Here's the income needed to afford the typical American home

Redfin's number is worth sitting with for a second: $109,756 a year just to afford the typical home in this country, against a median household income that's more than twenty grand short. That's not a stretch for a first house in a hot coastal market. That's the typical home. The average family, doing everything right, is still $22,197 short of the front door.

We've been told for years this gap is a supply problem, and sure, zoning and permitting delays are real and cities should build more. But rates didn't triple themselves and home prices didn't levitate on their own either. Four years of runaway spending and cheap-money stimulus dumped into an economy already short on housing did exactly what basic economics predicts: it bid up the price of the one asset every American actually needs. Wages moved. They just didn't move nearly as fast as the number on the mortgage.

What's frustrating is how normalized this has become in the coverage. A generation ago, needing six figures to buy a starter home would have been the headline for a week. Now it's a Tuesday data point, filed next to the weather. Meanwhile the people who already own homes are sitting on equity gains while everyone locked out watches the ladder get pulled up another rung.

This isn't an abstract affordability debate for policy panels. It's the difference between a young couple starting a family on schedule or delaying it five years, between a nurse or a teacher renting forever in the town they grew up in. Fix the money supply, fix the permitting mess, and stop treating a housing market this broken as the new normal.