From right and left, we keep hearing how hard it is to afford a home.
"A lot of young people are saying, 'Housing is way too expensive,'" Vice President JD Vance has said. He blamed illegal immigration and a failure to build "enough new houses to begin with, even for the population that we had."
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-New York, has accused the Trump administration of cozying up to big businesses that are driving prices – including rents and home prices – to record highs. "It's not easy to just find a cheaper apartment when every apartment or every home in your area is the same unaffordable price," she said.
They have a point. Only 29% of 25- to 34-year-olds owned a home in 2024, down from 40% in 2005. Housing has gotten less affordable,
and young men and women have grown far more pessimistic about ever owning a home, even though they still want one.
Better housing policy, whether from the left or the right, is a big part of the solution. But young adults don't have to wait for politicians or developers. There's a simple, powerful step they can take on their own: marriage.
The marriage math
Marriage builds household wealth and, for the average person, roughly doubles household income. That extra income translates directly into buying power. Among single, working-age millennial and Gen Z adults, about 43% can afford to buy a home in their metro area and 60% can afford to rent one. If they married, two-thirds could afford to buy and more than three-quarters could afford to rent.
A rebound in marriage would put homeownership within reach of millions of young Americans.
Couples themselves reap the biggest rewards of marriage. Beyond the income boost, married adults report more happiness, financial security and stability for themselves and their children than their unmarried peers do. But a broad rebound in marriage would also help the housing market as a whole.
If marriage rates returned to 2000 levels, it would free up 1.1 million homes – roughly 18% of the nation's housing shortage – according to a joint analysis by the American Enterprise Institute and Institute for Family Studies.
And because single people, with their lower incomes, tend to live in cheaper homes, a rebound in marriage would free up a disproportionate share of affordable housing. That would help low-income Americans in two ways: by putting more homes within their reach and by leaving fewer low-income households in the first place.
More power than they think
That’s a hopeful message for young Americans. Marriage is something concrete they can do to become homeowners. It also improves lives in measurable ways, raising the odds of health and happiness and lowering the odds of loneliness and despair.
And it sets off a virtuous cycle, making housing more affordable for everyone around them.
Yet fewer young adults are taking that step. Marriage has fallen sharply among young Americans over the same years that homeownership has slipped out of reach. That doesn't make young people responsible for the housing shortage; the blame lies mostly with local regulations that choke off new construction. But it does mean they have options that don't depend on zoning reform.
Marriage and new construction reinforce each other. Expensive housing is linked to fewer marriages and fewer births, and building more starter homes, a hugely popular idea, might itself nudge marriage rates up.
More marriage, in turn, would ease the pressure for new construction and bring the goals of pro-housing advocates within closer reach.
Marriage belongs in the housing debate. More of it would be good for the housing market and better still for young Americans themselves. If you're young, single and hoping to buy a home, your most powerful move may be to get married.
Arthur Gailes is a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Brad Wilcox, a distinguished university professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, is a nonresident senior fellow at AEI.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Can't afford a house? Try getting married | Opinion
