The American Dream Is Now Month to Month

I am 43 years old. I have been working in my current field for 16 years, almost to the day. And I have a master’s degree in journalism – which I am not divulging to brag. If anything, feel welcome to make fun of me for it.

To complete this list of vital working statistics, I can also add that I make a decent bit more than the median income for people over the age of 25 in San Diego, which is about $57,000.

Despite my plenty faults, I think this well qualifies me as what some people like to call a “contributing member” of society. That designation buys a whole lot less than it used to.

Like just about everyone else, my working bona fides could never hope to buy me a home in this city. Until not that long ago, even San Diego’s mayor was a renter!

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To all the haters, this isn’t just because I mark “Single” on my tax form. If I had a partner who made the same as me, we still wouldn’t qualify to buy a median-priced home. Only 15 percent of families can afford to buy one of those in San Diego. The odds expand for someone who wants a studio or one-bedroom condo, but not by much.

What I’m writing isn’t news to most people. But it can’t possibly be overstated as a destabilizing force in the American psyche. The tension between people who want to own a home (or simply want that option) and the market reality is completely undoing the myths that powered this country since at least World War II. But myths do not die easily.  

I try to think of what the most hardcore pull-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps Americans might say to me.  

“Move,” comes to mind. They might say it is not my god-given right to live in San Diego – one of the most expensive cities in the country, no matter how you slice it. People can afford to live some places, not others. Deal with it.

This ignores the fact that homes are out of reach for more people than ever all across the country. In 2023, the number of Americans who could afford a home fell to its lowest point, since the National Association of Realtors began tracking affordability in 1989. That’s not because people aren’t working hard enough. It’s because home prices have risen much faster than wages. Americans can’t move their way out of this housing crisis.

The best answer San Diego politicians have given is that we can build our way out of it, but that is taking far too long for people to feel it in a meaningful way.

The city of San Diego permitted an impressive number of new homes in 2023 and 2024 – nearly double the amount from earlier years. But even with the massive jump in permitting, the city is still well off the number it needs to keep pace with demand – a demand that has been quietly building in pressure over decades.  

The formatting on that chart isn’t great, but look closely. Since 1950, the population has been growing at a MUCH faster clip than new houses. Digging out of that hole can’t be done with two years that are better than the abysmal average.

Interestingly, some people have taken to denying that any supply and demand problem exists at all – even the more conservative-minded, who historically have been the biggest market believers.

Bruce Ehlers is the mayor of Encinitas, one of the most housing-resistant coastal enclaves in California. Ehlers is wily. He likes to turn debates about the so-called housing crisis into Socratic dialogues, which he leads.

“What’s happened to the state [and local] population in the last three to five years?” he asked me earlier this year.

Perhaps you have heard that San Diego County’s population declined recently? If not, Ehlers is ready to fill you in.

“There are less people here than there were a couple years ago,” Ehlers told me. “The state population declined by half a percent. San Diego County declined by half a percent. Encinitas was a little less than that.”

The point Ehlers is leading you to is this: How could we possibly have a supply issue? The population is shrinking.

There are a couple problems here.

First, the population isn’t exactly shrinking. Population growth has slowed, but it hasn’t stopped. For many decades (as seen in the earlier chart) San Diego County’s population grew at a strong and steady pace. Between 2020 and 2023, it did shrink slightly, but since then it has been back on the upswing. The state’s population has also grown in the last two years.

Population stagnation isn’t a sign that there is no supply issue. It’s the opposite. Population stagnation is a symptom of the supply issue. The housing market has gotten so tight, and wildly expensive, over a period of decades that people are leaving. (People are also having less babies.) Population declining our way of the housing crisis, definitely isn’t going to work – at least not any time soon.

Even though it’s not working fast enough, building new homes does work. Building new housing slows rent growth the most for older, more affordable apartments, the Pew Charitable Trust found in an analysis of housing data. In our housing series with KPBS, reporter Jake Gotta found something similar: Rents grew less in ZIP codes that permitted the most new homes.

Ironically, Ehlers himself has benefited from the new housing he and others in Encinitas have fought so hard against. Fox Point Farms is a group of condos and townhomes that start at $765,000, according to its website. That’s not cheap, but it’s less than half the median home price in Encinitas, according to Zillow. Ehlers’ daughter, a CPA in her late 20’s, managed to buy a place there — without his help, he’ll be quick to point out.

Ehlers acknowledges the irony, but he will not concede that new housing is slowly making way for a new, more cash-strapped generation to purchase homes in California.

And honestly, it’s easy to see why that argument resonates with a lot of people. (Whether it resonates is an incredibly big deal. Ehlers and others are working on a ballot initiative that would give cities more local control to prevent new housing.) New housing isn’t working fast enough. If it’s the only trick San Diego politicians can come up with, then it’s hard to imagine voters keeping them in power much longer.

San Diego City Councilmember Sean Elo-Rivera recently told my colleague Bella Ross that government itself needs to get back in the housing game in a more direct kind of way. In previous generations, governments funded, built and owned housing developments.

“I don’t see a way out of this being a problem for San Diego and California and quite frankly for the country, without significant public investment and ownership of housing,” Elo-Rivera said. Government playing a more active role could detach “profit from being layered into every single piece of housing.”

That’s one thought.

It’s easy to see housing as one branch of a much larger affordability problem. Wages aren’t going up fast enough to keep up with costs. Healthcare bills are rising more and more each year. Utilities, same. Home insurance, too. Then there’s college, which is doubly cursed. It’s hard to justify such a ludicrously large investment when the future seems so uncertain. All while profits on Wall Street soar.

That is what the free market has given us – not to mention snuggies, cappuccino-flavored potato chips and Microsoft’s Clippy.

Housing isn’t just a branch of the poisoned tree. It’s the trunk. Having a home is fundamental to our present and future financial security, just as it is the basis for a much deeper level of psychological security. If our elected leaders can’t get to the root of this problem, they should move.

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