A CNBC survey published July 19 found something that should reorder how every candidate heading into this fall’s midterms is thinking about their message: housing costs are the number one political issue for young voters. Not immigration. Not culture-war flashpoints. Not even inflation broadly — housing specifically, the cost of putting a roof over your head, is what’s driving the anxiety of an entire generation of voters.
I want to sit with that for a second, because I don’t think either party’s current playbook is built for this answer.
If you’re under 35 right now, you came of age watching home prices and rent climb faster than wages in almost every metro area in this country, including right here in the Milwaukee region, where starter homes that would have been affordable on a single working-class income a decade ago are now competing with cash offers from out-of-state investors. You’ve watched older generations — mine included — treat homeownership as an assumed rite of passage, while you do the math and realize the numbers simply don’t work the way they used to. That’s not an abstract policy complaint. That’s a daily, compounding source of stress about whether you’ll ever have stability, whether you can start a family on your terms, whether the place you grew up in will still have room for you in ten years.
This tracks with something else I’ve been watching all year: a record-high share of Americans — 45%, by some measures pushing toward 47% — now identify as politically independent, the highest number Gallup has recorded since it started asking in 1988. I think those two data points are connected. When young voters feel like both parties are fighting yesterday’s battles while the actual crisis in their lives — can I afford to live somewhere — goes largely unaddressed, walking away from both teams starts to look less like apathy and more like rational behavior.
Here’s where I’ll push back on my own community a little. It’s easy to talk about affordability as purely a partisan football — blame zoning on one side, blame corporate landlords and private equity on the other, and never actually build anything. But the housing shortage in most American cities, including Milwaukee, is a supply problem with contributions from both regulatory failure and market consolidation. Restrictive zoning that blocks multi-family housing in high-opportunity neighborhoods is a real, documented driver of scarcity, and it’s often defended by homeowners across the political spectrum protecting their own property values. Institutional investors buying up single-family homes in bulk is also a real, documented driver of scarcity. You don’t get to pick only the villain that fits your existing politics if you actually want the number to move.
For Black and urban communities specifically, this isn’t a new anxiety — it’s an old one wearing new numbers. Redlining, contract selling, and decades of disinvestment already shaped who got locked out of building generational wealth through homeownership in cities like Milwaukee. What’s different now is that the crisis has widened enough to hit young voters across racial and geographic lines, which — cynically or not — is often what it takes to get a policy issue real national attention. That’s worth watching closely, because it means there’s a genuine coalition-building opportunity here for anyone willing to build cross-racial, cross-generational housing policy instead of a talking point.
What I’d want to see from candidates this cycle, honestly, is less “cost of living” rhetoric and more specifics: zoning reform stances, positions on institutional single-family home purchases, actual production targets for affordable multi-family units near transit and jobs. Young voters told pollsters exactly what they’re scared of. The candidate who takes that seriously enough to answer with specifics, instead of a vibe, is going to earn a level of trust from this generation that neither party currently has.
Marcus Hart is the founder of Urban News Journal and host of the Transform U! Live Show, based in Oak Creek, Wisconsin.