There are countless examples these days of how America is rapidly becoming something of a failed state for those with a net worth under six figures, and Bankrate released new data today that we can add to the pile. The American dream itself has been priced far out of most Americans’ lives. In 30 states and the District of Columbia, homebuyers now need “at least $100,000 in annual household income to afford the typical home in their area as of January 2025.” In 2020, “only six states and the District of Columbia required six figures to afford a median-priced home.”
In two states (California and Hawaii) plus our nation’s disenfranchised capital, it now requires over $200,000 in annual income to buy a house.
What the fuck.
On the other end of the spectrum, the states that require the least income to afford a typical home are West Virginia ($64,179), Iowa ($70,437), Ohio ($71,080), Mississippi ($72,072) and Indiana ($72,342). While 2024 data should be released in the coming months, in 2023, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) found that the US average wage was $65,470. Guess that means we all should move to West Virginia now.
Sage dove into this 2023 BLS data and put together the most common professions in America and their median annual wage. One glance at this data relative to Bankrate’s, and it becomes obvious what the dynamic is underlying the contradiction between our economic strength and our economic precarity.
The largest professions in America by number of workers are laborers and material movers ($36,720 median annual wage), home health and personal care aides ($33,530), retail salespersons ($33,680), fast food and counter workers ($29,540) and drivers and truck drivers ($48,120). Only one of the ten most common professions in America has a median annual wage above $100,000 per year (general and operations managers, $101,280), and only one other even makes it into the same zip code (registered nurses, $86,070). These salaries obviously vary more by state, but even when cost of living is taken into account, it does not map neatly on to the most expensive states to buy a home. Washington D.C., Minnesota, North Dakota, Massachusetts and Colorado have the highest average hourly wages, adjusted for cost of living. California, what the hell is going on over there?
The most common jobs in America don’t bring their workers remotely close to the ability to purchase the so-called American dream, while private equity makes more inroads into purchasing it. The George Carlin “American Dream” bit was more prescient than he could have ever envisioned.
Now, there are plenty of reasons to doubt that sensational and viral claim that Wall Street bought 44 percent of all homes in America in 2023. That would be around a whopping $1.144 trillion spending spree given that Zillow found that housing value grew by $2.6 trillion from 2022 through most of 2023 (and it would be a spending spree, the increase over the same time in mortgage demand is not coming from Wall Street, they buy in cash). America’s housing market is a nearly $50 trillion market. To put that in context, annual US GDP is around $27 trillion. The housing market is too big for any singular entity to dominate it, but that doesn’t mean that the 44 percent myth isn’t rooted in an accurate framework of reality.
It may not be Blackrock or Blackstone owning every home, but when your annual salary is a third of what your local housing market requires, the Joneses down the street owning their home may as well be as far away as Blackrock’s CFO. This is what Gilded Age-level inequality looks and feels like.
America is ruled by a depraved oligarchy and managed by a cloistered professional class who has proven they are out of touch with a country where roughly half of adults have a bachelor’s degree. Census data in 2022 found that 53 percent of women and 47 percent of men aged 25 and older had completed a bachelor’s degree or more, and that gap has only widened since. If you want to drill down on the root of discontent in our politics, building an economy around college degrees while making houses and healthcare luxury goods for most of the country is a pretty good start. A healthy country would not be openly cheering an extrajudicial killing of a health insurance CEO. Trump is a symptom as much as he is a cause of our problems.
Joe Biden handed Trump a much better economy than people think he did, as evidenced by unemployment being at 50-year lows, but the precarity that people feel isn’t invented (the 2023 recession that people hallucinated was though). There’s a very straightforward explanation for the seeming divide between the vibecession and the macro data, and it’s that the people working the most common jobs in America–what one might call the working class–live some of the most financially precarious lives in this country. Add in the fact that some of the very basics of life, like putting a roof over your head or ensuring our bodies are functioning properly, can bankrupt you overnight in America, and it’s clear that this country’s oligarchy has constructed a wholly unsustainable economic system resembling one that collapsed in on itself nearly a century ago.
Now climate change is radically changing home ownership as we know it. Home insurance is rapidly becoming a thing of the past in Florida and along other parts of the Gulf Coast in the Carolinas, and there are parts of the country where home insurance and taxes now cost more per month than a mortgage. Owning a home is something that is completely out of reach for most Americans, and it is only becoming more so as home prices rise, and interest rates remain elevated because our aspiring autocrat is a colossal dumbfuck who doesn’t understand how tariffs work. Homes are luxury goods now, and until they aren’t, America’s political crisis will endure.
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