If you want to know why Millennials and Gen-Z have coined the phrase, “OK, boomer,” let’s consider the predicament that our kids and grandkids are in today.
November 8, 2026
Just a generation or two ago, Americans believed that if you worked hard, saved your money, behaved responsibly, and avoided doing something incredibly stupid or going to jail, you might eventually be able to buy a house. After the Second World War, millions of relatively affordable houses went up across America, helped by suburban expansion, automobiles, and eventually the Interstate Highway System. For many boomers, the life they knew included one working parent, larger families, stronger communities, widely available public education, safe neighborhoods, and a decent house in which to raise a family. The middle class was like a vast ocean. These opportunities were not available to everyone. Black Americans were still struggling for equality, and discrimination denied many families the opportunities others took for granted. Yet the early 1960s also carried a sense of hope, despite all the obstacles.
In those days, to own a home, you generally did not need a hedge fund, a trust fund, or a father who happened to own half of Beverly Hills. Most people needed a decent job, a little discipline, and perhaps a spouse who shared the same ambitions and helped support the effort. SNIP>>>
According to a 2024 analysis of newly constructed housing, only 16 percent of households in Washington State could afford the median-priced newly built home. In Massachusetts, it was 14 percent. Montana, a state with more open land than it knows what to do with, came in at 18 percent. South Carolina was also at 18 percent, Illinois at 23 percent, Alabama at 25 percent, and Nebraska at 27 percent.
Think about that. In the richest country in the world, roughly six out of ten households lack the income to qualify for a mortgage on the median-priced existing house under conventional financing assumptions.
So, if you want to know why Millennials and Gen-Z have coined the phrase, “OK, boomer,” let’s consider the predicament that our kids and grandkids are in today. We see a lot of couples, married or unmarried, who both work jobs and can pay the rent, but cannot possibly assemble a six-figure down payment. Meanwhile, Billy the Boomer across the street bought his house in 1975, pays a pittance or nothing for a mortgage, and has seen the value of his home rise from $50,000 or so to over a million bucks. Then he lectures the Gen-Z couple about fiscal responsibility or recounts how hard life was when they were a young married couple. Meanwhile, many of these same boomers have long disappeared to somewhere warm with their bags of cash by the time couples starting out can even think about having children. If only the couple had the foresight to have been born in 1957.
And we wonder why socialism is making a comeback. Socialism is an insidious political theory, and its ethics are atrocious. It was responsible for millions upon millions of deaths in the 20th century and untold misery. Yet, the current arrangement has produced an understandable reaction in millennials and Gen Z along the lines of, “Let’s get rid of these people and take their shit.”
This is because, in the midst of our democracy, we are watching the potential emergence of a new landed gentry and a permanent renter class. We are not yet living under feudalism. But when ownership increasingly determines who accumulates wealth, who can borrow against it, who passes it to children, and who has the loudest voice at city hall, the resemblance to a hereditary class system becomes difficult to ignore.
The sneaky manner in which this has transpired makes it all the worse. In the old aristocracies, land passed from one generation to the next. In our more democratic arrangement, wealth can pass through inheritance, parental down-payment assistance, and accumulated home equity. We have not abolished inherited advantage. We have simply provided it with a mortgage calculator and a real estate agent.
And the renter gets less and less. He or she pays the landlord each month, helps finance someone else’s asset, and tries to save what remains. Good luck with that. Rising rents make the down payment a ball-buster, and rising home prices move the finish line astronomically each year.
Here are some numbers that deserve attention. Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies reported that in 2024, 22.7 million renter households—roughly 49 percent—spent more than 30 percent of their income on rent and utilities. Of those, 12.1 million spent more than half. How exactly is a family supposed to build a down payment while surrendering half its income to remain housed?
Nor is this merely a California problem. It’s spread everywhere like locusts. Census-based 2024 figures show the share of renter households paying at least 30 percent of income for rent and utilities was 48.3 percent in Washington, 45.4 percent in Illinois, 41.6 percent in Alabama, 49.4 percent in Massachusetts, 46.9 percent in South Carolina, 43.5 percent in Nebraska, and yes, even 38.6 percent in Montana.
Our kids and grandkids want to vomit when they hear that America is the richest country on earth. Politicians celebrate the stock market as if it comes even close to helping Main Street. No, it doesn’t. Even though economists assure us that the aggregate numbers are splendid, wealth has not yet reached our working class or even our college graduates on Main Street.
And when it comes to working-class jobs, the whole matter gets a lot worse. For much of the twentieth century, an American without an advanced degree could find steady work in a factory or skilled trade, raise children, and purchase a modest home. The work could be dangerous, as in mining or heavy industry, but at least it existed on a scale that gave whole towns an economic foundation. Then we began dismantling that foundation because Bruno had an extra space in his four-car garage for a sports car, so we sent the jobs to Malaysia.
In June 1979, American manufacturing employed 19.6 million people. By June 2019, it employed 12.8 million, a loss of roughly 6.7 million jobs. A lot of the replacement jobs never paid what the original jobs did, nor did they offer security. The benefits of cheaper goods were there, but they benefited mostly the affluent classes who could afford to buy stuff, hold it for a few years, and then throw it away and buy another. It benefited shareholders. It benefited CEOs who now made astronomically more than anyone else in the company. But the losses were borne by the communities that had previously made the goods, and America’s sense of morality went in the shitter. Smug progressives kicked the working class out of the Democratic Party and told them to learn coding. Smug conservatives announced that their time had passed and it was time to move on. Perhaps AI will have the last laugh when it comes to these people, and we can one day tell the coders to learn welding.
Even lower-wage work became a political football. Some asshole announced that these were “jobs Americans won’t do,” as though wages, working conditions, and enforcement of labor laws had nothing to do with the matter. Neil from Brentwood was delighted that someone would trim his hedges cheaply; whether the worker could afford to live anywhere near Brentwood was apparently a separate question. Our “environmentalist friends” objected to industry to “save the earth,” and anything like a mine or steel mill was replaced with a charming selection of coffee shops and Lululemon. Forget that the people they had pushed out had actually built the fucking town. All these new inhabitants had to do to appease their guilt was recycle and hang a rainbow flag up in the shop. Meanwhile, the talking heads on Fox Business and CNBC evaluate fiscal health by how every little thing affects the stock market and their own personal portfolios. A national debt approaching $40 trillion is just a data point. Unemployment and out-of-control housing prices are data points that shareholders merely need to evaluate at their quarterly get-togethers with their financial advisers.
The trouble is not only prices. It is also the structure of local political power. Forget affordable housing or starter homes along the lines of what the boomers benefited from when they were children. Now, it’s all about preservation and the environment. The existing owners have all the power. They attend zoning hearings, know the council members, and often have every reason to resist additional housing. They speak eloquently about preserving neighborhood character. Sometimes they are right: water, infrastructure, wildfire exposure, and environmental constraints are genuine. Sometimes, however, protecting character in actuality means protecting scarcity—or the value of the house they already own.
The families pushed can’t protest. The families that would have occupied the unbuilt duplex cannot show up to protest. It has no address in town, no vote in the local election, and no seat on the planning commission. It is easy enough to ignore constituents who do not yet exist.
And then, in addition to how much of a couple’s income is gobbled up by housing, there are the taxes. The ordinary worker pays income and payroll taxes, sales taxes, and, directly or through rent, property taxes. In some places, they even encounter taxes on certain personal property. What bullshit. Each level of government has its own explanation for why it needs a little more. In the end, the fledgling family is left to discover that the little additions have become a substantial subtraction.
And we are assured, of course, that every last dollar is being spent with wisdom and restraint. While the people in charge tell us to tighten our belts, the Congressional Budget Office reported a federal deficit of approximately $1.8 trillion in fiscal 2025, leaving future taxpayers the bill and current taxpayers the interest.
At the state and local level, taxpayers are entitled to ask what they receive in exchange for their money. Are the roads maintained? Do the schools teach? Are permits processed in a reasonable time? Is anyone checking whether public contracts deliver what was purchased? The question is not whether government should exist. It is whether government can remember whom it works for.
Our political and financial commentators seem perpetually astonished that people are unhappy. The talking heads on Fox Business can point to a strong economic indicator and announce that everything is going splendidly. Perhaps it is, from the vantage point of someone with substantial assets. But a stock-market rally benefits fewer and fewer people and does not materialize into a six-figure down payment. I am less interested in the address of the commentator’s view of things than in the distance between the economy he describes and the one his audience inhabits.
Both parties have their favorite speeches about opportunity. One promises market freedom while defending rules that keep newcomers out. The other promises affordability while discovering that almost every actual building proposal offends somebody. Between the speeches and the hearings, the young family is invited to remain patient. Perhaps until retirement. Isn’t it all a miracle?
And this is where the matter becomes larger than housing policy. Ownership has long given Americans a stake in their communities and a practical means of accumulating wealth. If the path to ownership narrows, the social distance between people who own appreciating assets and people who pay to use them widens. We have moved from a democracy of independent citizens to a democracy of landlords and tenants—not by legal fiat, but by economic circumstance.
In small towns across the West, civic leaders tell me they want young families, businesses, teachers, tradespeople, and volunteers. Yet, they also want their communities to remain exactly as they were yesterday, only with Starbucks. Consider Nevada City, California, where proposals involving the reopening of historic mining operations have generated fierce arguments about jobs, environmental risks, and the future of the community. I want to know who gets to decide whether a working town remains a working town—and whether the people who might have taken those jobs are even in the room. Since when do small-minded, small-town politicians get to say no to the economic opportunity of large segments of their town because they want it to look like a Hallmark movie?
When it comes to creating jobs and the opportunities for affordable housing, we should be mindful of leaving something for the next generation except a pile of shit on the sidewalk. Local governments should conform to citizen demands for a serious accounting of land-use rules, permitting delays, infrastructure finance, construction costs, starter-home supply, and the obvious political incentives that protect existing owners. Our out-of-touch politicians, many of whom seem considerably more comfortable with donors than with wage earners, should be asking themselves whether wages and housing costs have become so detached that the ordinary American can no longer expect ownership through work and thrift.
It is no mystery why young Americans are angry and no longer believe capitalism is working for them. Because it isn’t. Economists who cling to laissez-faire theory while the economic underpinnings of our democracy shift toward oligarchy ought to spend less time lecturing and more time listening. We do not need to move to some hare-brained Marxist economic theory. But we do need to make capitalism work for democracy. That requires thinking about the next guy, the next generation, and shifting strategy accordingly so the greatest number of our citizens can benefit from the freedom that capitalism brings.
The Democrats seem hopelessly lost in a sea of Marxism and critical theory. That’s their problem. But the Republicans have their own issues. Ever since Lincoln was shot, Republicans have had to tussle with Northeastern blowhards who want to return to some kind of Federalist dream of an aristocracy that lords over the poor. The electoral bitch slap that we conservatives experienced on Tuesday is an opportunity for us to get our act together. There is a further opportunity for boomers to try to redress the seemingly intractable problems we have helped create: massive debt, wealth concentration, crap schools, lower standards, and the denial of the next few generations of the privilege of enjoying homeownership, safe neighborhoods, and excellent schools. Any political party that wants to be taken seriously should start by explaining what it will actually do about this.
Americans are not asking to be promised a mansion, a government check, or a guaranteed return on investment. They are asking whether honest work, thrift, and a reasonable measure of good judgment can still purchase a measure of independence. That was once a central promise of the country. It would be a peculiar achievement to lose it while the people in charge congratulate themselves on record prosperity.
We can celebrate our national wealth until the balloons deflate. But the more revealing question is whether a nurse, teacher, mechanic, or young couple can acquire a small piece of the country whose prosperity they help create.
If the answer increasingly depends on whether their parents are already landowners, we should stop congratulating ourselves on having abolished the landed aristocracy. We have simply given it a new form.
American Greatness
This content originally appeared on ABSTRACTRUTH Substack.
