⚡️The Hedgeye framing is correct on the data and missing the structural cause.
The map is showing something real, but calling it an “affordability problem” implies it could be solved by adjusting affordability.
The thing producing the map is not solvable that way.
What the map actually shows.
Housing has decoupled from wages across most of the country in five years. In Q1 2020, one state was unaffordable by the standard measure. By mid-2025, seventeen states are. This is not a slow drift. This is a phase change in the relationship between housing costs and household income across the entire country in five years. Phase changes in this kind of structural variable do not happen because of cyclical conditions. They happen because the underlying mechanism of price formation has changed.
The mechanism that changed.
Housing in the United States stopped being primarily a consumer good and became primarily a financial asset starting in the 1990s, accelerated dramatically post-2008 with quantitative easing, and reached its current state through the 2020-22 monetary expansion. The 2020-22 period printed approximately $5 trillion in new money. Most of that money flowed into asset markets including housing. Housing prices rose roughly 40% nationally in two years while wages rose roughly 12%. The 47.7% of median household income going to housing nationally is the consequence of this divergence becoming permanent rather than reverting.
The reason it does not revert is that housing supply is constrained by zoning, by construction labor shortages, by materials costs, and by the financial profile of existing homeowners who would lose wealth if prices declined and who therefore organize politically to prevent declines. Demand is supported by institutional capital that has discovered single-family homes as an asset class, by foreign capital seeking dollar-denominated stores of value, and by demographic demand from millennials reaching peak household formation age. Supply is structurally constrained. Demand is structurally elevated. Prices clear at levels that are unaffordable for median households but affordable for capital deploying assets into housing.
This is not a market failure. It is a market succeeding at producing the outcome the participants with capital are seeking, which is the conversion of housing from consumer good to investment asset. The outcome happens to be unaffordability for the median household, but the median household is not the marginal buyer setting prices. Capital is setting prices. Capital is satisfied with the outcome.
The K-shaped framing Hedgeye uses is correct as far as it goes but it understates what is happening. K-shaped implies two paths, one going up and one going down. The actual structure is a complete restructuring of the housing market into two separate markets that happen to share the same physical inventory. There is the asset market, where housing trades as a financial instrument among capital allocators. There is the shelter market, where households need a place to live. The asset market sets prices. The shelter market has to clear at those prices. The two markets have different price tolerances. The asset market can pay any price that produces yield comparable to alternatives. The shelter market can only pay what household income supports. When the asset market sets prices above what the shelter market can pay, you get the map.
The map is the visible signature of housing being financialized faster than wages can keep up.