A CEO of a major real estate company said this week that buying a home today is just as tough as it was for past generations, and that young people might manage if they skipped Starbucks and stopped taking Ubers.
It’s the kind of comment that sounds wise from a distance and completely out of touch up close.
Thirty years ago, the average home in New York cost four to five times the median household income. Today that gap is closer to ten. A median home now sells for about $763,000, while the median household income is about $76,500. To afford a median-priced home with a standard mortgage, a household would need to earn around $211,970 a year.
A public-school teacher earning sixty thousand dollars a year can’t realistically pay rent, eat, and save for a seven-hundred-thousand-dollar apartment. That isn’t a problem of discipline. It’s a problem of proportion.
And the imbalance doesn’t stop with housing. The average Gen Z worker in New York earns about $42,000 per year. A $100,000 salary — a benchmark of success in most people’s minds — is effectively worth only $35,791 here after taxes and cost-of-living adjustments. Nearly one in four New Yorkers carries student-loan debt, and among those borrowers, 45% report serious housing-affordability struggles.
The coffee myth is comforting because it keeps the story simple. It says that success is about self-control, not structure. But housing stopped tracking wages long ago. For an entire generation, homeownership isn’t getting delayed, it’s vanishing.
My oldest daughter is a New York public school teacher. She loves her work, and she gives everything she has to her students. Yet she couldn’t possibly afford to buy in the city she serves. She isn’t careless or entitled. She isn’t taking an Uber to work. She’s taking the bus. And she’s just trying to survive inside an economy that has forgotten her.
This disconnect between the people who built the system and the ones trying to survive it is exactly why so many young New Yorkers are turning toward leaders like Zohran Mamdani. They’re not drawn to slogans. They’re drawn to someone who seems to actually comprehend what their lives cost.
The bullshit Starbucks comment only confirms what Gen Z already suspects: that the old people have either stopped listening or don't care.
When teachers, nurses, artists, and workers can’t live in the city they sustain, the fabric begins to fray. What was once a thriving, multigenerational and diverse city is quickly becoming a museum of wealth.
We can’t keep pretending that skipping coffee will fix the imbalance. Housing isn’t a luxury or a moral test. It’s the foundation that lets people build a life. If we want New York to remain a city of possibility, we have to stop lecturing about lattes and start listening to reality.
Let’s do this!
Shaun