The downsizing of the American dream
Javier Jaén for BI
The American dream — like a beloved pair of pants you left in the dryer too long — is shrinking.
The idealized image of American life we know today was crystallized in the country's collective imagination in the 1930s. Since then, the idea that anyone can obtain a life that has the house with the white picket fence, 2.5 children, a lucrative career at an office that's a reasonable distance away, and the occasional trip to an enviable vacation spot has loomed large in nearly every facet of cultural and political life.
There's just one problem: The once expansive vision is getting smaller. Not only is it harder to grab a piece of it, like a bag of chips or a roll of toilet paper that has less substance every time you buy it, but even nominally achieving the dream is leaving people unsatisfied. Americans are having fewer kids, their houses are getting smaller, they're schlepping further to work, and they're spending less time on vacation.
Americans are taking notice of the diminishing returns. Among the 8,709 US adults surveyed by the Pew Research Center from April 8 to 14, 41% said that achieving the American dream was once possible but no longer. That's particularly true for younger Americans; 18- to 29-year-olds were the most likely to say that the American dream was never possible, and only 39% said that it's still possible. Their millennial counterparts felt similarly, though they were slightly more bullish on the possibility of the American dream.
At the same time, Americans are increasingly less satisfied with their personal lives, Gallup polling from January found. The share of Americans who are "very satisfied" with their personal lives has been plummeting, the poll found, and sits near record lows — other times it's gotten this bad were during the economic crisis of 2008 and its fallout in the following years. And even among those who might have achieved the American dream — higher earners with college degrees — life satisfaction has slipped.
Call it the shrinkflation of the American dream.
The central element of the American dream is owning a house. Having a roof over your head is the cornerstone of security and stability; research has found homeowners are less stressed than their renter counterparts, and beyond having a place that they can call their own, they have growing equity. But nowadays, the homes that many Americans live in rarely have enough room for a big dog — much less a picket fence.
In 2013, the median square footage of a new single-family housing unit was about 2,460. In 2015, new homes peaked at about 2,470 square feet — and then spent the next six years shrinking. In 2021, homes started to slowly get bigger again, and then they once again constricted. By 2023, the figure had fallen to about 2,180 square feet. An analysis by the National Association of Home Builders found that the share of single-family homes built with two bedrooms or fewer hit its highest level since 2012 — and the share of new homes built with four bedrooms fell to its lowest level since 2012.
Of course, homes getting a little smaller isn't necessarily a bad thing — many advocates for increasing the housing supply argue that the dedication to giant homes has made it tougher to build the number of new units that the country needs. But shrinking homes are coupled with another biting reality: Americans are paying more for less. In the same period that Americans have seen their homes shrink, home prices have grown by nearly $200,000. The median listing price per square foot was $127 in 2016; by 2024, that rose to $224 — meaning Americans were shelling out more per square foot, even as their square footage decreased. By one measure, Americans now need to work 110 hours a month to be able to afford their mortgages — meaning mortgages eat up the bulk of their earnings.
With those prices, it's no wonder first-time homebuyers are older than ever. The National Association of Realtors found that the median age of first-time homebuyers hit 38 in 2024, a record high. In 1981, the median age of a first-time buyer was 29; in 2014, it was 31.
It's not all peaches and rainbows for American renters, either. The median rent price in the US is $2,035, Zillow found. Rent.com, meanwhile, found that median rental asking prices hit about $1,619 in October. That's nearly a $300 increase from May 2019. So if renters are paying more, surely they're still at least getting some bang for their buck? Nope, apartments are getting smaller, too. In 2016, the median square footage of a new unit in a building that had two or more units was 1,105 square feet. Apartments have been shrinking since then: In 2023, new units were clocking in at a median of 1,020 square feet — and the measure reached its lowest recorded level in 2021 as housing prices and demand soared.
A house is just a house until there are people in it; only then, the saying goes, is it a home. But increasingly, American homes are occupied by fewer people. Not only is there a slight rise in single people buying a house, but also the pitter-patter of babies' feet is becoming less common in the hallways of American homes these days. The share of homebuyers without a child under 18 in the house rose to a new high of 73%. That comes as Americans are having fewer kids: The average number of births per woman in the US has fallen from nearly four in 1960 to 1.7 in 2022.
It should come as no surprise that Americans are having fewer children given the economic and social pressures working against them. If it's hard for anyone to break into the ranks of homeowners, it's even more difficult for parents. Housing costs aren't the only deterrent, young parents are also floundering amid rising childcare costs and the loss of the social connections that are critical to raising kids. At the same time, more Americans seem to be on board with choosing to go child-free. DINKs — double-income, no-kid couples — have been on the cultural rise. But just because it's harder for people with kids and more acceptable to forgo them doesn't mean that people are giving up on starting a family. Many Americans want to have children or have even more kids, but it's out of reach.
Karen Benjamin Guzzo, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who's researched the gap between the number of children Americans intend to have versus their ultimate childbearing, told me that having kids is often seen as the "last step" in accomplishing the American dream. You go to college, you line up a good job, you get married, you buy a house, and then you fill it with kids. There's a problem, though. "Every step along the way has become less and less predictable," she said.
Guzzo's research has found, in part, that Americans still expect to have children — they just don't actually have them. The way Guzzo describes it is many Americans want kids, but with an asterisk: They want kids if they can find a good partner, a good job with family leave and enough pay to afford childcare, and so on.
"People need to feel confident that the next 25 years of their lives and the world in which their children will be raised and growing and becoming adults on their own. They need to feel confident about those," Guzzo said. "And we do not do a good job right now in the United States of making people feel confident about their futures."
Part of the American dream is the ability to actually enjoy it. You can come home for dinner, spend a nice evening with your family, and maybe enjoy some ice cream in front of the TV before heading to bed at a reasonable hour.
Unfortunately, for many people, the free time is getting sapped by a mind-numbing commute. The average travel time to work in 1990 was 22.4 minutes one way. By 2023, it rose to 26.8 minutes. That may not sound like a lot, but that adds up to nearly 4.5 hours a week just commuting to work, or about 10 days a year, assuming they went in every workday. Even if they're going into the office three days a week, that's still nearly 2.7 hours a week commuting, or the equivalent of almost 6 full days a year. Meanwhile, in 1990, Americans spent just about 3.7 hours a week commuting — about 44 minutes less a week. That's a whole episode of "Real Housewives." Even on a small scale, research has found that every minute added to a commute can reduce one's satisfaction with both their job and their leisure time. Most Americans commuting are doing so by car, which can also weigh on workers' mental health — and how well they're sleeping.
And as more Americans have moved away from urban cores — perhaps in pursuit of buying a house in cheaper areas — they're living farther from work. Young families, in particular, have fled larger urban areas and are finding themselves in the farthest reaches of suburbia. If you want the American dream of that larger, cheaper house, you might be paying for it in minutes stuck behind the wheel.
Reveling in the American dream also includes unwinding away from that house and job. But even as more Americans have access to paid vacation, that doesn't mean they're taking it. In July 1980, over 10 million working Americans were on vacation. At the height of the pandemic, that number had halved. And even as more Americans went on vacation in July post-2020, the number of workers vacationing in July has essentially plateaued over the past few years.
As The Washington Post found in an extensive analysis of eroding vacation time, some of that might be chalked up to another form of shrinkflation: Workers saving their vacation days for when they're feeling sick. In a very Dickensian twist, Americans might not be going on vacation because they're too busy being sick or caring for their ill kids instead.
All of this is not to say that the American dream has gone extinct, but there's a marked shift from the idea that things will get better for each successive generation. In a country where growth, expansion, and constantly improving your lot — and your family's lot — are North Stars, a diminishing and sickly American dream is a bit of an existential downer.
After all, in a March 2023 survey of 1,019 American adults by The Wall Street Journal and NORC, 78% of respondents said they were not confident that life would be better for their kids' generation. The share not confident their kids' lives will be better has soared over the past few decades; in 2000 just 42% said the same. In short: Many Americans are feeling like the dream is slipping through their fingers.
Guzzo said that we're seeing a bifurcation of the American dream. For the ultrawealthy, the ability to accumulate the markers of the dream has never been easier. The top 1% holds just over 13% of all real estate by dollar value in the US, while the bottom 50% holds just about 10%. And, as the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta recounted in its December Beige Book round-up, lower- and middle-income consumers are scaling back their vacation plans; they're renting homes for multiple families and eating in rather than splashing out on hotels or fancy restaurants. Instead, the strength in tourism spending comes from those higher-income consumers exploring and going on cruises. For Americans in the middle, those who might have the college degree and career that could set them on that trajectory, the dream is still possible, though it may come later in life. But Guzzo said others, especially younger men without college degrees, feel the American dream has been pulled out from beneath them.
At the same time, there's a bittersweet parallel running alongside the shrinking of the American dream. For decades, things like homeownership or formal recognition of marriage were out of grasp — and, in some cases, expressly forbidden — for many marginalized groups. It's only in recent history that LGBTQ+ Americans and Americans of color have been able to somewhat catch up to their straight and white peers. But now that the American dream is within reach for these people, it's already shrinking.
Juliana Kaplan is a senior labor and inequality reporter on Business Insider's economy team.