The American Home Built a Nation—Now the Nation Is Struggling To Build Enough Homes

The year was 1760. Abraham Choate was just 30 when he built a dream home for his family of nine in Ipswich, MA. The two-story timber-frame house was humble by many standards, but it was big enough to make the neighbors talk.

“[My neighbor] Exclaims against my New House and thinks that it is too big, and ... too high,” a nearby owner who faced similar criticism wrote in his diary.

More than 260 years later, Choate’s house is the centerpiece of “Within These Walls,” an installation at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, sponsored by the National Association of Realtors®.

The exhibit traces the histories of five families who lived in the home between the Colonial era and World War II. Their stories seem both distant and strikingly familiar—from the ambitious young builder fighting 18th-century NIMBYism to the 20th-century multigenerational renters trying to make ends meet.

Room by room, the house makes a larger case: A home has long been one of the country’s most powerful engines of stability, wealth, and belonging—but only for those who could access it.

That tension feels especially urgent as America approaches its 250th birthday and stares down a historic housing shortage. For generations, homeownership has been a gateway to generational wealth, but after decades of underbuilding, there may not be enough homes for the next generations to buy in.

Home as American infrastructure

For Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, the idea of homeownership was not incidental to the American project.

“It’s right there at the beginning of our creation as a country to think of the importance of owning a home and owning land,” Goodwin said, speaking at the 2026 NAR Legislative Meetings conference this week in Washington, DC.

Thomas Jefferson "believed that if people could own their own land and build their own homes, that somehow there would be stability, there would be a stake in the community, they would have dignity,” she added.

Choate's own experience in the house he built reflects this. Less than a decade after it was built, a deed from 1769 shows him using the dwelling and other buildings as collateral for a bond.

“One of the most remarkable stories in our nation's history is how deliberately America built a system to expand homeownership,” Shannon McGahn, chief advocacy officer for the NAR, says. “The result has been one of the most successful public policy achievements in American history."

Charles McElroy, who was visiting the exhibit from Memphis, TN, on Tuesday, saw that the legacy of that expansion effort in his own family history.

“My father fought in [World War II], and there was a big effort to make homes available to families and to returning soldiers and people involved in the war effort,” McElroy says. “It became a very, very big part of what became the American dream.”

And today, McGahn says, 85% of Americans still say homeownership is part of the American dream.

The unfinished promise of homeownership

But America’s homeownership story has always been complicated, and Goodwin pointed to the GI Bill as one of the clearest examples.

After World War II, the federal government helped millions of veterans enter the middle class through education and low-cost mortgages. But that opportunity depended heavily on local implementation, and Black veterans and other minority buyers were often shut out through redlining and other discriminatory practices.

“The dream that [President Franklin Delano Roosevelt] had, that homeownership would be something that propelled them into the middle class, was not realized then,” Goodwin said. “It still needed more work as time went by.”

That unfinished work is still visible to visitors at the Smithsonian exhibit, including Nancy of Johnson City, TN, who worries that rising home values have turned one generation’s foothold into another generation’s barrier.

“I hope that they’re going to be able to afford a house in the future, too,” she says of younger buyers. “Twenty years ago, when we bought our house, we thought it was expensive, and now we could sell it for five times as much. It just doesn’t seem right”

For Goodwin, that kind of present-day anxiety is exactly why history matters now.

“History can really give us the perspective we need,” she said. “We're living in a really rough time, but we've lived in really, really, really rough times before.

“If we can just remember that they lived through those times, and somehow we emerged with greater strength from each one of those adversities, we can do it again," she added.

Affordability as the next frontier

The exhibit doesn't shy away from some of the harder aspects of America’s housing story.

By the late 1800s, the Choate house had entered a new chapter. The Heard family bought the property as an investment in 1865 and divided it into rental apartments for workers as Ipswich’s hosiery mill boomed.

That's how Catherine Tracy Lynch, an Irish immigrant who had sailed from Liverpool to Boston in 1847, came to rent part of the house with her daughter, Mary. Together, they made ends meet with Mary’s wages from the mill and Catherine’s earnings from taking in laundry.

The home was a foothold, to be sure—but it was not the same monument to ambition it had been for Choate.

The same is true for the Scott family, who moved in during World War II. From her downstairs apartment, Mary Scott stretched ration coupons, canned food from the family garden, and helped care for her grandson while her daughter worked in a war-materials factory and her sons served in uniform.

Their stories show what's at stake when a home is asked to do everything but offers no clear path to ownership—and why the current housing shortage is more than a market problem.

“NAR estimates the country faces a shortage of roughly 4.7 million homes, and that shortage is making it harder for families to buy, move, or build wealth through homeownership,” McGahn says.

To her point, just 30 years ago, the median home price was $96,800 and the median household income was $31,000—a price-to-income ratio of about 3.1, according to a Realtor.com analysis of NAR and U.S. Census Bureau data. Today, the median home price is $418,000 and the median household income is $85,000—pushing that ratio to 4.9.

The result is an environment where the first rung of ownership is being pushed further out of reach. Additional research from the Realtor.com economic team estimates that these affordability constraints shut out as many as 1.8 million potential Gen Z and millennial households from the market in 2025.

McGahn measures it another way: “The median first-time homebuyer is now 40 years old, a record high, while first-time buyers account for just 21% of purchases, a record low,” she says.

It is a stark inversion of the system America built two and a half centuries ago.

In McGahn's words, "If the first 250 years of American housing policy were about expanding access to ownership, the next chapter will be about ensuring affordability so that the American dream remains attainable for future generations."