Housing is the foundation working-class America builds on.

For most of the twentieth century, the American housing market functioned as the primary mechanism for middle-class wealth formation. Homeownership produced a durable asset. Rising values compounded across generations. Renting served as a stage on the way to ownership rather than a permanent destination. In large segments of the country today, that mechanism no longer works as it once appeared.

The United States faces a shortage of roughly 4 million housing units, and working-class families bear the brunt of that scarcity.¹ As of March 2025, families earning up to $50,000 a year could afford just 8.7% of home listings nationally, compared with the 48% they could reach if supply met demand.² Even households earning between $75,000 and $100,000 can access only a fifth of listings, less than half of what was available six years ago.² The price-to-income ratio for homebuyers has risen from 3.39 in 2015 to nearly 4.5 today.³

Rental markets, long framed as a stepping stone toward ownership, no longer function that way. Nearly half of all renter households, 22.6 million Americans, are cost-burdened, spending more than 30% of income on housing and utilities.⁴ In the past five years, apartment rents rose 28.7% and single-family home rents rose 42.9%, while median household income grew just 22.5%.⁵ After paying for housing, 65% of working-age renters lack sufficient income to cover necessities.⁶ For the roughly two-thirds of renters who believe they will never own a home, the traditional wealth-building pathway remains closed.⁷

LSI's research program starts from the premise that markets, when their incentives are aligned with the public interest, can serve as platforms for economic mobility. When those incentives misfire, as they have across the United States for generations, working-class households lose access to ownership, asset-building, and the resilience that comes with them. LSI uses two instruments to realign them. Federal and state policy research identifies the levers most likely to work. Proprietary technology, led by the Renter Wealth Index and the Federal Credit Lab, makes working-class places legible to the capital, credit, and legislation that shape them. LSI translates the findings into options that lawmakers of either party, community organizations, investors, and other mission-driven actors can act on.