Local News
American dream of homeownership on hold for most young Utahns
Rob Shelton | Lehi Free Press
Ask anyone under 35 in American Fork or Lehi about buying a first home, and the answer tends to be some version of the same thing: not yet, and maybe never. The dream hasn’t changed. The math has.
The Provo-Orem-Lehi metro area had a median household income of $101,014 and a median home price of $572,450 as of mid-2026, according to an analysis by Ziffy.ai reported by the Deseret News in July. To make that home affordable on that income, mortgage rates would need to fall to 2.3 percent, a level not seen in the U.S. since the depths of the pandemic. Rates in Utah are instead averaging 6.55 percent as of late July 2026. This has led to 74% of Utahns being priced out of purchasing a median-priced home, according to the Utah Housing Strategic Plan Metrics.
That local snapshot tracks statewide. James Wood, recently retired senior fellow at the University of Utah’s Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute, shared this outlook at a Salt Lake Board of Realtors forecast event in January that Utah’s housing market would be “running in place” through 2026 with modest price growth, elevated rates and a market still working through the aftershocks of the pandemic-era boom.
Nationally, the income needed to afford a typical home for sale fell 2 percent between April 2025 and April 2026, to $116,780 from $119,191, according to Redfin, the seventh straight month of improvement, and mortgage rates briefly dipped below 6 percent in February 2026 for the first time since 2022. But Redfin’s list of the 35 large metro areas that saw affordability improvements excluded all of Utah. Rates climbed back to the mid-6-percent range by late spring as instability tied to the conflict in Iran pushed them up again.
The Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute’s 38th annual Economic Report to the Governor, presented in January, found Utah’s overall housing prices grew slower than inflation in 2025, technically an affordability improvement. Still, homeownership rates kept falling anyway, a sign that price growth alone isn’t the whole story.
A common assumption is that affordability will return once mortgage rates fall enough. The Ziffy.ai analysis complicates that locally: of 364 metro areas nationwide in the 2026 study, 42 had such a wide gap between median income and median home price that even an interest-free mortgage wouldn’t close the gap for typical earners like in the St. George area. The Provo-Orem-Lehi metro wasn’t quite that extreme, but still needed rates near 2.3 percent.
Principal and interest are only part of the monthly bill. According to a March 2026 profile from the National Low Income Housing Coalition, a full-time worker in Utah needs to earn $29.29 an hour, a household income of $60,930 a year, to afford the average two-bedroom rental at HUD’s Fair Market Rent of $1,523 a month without being cost-burdened. That’s before factoring in the added costs of ownership: property taxes, homeowners insurance, HOA dues and maintenance on top of a mortgage payment.
With the cost of ownership and rent, some young people are getting creative. According to Finance Buzz and the US Census Bureau, 27% of Utahns age 18-34 currently live with their parents. Nationally, a third of American young adults still live at home with their parents. That figure is up over 10% from 1960.
Population growth: Utah County is projected to roughly double, to 1.5 million residents, between 2025 and 2065, and will drive 45 percent of the region’s long-term population growth, according to the Gardner Institute’s 2026 Economic Report to the Governor. That growth hasn’t slowed even as statewide net migration has slowed: migration accounted for just 43 percent of Utah’s 2025 growth, the Gardner Institute found, the lowest share in four years.
The lock-in effect: More than 61 percent of Utah mortgage holders have an interest rate below 4 percent, according to Wood’s 2026 outlook, giving current owners little incentive to sell a home a younger buyer might otherwise be able to afford.
Housing affordability was ranked Utah voters’ No. 1 issue in the Utah Foundation’s 2024 Priorities Project, the first time in that survey’s 20-year history any housing-related concern topped the list. The Priorities Project runs once every four years, so that remains the most current version of that specific measurement, with the next update due in 2028.
In the meantime, the Utah Foundation has kept publishing on the topic. A March 2026 report, “Appraising Utah’s Homeownership Approaches,” examined “shared-equity” programs, in which private investors help cover a buyer’s down payment or other costs in exchange for a share of the home’s future value, an emerging option as government subsidy programs remain limited relative to need.
Nationally, first-time buyers made up just 21 percent of all home sales in the year ending mid-2025, the lowest share the National Association of Realtors has recorded since it began tracking the figure in 1981, down from roughly 40 percent before the 2008 financial crisis. The median age of a first-time buyer nationally hit 40 in 2025, also a record.
Gov. Spencer Cox’s goal of adding 35,000 new “starter homes” statewide by the end of 2028 remains behind pace; state housing officials reported roughly 6,500 starter homes built statewide as of a legislative preview in January 2026. The state’s Utah Housing Strategic Plan, finalized in December 2025, calls housing affordability the “single greatest threat to Utah’s prosperity” and is now paired with a new public dashboard.
Homeownership remains one of the most common financial goals among young Americans. The challenge isn’t that younger Utahns have stopped dreaming of homeownership; it’s that the cost of that dream has risen faster than the incomes meant to reach it, even in a year when national affordability data show tentative, uneven improvement. Whether Utah County closes that gap may decide not just where young adults live, but whether they stay in places like American Fork and Lehi.
