Marc Norman, Associate Dean at NYU’s Schack Institute of Real Estate, has had a front-row seat to one of the most significant and underreported shifts in American housing: the affordability crisis is no longer just a low-income problem, and he’s been watching the boundaries quietly expand for decades. In a recent feature for Keycrew Journal, Norman traces how the crisis metastasised from inner-city poverty into the everyday reality of middle-class families across the country.
Families earning over $100,000 in cities like Denver, Seattle, and Dallas are now rent-burdened and technically eligible for affordable housing programmes, a reality Norman describes as a generational departure from what anyone once thought possible. As he explains it, “When I started, the crisis was really one of our big cities affecting people at the lower income spectrum. Now we’re seeing the housing crisis pretty much everywhere, bleeding into what we used to call middle-income.” The underlying cause is a decades-long structural mismatch: “Incomes over the last 20 to 30 years have been pretty flat, especially in the middle to lower income ranges. Meanwhile, housing costs, construction costs, insurance, and other soft costs have increased exponentially.” With average construction costs now around $350,000 per unit nationally, a household needs to earn between $85,000 and $100,000 just to afford newly built housing.
Norman also points to a deeper root cause in post-World War II urban planning, which stripped cities of the natural housing fluidity that once made them affordable without subsidies. As he puts it, “Housing traditionally would flow – the mansion became the rooming house, the rooming house became the multifamily development. Post-World War II, we froze a lot of types and didn’t allow that flexibility anymore.” Around 40 housing types are now illegal to build in most jurisdictions, eliminating affordable entry points for working families. Despite this, Norman offers measured optimism, citing Minneapolis’s elimination of single-family zoning as proof that supply-side reform works, and advocating for a pluralist approach: “There’s not one answer to the housing crisis. Seeing 15 to 20 different approaches in different jurisdictions is going to create lessons for lots of people.”
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