Another tax credit won’t fix what Sunday schools used to teach

The American dream of owning a home — a yard, a fence, a stake in the neighborhood — is slipping out of reach for many young adults. Policymakers keep treating this as a pure affordability problem. Prices, interest rates, and down payments are all important, but the real culprit lies beneath the numbers: family formation, especially marriage.

First-time buyers made up just 21% of home purchases last year, the lowest share on record. The median first-time buyer is now 40 — up from 33 in 2021 and 29 in 1981. Census data show homeownership for Americans ages 25-34 at about 35%, roughly 19 percentage points lower than in 1980, when mortgage rates were much higher.

We keep treating the symptoms and ignoring the disease.

Affordability helps explain some of that decline. Housing is cyclical, and prices will soften if government stops inflating asset bubbles. But a newer analysis argues the bigger driver is cultural, not fiscal: the drop in marriage.

American Enterprise Institute scholar Scott Winship analyzed census data for the Institute for Family Studies and found that most of the generational decline in young homeownership tracks the collapse in marriage. While overall homeownership among Americans under 35 sits around 35%, the rate for young married couples remains about 63%.

“As recently as 2023, 63% of young married couples were homeowners,” Winship wrote. “That was the same as in 1983 and only 3 percentage points lower than at the height of the 2000s housing bubble. The 2023 rate was also higher than in any year through 1970 and any year from 1985 to 1999.”

That should change the argument. The big generational slide in homeownership hasn’t hit married couples the same way. The bigger collapse is marriage itself. The share of Americans ages 25-34 who are married fell from about 67% in 1980 to about 37% in 2025 — a 30-point drop. That’s the hole in the bucket.

So the answer shouldn’t just be “more programs.” It should address the cultural drivers behind the marriage collapse — because no housing bill can substitute for family formation.

That’s why the usual Washington approach misses the point. After decades of affordability initiatives dating back to the Clinton era, homeownership still hasn’t surged. Yet Republicans in the Senate just passed Elizabeth Warren’s housing bill — another expansion of HUD programs that would rope more people into an inflated market while rewarding the same political class that helped inflate it.

RELATED: Elizabeth Warren’s housing fix could make home buying even tougher

Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

We keep treating the symptoms and ignoring the disease.

In the long run, the country won’t face a shortage of houses. The baby boom generation holds a huge share of the housing stock. Those homes will enter the market as boomers age and pass away, often transferring to heirs. The deeper question is whether the next generation will form families stable enough to buy them — and want them.

So, why is marriage declining?

Contrary to a popular assumption, it’s not mainly the housing crisis depressing family formation. The bigger driver is spiritual and cultural: a rejection of God and biblical values. Rising costs can pressure families at the margins. But a slightly higher child tax credit won’t reverse a collapse that began generations ago with the decline of worship and the rise of a culture that treats marriage as optional.

Europe has run the experiment. Many countries tried generous incentives — paid leave, universal child care, expanded benefits — and still can’t restore stable birth rates. Money can ease sacrifice. It can’t create the desire for marriage and children.

But faith can.

Institute for Family Studies senior fellow Brad Wilcox has noted that the birth rate for religiously oriented people has never fallen below replacement. A large Harvard study found that frequent religious service attendance (more than once a week) correlates with a 50% lower divorce rate compared with those who never attend. Strong marriages create the conditions for stable family life — and stable homeownership.

Anyone raised in an orthodox Christian or Jewish home learns the opening chapters of Genesis early: Marriage and children aren’t lifestyle accessories. They’re duties bound up with meaning, responsibility, and love. Faith-based communities also create thicker social bonds and clearer norms — including a dating pool that doesn’t feel like a battlefield.

A new Pew Research survey shows worship and practice dropping across every region over the last two decades. In the South, only 51% say they pray daily — still the highest region, but down 14 percentage points in a decade. The share of religiously unaffiliated Southerners rose to about a quarter of the population. In the West, 35% report no religious affiliation.

That decline makes the marriage decline easier to understand — and it helps explain why young homeownership is falling with it.

If we want more young Americans to buy homes, we should stop pretending this is only about interest rates and HUD programs. We need cultural repair. We need marriage. And to rebuild marriage, we need to rebuild the house of God.