Housing

You know the math. You’ve done it — maybe this morning, maybe last night staring at the ceiling. Rent, utilities, groceries, gas, the payment on whatever’s keeping the car running. You add it up, and then you add it up again, because the first time can’t be right. But it is. The numbers don’t work. They haven’t worked for a while.

And here’s the thing nobody in a policy office will say this plainly: the numbers were never designed to work. A society that can build skyscrapers but can’t house its people has a priorities problem, not a resources problem.

Rosa is not one person. She is a pattern. She’s a home health aide in Oklahoma City — she cares for elderly people in their homes so they can stay out of nursing facilities. The work is essential. Everyone says so. It pays $11.50 an hour. The cheapest one-bedroom near her clients rents for $876 a month. She works five days a week and lives with her sister’s family — two adults and three kids in a two-bedroom apartment — because there is no other option. She’s been on the affordable housing waiting list for three years. The list has 2,000 names on it.

Rosa’s math: at $11.50 an hour, working full time, she can afford $598 a month in rent without being cost-burdened. The one-bedroom costs $876. The two-bedroom costs $1,091. There is no version of this arithmetic where Rosa lives alone. Not because she doesn’t work hard enough. Because the numbers were never designed to add up for her.

Foundation is built on a simple premise: there is a minimum set of conditions people need to thrive, and a society wealthy enough to provide them has no excuse not to. Housing is one of sixteen components in this framework, and the argument is as simple as anything gets: shelter is infrastructure, not a speculative asset. The same way we treat roads and water lines and the electrical grid. You don’t apply for permission to drive on a highway. You shouldn’t have to prove your poverty to have a roof.

The Gap That Swallowed a Generation

In 1990, the median home in America cost about three times the median household income. A stretch, but reachable. By 2025, that ratio hit five to one. In parts of the West Coast, it’s eight or nine to one. Since 1985, median household income has risen about 255 percent. Median home prices have surged over 415 percent. The gap isn’t closing. It’s accelerating.

And it’s not just buying. The national housing wage — what you’d need to earn per hour to afford a modest two-bedroom rental without spending more than 30 percent of your income — is $33.63. The average renter earns $23.60. That’s a ten-dollar gap, every hour, between what people make and what housing costs. Almost half of all U.S. workers earn less than the one-bedroom housing wage. Of the 25 most common jobs in America, 17 pay median wages below what a one-bedroom apartment requires. Those 17 occupations employ 74 million people.

Seventy-four million workers in this country can’t afford a one-bedroom apartment on what they earn. That’s not a housing market. That’s a math problem with no solution.

In Oklahoma — not California, not New York — a minimum wage worker would need to put in 93 hours a week just to afford a one-bedroom apartment. Ninety-three hours. That’s more than two full-time jobs, for a single room. Oklahoma’s minimum wage is still $7.25 — the federal floor, unchanged since 2009. Rents in the Oklahoma City metro have risen over 26 percent since 2019, with a 24 percent spike in a single year around 2021-2022 that was the fastest in the nation. The wage didn’t move. The rent did. The math was always going to produce this outcome.

And the outcome is here. Oklahoma’s homeless population has doubled since 2021. The 2025 point-in-time count in Oklahoma City found 1,882 people experiencing homelessness. In Tulsa, nearly one in four people counted as homeless were employed at the time. They had jobs. They just couldn’t afford a roof.

The Numbers in Your State

Who Benefits When Housing Costs More

Here’s the part that doesn’t get said enough: housing unaffordability is not an accident. It is the predictable result of treating shelter as an investment vehicle.

We built a system where the primary wealth-building strategy for the middle class is homeownership — which means home prices must perpetually rise. And when prices perpetually rise, housing perpetually becomes less affordable for anyone who doesn’t already own. The incentive structure is mathematically hostile to the people who need housing most.

Then add the institutional money. Large investors — firms managing hundreds or thousands of properties — own about 3 percent of single-family rentals nationally. That sounds small until you look at where they concentrate: in the 20 most-affected metros, they own over 12 percent of single-family rentals. They buy in the neighborhoods where working families are trying to buy their first homes. In 2025, investors of all sizes purchased 27 percent of homes sold in the first quarter. Individual families are competing against algorithms with unlimited capital. That’s not a market. That’s a rigged auction.

The Trump administration signed an executive order in January 2026 titled “Stopping Wall Street from Competing with Main Street Homebuyers.” It directs agencies to prevent federal programs from facilitating single-family home sales to institutional investors. It does not ban institutional buying outright. It does not force divestiture of existing portfolios. And it exempts build-to-rent communities — a growing segment. Meanwhile, 38 bills are moving through 18 state legislatures to limit institutional investors from purchasing housing, ranging from outright bans to cutting off government funding. The political will is forming. Whether it matches the scale of the problem is another question.

The same principle applies here that applies across Foundation: no for-profit motive belongs in civic infrastructure. The people who provide shelter shouldn’t have shareholders whose returns depend on your rent going up.

What This Does to a Person

Here’s what connects Rosa living doubled up with her sister’s family, the veteran sleeping in his car in Tulsa despite holding down a job, and the 22.6 million renter households across the country that are cost-burdened.

When you don’t know if you can keep your housing — when the background hum of your life is the calculation of whether you can make rent — it presses down on everything else. Not just your finances. Everything. It affects whether you can focus at work. Whether you can help your kid with homework. Whether you have the bandwidth to participate in your community — show up at a school board meeting, vote with anything other than exhaustion, think about anything beyond the next first of the month.

Housing instability causes mental health crises — the chronic stress of not knowing where you’ll sleep rewires the brain the same way any other sustained threat does. Cortisol elevated, decision-making narrowed to the immediate, the future shrinking to the next paycheck, the next landlord’s mood, the next rent increase you can’t absorb. And mental health crises cause housing instability — job loss, relationship breakdown, the cascading failures that start with a mind under siege. It’s a feedback loop that eats people alive.

Housing instability tracks with food insecurity — the neighborhoods where people can’t afford to live are the same neighborhoods where there’s no grocery store within walking distance. Food deserts and housing deserts overlap on the map so precisely it looks intentional. And the economic security that Foundation proposes can’t function if people are spending 50, 60, 70 percent of their income on shelter before they buy groceries, before they see a doctor, before they do anything else. Housing is the platform. Without it, nothing else stands.

You can’t build the scaffolding for hope when you’re not sure you have a home next month. That’s not weakness. That’s physics. A person needs a floor before they can stand on it.

What We’re Building

Foundation’s housing component treats shelter the way we treat roads — as infrastructure that a functioning society provides because everything else depends on it. Not a reward for economic success. The foundation that makes economic participation possible.

Housing First programs — giving people housing unconditionally and then addressing other issues — consistently show that it’s cheaper than the emergency systems we use instead. We pay more to manage homelessness than it would cost to prevent it. That’s not just a values argument. It’s an accounting argument. And it’s been proven in every city that’s tried it seriously.

This means community land trusts — over 300 now operating across 46 states, holding more than 44,000 permanently affordable units. Nonprofit ownership of the land, with affordable housing on it, keeping prices stable instead of letting speculation drive them up. It means public housing that’s actually maintained and destigmatized — Vienna houses 60 percent of its population in publicly subsidized housing that’s desirable, well-maintained, and mixed-income. It works at scale. The question is whether we have the will to adapt it.

And it means building housing as part of the broader infrastructure system. AI-assisted modular construction can help cut building costs and timelines dramatically — some companies are already building homes in days rather than months. Human architects and planners guide the design for local conditions and community needs. AI helps them work faster. The question, as always, is who this technology serves: if it’s deployed to build more luxury units for investors, it makes the problem worse. If it’s deployed to build affordable, high-quality housing where people actually need to live, it’s the lever that moves the whole system.

What We Need From You

Those who say we can’t afford to house everyone are often the same ones whose portfolios depend on housing being scarce. The obstacle isn’t resources — it’s who profits from the scarcity. A society that can build skyscrapers but can’t house its people has made a choice. It can make a different one.

We have a framework. We don’t have all the answers — and that’s deliberate. Foundation is citizen-developed work, which means the people closest to the problem help shape the solution. Here are directions we think matter. Push back on them, extend them, or bring your own:

• Community land trusts as default, not exception. Three hundred CLTs are already operating. They keep housing permanently affordable by taking the land out of the speculative market. What would it take to make this the standard model for new affordable development in your city, instead of the alternative one? What does your community need that the CLT model doesn’t yet provide?

• Vienna-scale public housing, American-adapted. Sixty percent of Vienna lives in public housing — and it’s housing people want to live in. Mixed-income, well-maintained, integrated into the city. The American version doesn’t have to look like Vienna’s. But the principle — that public housing can be desirable, not punitive — has been proven. What would that look like in Oklahoma City? In your town?

• AI-assisted construction for the public good. Modular homes designed with AI assistance for local climate, soil, and community needs — with human architects and local planners guiding every decision. Deployed to build affordable housing fast, at scale, where it’s needed most. Not another luxury development with a “workforce housing” unit in the basement. Actual housing, for actual people, built with tools that already exist. What’s standing in the way in your community — zoning? Land costs? Political will? All three?

What does “affordable” mean where you live? What models preserve community while providing stability? What do people who’ve experienced housing insecurity know that no one in a policy office has thought to ask?

This is citizen-developed work. This is one of sixteen components. Explore the full framework →

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