A recent report, “Giving Up: The Impact of Decreasing Housing Affordability on Consumption, Work Effort, and Investment,” documents what many people already feel: housing has become a trap.
Doctoral candidates Seung Hyeong Lee of Northwestern University and Younggeun Yoo of the University of Chicago project that people born in the 1990s will retire with homeownership rates nearly 10% lower than their parents’ generation.
The numbers are stark. Over the past five years, typical mortgage payments have increased by 82%, while median incomes have grown by just 26%, according to John Bruns Research and Consulting. For millions, math simply doesn’t work anymore.
Marcus Thornton, a 32-year-old D.C.-based computer scientist, represents this exhaustion. After years chasing a “sold” sign that moved further away with every rent hike, he stopped volunteering for overtime. “Why am I killing myself for a landlord?” he told The Final Call.
“Buying a home was a long-time dream that became a nightmare because it just seemed to always be out of my reach.” He explained that, though his wife still wishes for a home with a picket fence, it may be difficult to achieve unless something changes.
The report shows that 43% of Millennials (those born between 1981 and 1996) are now “spending for today” because they can’t see a “tomorrow.” With homeownership out of reach for some, many redirect savings toward luxury travel, designer clothing, and instant gratification—what some economists have coined “doom spending.”
“Despite their similar starting points, the discouraged renter quickly falls into a near-zero wealth trap, while the hopeful renter gradually accumulates assets,” Lee and Yoo write. “As housing affordability declines, more households fall into the discouraged group, producing a more polarized and unequal wealth distribution.”
The “Giving Up” report concludes grimly: America is bifurcating into a “landed gentry” and a “permanent renter class.” Yet this division is not inevitable.
What some economists call “reduced work effort” among the discouraged is actually strategic withdrawal—people refusing to sacrifice health, family, and spirit for a system that withholds the most basic human need: shelter.
But strategic withdrawal is different from building alternatives.
Hope Copeland, a government employee from Virginia and her family are not withdrawing. They are redirecting their energy toward land, community, and legacy. They understand that if the individual cannot buy a home in what many see as a rigged market, the collective can—and must.
When a family friend asked if she and her best friend from boarding school would be interested in buying land in Littleton, North Carolina—the area where both their mothers are from—she did not hesitate. “I said yes,” Ms. Copeland told The Final Call.
Together, they purchased 75 acres. The land, primarily used for growing trees, came with practical advice: “The previous owner told us the land was primarily used to grow trees.
We should continue to cut them down when they mature and sell them because no matter what, you’re going to make money on the timbers,” she said. But Ms. Copeland’s vision extends far beyond timber. She and her husband, a builder, are working on plans for the land.
The roadblocks outlined in the “Giving Up” report are all too familiar to Black people. For Black Americans, a systemic exclusion from housing security is neither new nor surprising and it echoes a long history of economic disenfranchisement.
The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan has repeatedly pointed out that social and economic structures in the U.S. are built in ways that limitBlack economic empowerment and keep many Black people in subservient economic roles.
For example, in “Policies for Empowerment: The Struggle for a New Economic Order”delivered March 10, 2006, at the National Black People’s Unity Convention held at Westside High School in Gary, Indiana, Minister Farrakhan explained that the educational system was designed to fit people “into a socioeconomic, political paradigm where you actually are slaves,”
Aather than cultivate their true potential—and that Black people were trained “to serve” rather than succeed in equitable economic participation.
Ms. Copeland’s story is an example of what Minister Farrakhan has advocated and taught for decades, based on the Teachings of the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad, the Eternal Leader of the Nation of Islam: land ownership as the foundation for Black economic self-sufficiency.
In His book, “Message To The Blackman In America,” published in 1965, in the chapter, “Land of Our Own Qualifications,” the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad writes, “What we must understand today is the importance of acquiring land of our own.
We are no longer a mere handful of people. We are a little better than 22 million in population and still increasing. We cannot forever continue to depend upon America to give us a job, send us to school, build our houses and sell us her food and give us nothing in return.”
If housing unaffordability functions as a form of social control—promoting transience, preventing wealth accumulation, and eroding community—then land ownership is its antithesis.
This model breaks the cycle, builds intergenerational wealth, and creates a sanctuary. It proves that “giving up” on a rigged American Dream is not surrender; it is the first step toward building a better one.
—Nisa Islam Muhammad, Staff Writer