The Affordability Problem
Someone earning more than their parents did still can't buy the house their parents bought. The reason isn't avocado toast. It's monetary, and it happened in two moves.
Between February 2020 and February 2022 the US money supply grew by $6.2 trillion — 40% in twenty-four months, the largest increase on record in a series that starts in 1959. Then the Fed raised rates faster than it had in forty years to bring inflation down. It worked. It also froze the housing market solid.
The Flood raised the prices. The Freeze raised the payments. Here is the first move:
Federal Reserve H.6, seasonally adjusted · M2SL
Prices went where you would expect. Then, to bring inflation down, the Fed raised its own rate from nothing to five and a third in sixteen months — and the 30-year mortgage followed it up to 7.79%.
Freddie Mac PMMS and the Federal Reserve · MORTGAGE30US, FEDFUNDS · weekly survey shown as a monthly average
Nobody holding a 3% mortgage will trade it for a 6.7% one, so the houses stopped coming up for sale — and the payment on the ones that do stopped being affordable. Put the two together and this is what happened to the income you need to buy the same house, against what people actually earn:
Case-Shiller, Freddie Mac, Census/HUD and BLS · CSUSHPINSA, MORTGAGE30US, MSPUS, LEU0252881500Q · the income line is computed, not published — see the method. It stops at June 2026, the last month Case-Shiller covers; the film’s +121% is at the August mortgage rate of 6.65%, which is why the line ends a few points below it.
From $51,557 to $113,840 a year to qualify for the same house, while median pay went from $936 a week to $1,251. The hurdle rose 121%. Pay rose 34%.
If you earn more than your parents did and still can't buy a house, you are not bad with money. The arithmetic changed.
The Affordability Problem
8 minutes 35 seconds · published 1 September 2026
Where $6.2 trillion of new money went, why the fastest rate rise in forty years froze the market it was meant to cool, and why the two effects multiply instead of adding.
What's next. Film one ends on a question it doesn't answer: why nothing feels affordable when inflation is supposedly back to normal. That's film two. When it's finished it gets a page here — its own numbers, its own sources, the same rules.