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Comment by anubistheta | Hacker News Reader

Households is an interesting metric to choose. If fewer people get married, then average household would have fewer people.

But I don't see data for 2022 on the page? I searched for "2022" and found nothing?

What makes it odd to me is that real median incomes for both individuals and households rose 6.2% over that period. That includes all people, but what I can find specifically on younger people is even more optimistic.

https://fortune.com/2026/09/22/gen-z-wealth-income-vs-boomer...

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/mehoinusa672n# https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N

Edit: someone linked the data below. Seems like 2022 was an outlier. All numbers in 2025 dollars. 2019 17.8k 2022 42.7k 2025 32.8k

So from 2019 to 2025, median net wealth for people under 35 increased by 84%.

https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/scf/dataviz/scf/chart...

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I suppose it’s almost exactly the right metric if you want to look at affordability of houses. Almost since a bigger household needs a bigger house/flat but only up to a point, a young couple needs barely more space than a young single person occupying their own flat.

lol. With the WFH shit a young couple needs MORE space than a single person. You can’t both work out of the one bedroom.

a young couple doesn't need 2x the space as a single person though

Au contraire, you see, I can live quite nicely in a 1,000-square-foot apartment, but I need about 1,500 square feet of garage space for my hobby support, places to put my tools where they're usable, storing lawn equipment, recreational equipment, etc.

Now, if you add my partner, we could add another 1,500 square feet to the living space, you know, because of "stuff," and then we'd need to double the garage size for her art studio and project space.

And that doesn't include the space we use for a berry garden, fruit trees, and vegetables.

Here we come to the difference between need and want

There's multiple levels of need. See Maslow.

Another way to look at it is, do you live for experiences or do you live for building things? Are you a consumer or are you a maker?

I come from a family of makers at least as far back as my grandparents and our tools and using them gave our lives meaning.

These differences in experience and perspective alter the balance of need versus want.

At a glance, it looks to me like it's plausible that a good chunk of the tail end of the age group who'd have had their wealth considered for the <35 age bracket for both 2019 and 2022 would have aged into the next bracket for 2025 and taken their pandemic gains with them. Between 2022 and 2025, the 35-44 bracket continued increasing, albeit at a slower rate, so things do not look optimistic comparatively.

The pandemic created a ton of wealth for whomever would've had the most money in the market at that time and the most stability, to the point where there's basically no chance anyone else reaching those same ages after the pandemic could catch up without some miracle. Ya it's still better in real dollars than 2019 by a significant amount, but it would need to be even more significant for it to be optimistic, imo.

Edit: Looking at the The Fed chart you posted a bit further, there hasn't been a similar relative drop in any other 3 year period from 1989 onward. The closest period overall would be 2004-2010, and secondly 1995-1998. That's... pretty dramatic

It's not just fewer people getting married, fewer people are even living with a partner. Living together has economies of scale.

The number of adults, and even elderly who are forced to live with roommates is hitting record highs though so some expenses are probably shared.

https://www.npr.org/2026/04/04/nx-s1-5760948/high-housing-co...

https://eyeonhousing.org/2025/04/house-sharing-is-not-just-f...

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