The Baby Boomer Home Buying Advice That Won't Actually Work In 2026

If you're among the 86% of non-homeowner Americans who feel negatively about the affordability of homeownership (per 2026 National Association of Realtors, or NAR, data), baby boomers (those born between 1946 and 1964) have a message for you: just try harder. Yes, although the idea of younger people not working hard enough may only seem like a stereotype to most, a 2024 Clever Real Estate survey found that a whopping 57% of the baby boomers surveyed actually believed it was the reason younger generations couldn't afford homes. Meanwhile, another 64% said younger generations could become homeowners if they were simply more responsible.

If this stance angers you, you'll be delighted to know that the data doesn't support it. A 2026 CBRE review found that the percentage of renters able to afford median-priced homes has decreased since 2019 in almost all of the nation's 25 largest housing markets. The report also revealed that buying premiums (or the amount required to make a monthly mortgage payment compared to the average rent in a given market) also increased in almost every market between 2019 and 2025, with some areas seeing these costs nearly double during that period. Plus none of this counts how much a homeowner spends every year on their home once they do buy. 

As if all of this didn't pose enough challenges for would-be homebuyers, the same survey in which over half of baby boomers reported believing that younger generations needed to try harder also found that 54% of baby boomers don't plan to ever sell their current home. This has created a troublesome bottleneck that, when combined with other socioeconomic factors, has made home ownership increasingly unattainable, even if the housing market grows in 2026 due to lower mortgage rates.

No matter how you slice it, purchasing a home is a far bigger feat in the 2020s than it was in the 1970s and 1980s — the decades when baby boomers largely became homeowners. A Berkeley Economic Review analysis found that while 45% of Boomers became homeowners between the ages of 25 and 34, only 37% of millennials have done the same. According to Harvard's 2025 State of the Nation's Housing report, reduced homebuying can be explained by steep listing prices, high interest rates, and the financial difficulties of stagnating wages and high rents.

The report also found that the median single-family home price reached five times the median household income in 2024. For context, an affordable home is considered to be around three times your annual income. This was more realistic back in 1980, when the median new single-family home was $64,600, per Department of Housing and Urban Development data, and the median income was $21,020, per the U.S. Census Bureau. In 2026, the median single-family home price was $412,400 in March 2026, according to NAR, while the median household income is estimated to be $87,630, per Motio Research.

There's also the fact that around 40% of both Millennials and Gen Z have had their finances significantly hampered by student loan debt that can be complicated to pay off. The Education Data Initiative shows that the average annual public college tuition during the 1970s was between $500 and $600.