The American Dream Feels Out of Reach for Most
A Wall Street Journal poll shows people want a home, a family and a comfortable retirement, but say those goals are tough to achieve even with hard work
Americans overwhelmingly desire all the traditional trappings of the American dream—owning a home, having a family, and looking forward to a comfortable retirement. But very few believe they can easily achieve it.
A July Wall Street Journal/NORC poll of 1,502 U.S. adults shows a stark gap between people’s wishes and their expectations. The trend was consistent across gender and party lines, but held more true for younger generations, who have been priced out of homeownership and saddled with high interest rates and student debt.
While 89% of respondents said owning a home is either essential or important to their vision of the future, only 10% said homeownership is easy or somewhat easy to achieve. Financial security and a comfortable retirement were similarly labeled as essential or important by 96% and 95% of people, respectively, but rated as easy or somewhat easy to pull off by only 9% and 8%.
When it comes to achieving your own vision of the American dream, how important is each of the following? And in the U.S. today, how easy is it to achieve each one?
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Twelve years ago, when researchers at Public Religion Research Institute asked 2,501 people if the American dream “still holds true,” more than half said it did. When The Wall Street Journal asked the same question in July, that dropped to about a third of respondents.
By many measures, economists say, people are right to feel that their shot at success has diminished.
“Key aspects of the American dream seem out of reach in a way that they were not in past generations,” says Emerson Sprick, an economist at Washington, D.C., think tank the Bipartisan Policy Center.
Sprick points to the continued decline of private-sector pensions—leading to their near-disappearance—and the surge in the cost of homeownership as two of the biggest economic changes over the past decade.
Marquell Washington remembers that his elementary-school teachers instilled in him that high grades and a college degree would be his ticket out of the Chicago neighborhood where he grew up “hearing gunshots every day.”
The promise, the now 22-year-old says, was that “you’d get a good job and enjoy the rest of your life in a house with a front gate.” He was the first person in his family to go to college, but dropped out during his junior year after three of his close friends were killed within months of one another.
He now makes around $30,000 a year working part-time for youth development nonprofit My Block, My Hood, My City. He says he can’t afford to move out of his mother’s Section 8 apartment where he grew up, let alone to resolve the $10,000 debt he needs to transfer his transcripts to a school closer to home. He hasn’t given up on his American dream, he says, but he’s finding it much less straightforward than he thought.
“They don’t tell you how hard it is to obtain the American dream,” says Washington. “You have to learn that on your own.”
Economic mobility has declined in recent decades on the whole, economists say.
While around 90% of children born in 1940 were ultimately better off than their parents, according to research by Massachusetts Institute of Technology economics professor Nathaniel Hendren and Harvard University economist Raj Chetty, only around half of those born in the 1980s were able to say the same. Younger cohorts appear to be in a similar position based on median income growth, Hendren says, but likely experienced a slight post-Covid boost as wages for lower-income Americans have outpaced other earners.
“It’s still a coin flip whether or not you’ll earn more than your parents, but mobility probably hit a record low in the early 2020s,” Hendren says.
Chetty looks at the American dream through the lens of how difficult it is for someone starting in a poor family to reach the middle class. For white Americans in particular, that goal has become significantly more challenging over the past 15 years, he says.
“People are right to feel that the American dream has become harder to achieve both in terms of their chances of doing better than their parents and their chances of rising out of poverty,” Chetty says.
A home of one’s own
Richard Thomas and Cherish Celetti were sure they had pulled off their own version of the American dream when they bought a five-bedroom split-level in Mount Vernon, N.Y., for $612,000 in 2017.
“It was like everything was going in the right direction,” says Celetti, a 42-year-old lawyer who grew up poor among nine siblings.
Buying her first house not only meant the couple’s children, now 8 and 11, could have their own bedrooms—a luxury both Thomas and Celetti used to pine for—but also that they had space to take in Celetti’s mom, Diane Thompson, and 20-year-old sister.
The couple’s $5,400 mortgage, including $689 in private mortgage insurance, was tight but doable, between Celetti’s salary and her husband’s as mayor of the town at the time. But seemingly overnight, their energy costs doubled to more than $2,000 a month, and grocery prices, insurance and other bills for the family of now six surged.
Thomas was forced to resign as mayor and ordered to pay a fine after pleading guilty in July 2019 to stealing $12,900 from his campaign. He says he only took the plea deal because he couldn’t afford to fight the charge. He now works in public relations.
Both Thomas and Celetti lowered their retirement contributions to near zero, scrapped plans for vacations and started setting the thermostat above 80 degrees in the summer and below 65 in the winter. They know selling the house—which has more than doubled in value—would be their best bet, but don’t know where they would go if they left.
“We want to stay in our community. We want to raise our kids here, but the dream of being able to do that really escapes us,” says Thomas. “We had the American dream. Now it’s the American nightmare because it feels like the country made us a promise and then took it away.”
Many are struggling to achieve their goals of homeownership at all. Owning a home was a record 47% more expensive than renting for the 12 months ending in June, according to research by commercial real-estate services firm CBRE. That is even after rents have skyrocketed—though the firm forecasts improvement over the next year.
Lily Roark’s father bought the eight-bedroom New Orleans fixer-upper she grew up in for $160,000 in the early 2000s. When she went to look for houses in Louisville, Ky., with partner Jessica Holland this past spring, she was sure $250,000 would be a big enough budget for a starter with one or two bedrooms.
Instead, “we were looking at houses that had no walls and no floors,” says Holland, a 28-year-old second grade teacher.
Since Roark and Holland still want to give priority to saving for a house, the couple feels as though they can’t move forward with any of their other life goals—getting engaged, having a wedding and planning for children.
They are both frustrated that homeownership and family formation seemed so much more attainable for their parents, who made less than their combined income of around $100,000 at their ages.
“We’re doing everything right, we’re saving, we went to good schools, I have a master’s degree, and it’s still so hard,” Holland says.
The marriage question
In Des Plaines, Ill., 31-year-old Kevin Murphy believes that even finding a partner is more difficult than it used to be because of how expensive dating has become. He can’t always afford to pick up the check, and worries that he is less desirable than someone who makes more than his $95,000 yearly income or owns a home.
In
the WSJ/NORC poll, 62% of people said marriage was either essential or
important to their vision of the American dream, but only 47% of people
think it is easily attainable.
Still holds trueOnce held true but not anymore
“For me, the American dream feels further away than it’s ever been,” says Murphy, who works in government affairs for an energy company. “I worry about when I’m 50 or 60 and if nothing changes, I’m going to be totally screwed.”
He interacts with older Americans in that position every day in his side job as founder of the Jet City Coalition nonprofit, which provides free home maintenance to people in need.
“I take care of these people who trade insulin for groceries,” says Murphy of choosing which essentials to go without. He says he’s noticed a growing sense of hopelessness tied not only to high prices, but also to a seemingly more permanent state where “the math doesn’t make sense.”
Murphy is particularly worried about wealth inequality, which has increased over time, according to an analysis of Survey of Consumer Finances data by Scott Winship at right-leaning think tank the American Enterprise Institute.
In 1989, the typical net worth of the wealthiest 10% of households was just under 15 times the overall median net worth for all Americans, compared with almost 20 times that number in 2022. Though, Winship notes, median wealth is more than twice as high as it was in 1989 even after adjusting for inflation. The economy is working well for some people, including investors and many who bought homes when interest rates were low—creating a divide between higher-income Americans and most everyone else.
“It feels like my parents’ generation has ruined it for us,” Murphy says. “It’s such a stark case of the haves and have-nots.”
Write to Rachel Wolfe at rachel.wolfe@wsj.com
Corrections & Amplifications
The
Thomas/Celetti household is a family of six. An earlier version of this
article incorrectly identified them as a family of seven. (Corrected on
Aug. 28)
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Appeared in the August 29, 2024, print edition as '‘American Dream’ Proves Elusive for Many'.