The American Dream is losing its keys.
The number of US homeowners fell in 2025 — the first time in nearly a decade the figure has dropped, according to a realty company RedFin.
About 86.19 million Americans belonged to the picket-fence crowd as of April 1, down 0.1% from the 86.28 million who owned homes at the same point in 2024.
The United States last saw a drop in home ownership in the second quarter of 2016, when there were 74.36 million deed holders — down 0.1% from the 74.4 million at the same point in 2015.
The key metric had steadily increased each year since then, climbing to 75.41 million in 2017, 78.01 million in 2018, and 78.42 million in 2019 and so on — until now.
Over a decade of low mortgage rates since the 2008 financial crisis had helped people buy homes until recently, explained Chen Zhao, Redfin’s head of economics research.
“That all of a sudden changed in 2022, when we had high inflation and interest rates started hiking up” — sparking a “huge increase in mortgage rates,” Zhao said.
“And now that we’ve been at this much higher level of mortgage rates for three years, that’s what’s weighing on the homeownership rate, and that’s why we’re seeing the rate falling now,” Zhao told The Post.
And with sky-high real estate prices, “a lot of people are priced out of the housing market,” she said.
Meanwhile, the percentage of Americans who rent their homes increased from 34.9% as of Jan. 1 to 35% in the second quarter of 2025 — a shift Zhao attributed to “relative affordability.”
“Rentals have gotten pretty cheap relative to the housing market. So rents are certainly high and a lot of families are rent-burdened, but relative to buying a home, in most parts of the country, renting actually seems like a relative bargain,” she said.
Young Americans pushing off getting married and starting families, thus buying homes later in life, may also be a contributing factor to decreased homeownership and more renter households, Zhao noted.
New York City had the second-lowest homeownership rate in the second quarter of 2025, at 49.4%, out of the country’s 75 biggest metro areas, following Los Angeles, which had 46.4%.
Over half of Big Apple residents, or 51.3%, were homeowners in the same period in 2023, and 50.6% were titleholders at that point in 2022.
But the city’s homeownership rate is back on the rise after dipping to 47% as of Jan. 1 — the lowest it’s been in at least six years.
