Across the country, Americans need about $127,000 for a down payment on a typical house, according to Zillow. In my hometown of San Diego, a median-income household would need to save for over 32 years for a down payment of $723,527! And that doesn’t even take into account the high rents that most members of our generation are paying because they can’t afford to buy and build equity.
If you are young, housing is your biggest expense. If you have kids, childcare is right up there, too, surpassing housing in some cases. And yet our childcare system is a market failure. In San Diego, the average annual cost for childcare for one infant in a licensed center is more than $19,000, according to the San Diego Foundation. For two kids, it could cost more than $33,000. That’s too expensive for most families, which means parents can’t afford to return to the workforce or contribute to our economy.
If my constituents have young kids, it doesn’t matter whether they are Republican, Democrat, or something else — they are talking to me about the cost of childcare. Despite all the data that investing in childcare is an incredible return on investment and that our economy loses $122 billion every year due to the childcare crisis, many of my colleagues still don’t understand the urgency of this issue. During the Build Back Better debate in 2021, one of my congressional colleagues (yes, a Democrat) asked me, “Isn’t there an aunt down the street that can take care of the kids?” While that may have been the case 40 years ago, today the answer is definitely no.
Young people don’t just want change, they need it. Despite what older generations say, the problem isn’t that millennials and Gen Z’ers can’t budget or don’t work hard enough or that we’re eating too much avocado toast; the problem is that the status quo simply isn’t working for millions of people. And when I talk to my friends and peers, they see the Democratic Party as the party of the status quo — as the institutionalists who are fighting to protect systems that don’t work to begin with.
Now is the time for change. Now is the time to rebuild and reimagine our systems and make them better. Now is the time to create a universal, affordable childcare system that meets every family’s and every provider’s needs. Now is the time to ramp up the housing supply, provide more relief to renters, and assist first-time homebuyers.
The problem isn’t that there are baby boomers or Gen X’ers in Congress; we need their experience and institutional knowledge. But it’s also necessary to listen more to the young people of this country who are begging for their top concerns to finally be respected and addressed.
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