Wages have been rising, but not fast enough to close the gap on their own, and that gap is a real part of the affordability problem. Wage growth has generally run positive in real terms in recent years, which helps at the margin. It just cannot carry the whole load. Three levers move affordability: home prices, interest rates, and wages. Fixing it through any single lever would take an unrealistic swing, on the order of prices falling by roughly half or wages jumping by most of their current level. That does not happen in isolation. Affordability improves through a gradual mix of all three, and because interest rates move a monthly payment more than price does, rate relief usually does more of the lifting than wage catch-up. The longer view explains why it feels stuck. Over recent decades, median household income has grown a few times over, helped heavily by the shift to dual-income households, while home prices have grown by a much larger multiple, especially in the run-up of the last decade-plus. Even with real income gains, prices have outpaced paychecks. Today's strain comes mostly from structurally high prices, unlike an earlier crunch that came from rate spikes and eased faster once rates fell back. One durable point under all of it: a baseline of a few million Americans buy every year out of life necessity, marriage, kids, a job move, divorce, regardless of conditions. Whether the numbers work for your life matters more than timing a perfect macro moment, and that is exactly what the free Roadmap conversation is built to figure out, about 20 minutes where we run your real numbers.