A new report on the U.S. housing sector finds that activity remains subdued through the first part of the year as high costs suppress demand.
The Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University released its annual “State of the Nation’s Housing” report on Wednesday, which found that existing home sales remain near the lowest level in three decades that was first reached in 2023.
Sales of new homes remained relatively unchanged, while rental retention rates rose and new occupancies declined. New construction starts dipped 1% over the last year, driven by a 7% decline in single-family starts.
“Although supply shortages are still a major concern, depressed demand became a headline in housing over the past year,” the report said, noting slower growth in the number of homeowner households as well as the number of renters compared with a year ago.
MEDIAN US HOME PRICE PROJECTED TO HIT $1 MILLION BY 2050 – RIGHT AS MILLENNIALS RETIRE
The rate of growth of homeowner households declined by half and caused homeownership rates to decline for the second straight year. Additionally, the year-over-year increase in the number of renters in the first quarter of 2026 was less than half of what it was a year earlier.
Economic uncertainty has weighed on housing demand, with employment growth slowing from a gain of 1.5 million in 2024 to just 116,000 in 2025.
Consumer confidence dropped by more than 20 percentage points in 2025 and fell further in the first part of 2026 due to the Iran war, reaching an all-time low in April.
MORTGAGE RATES TICK HIGHER, BUT BUYERS SHOW SIGNS OF CONFIDENCE
“Without a job, graduates are less likely to form a new household or move to a new region,” the report said. “Without confidence in employment, families are less likely to move or make a big purchase like a house.”
High costs and the lack of affordable housing options are also contributing to the weaker demand, as households are struggling with high home prices and interest rates.
MIDWEST AND SOUTHERN STATES DOMINATE HOUSING REPORT CARDS: SEE HOW YOURS SCORED
The report said that the median prices for new and existing homes are both over $400,000 and that existing home prices have risen 54% since 2020 and are about 5-times the median income – a level well above the ratio of 3-times that prevailed in the 1990s.
Mortgage rates are over 6%, which makes the payment on a median-priced home $3,100 in the fourth quarter of 2025, up from $1,700 in early 2020. That has pushed the income needed to afford that payment to more than $120,000 – a significant increase from $66,000 in 2020.

The empty nest is filling back up.
Millions of young adults are delaying life on their own as high housing costs keep them living with mom and dad. In 2025, 25.2 million adults under 35 lived with a parent, according to new data from Realtor.com. That amounts to roughly one in three people in that age group.
The numbers point to a housing market that remains difficult to break into, even for young adults with jobs and college degrees, the outlet reported.
“The adults living with their parents today are largely employed, and many hold college degrees,” Hannah Jones, senior economist at Realtor.com, said in a statement. “What’s holding them back isn’t a lack of qualifications, but rather, at least in part, a lack of housing they can actually afford. This is a supply story, not an employment story.”
GOVERNMENT REGULATIONS ADD NEARLY $132K TO COST OF NEW HOME, BUILDERS SAY
That supply problem has been years in the making. The U.S. is short roughly 4 million homes, with entry-level properties especially scarce. The gap has widened since construction slowed following the 2008 financial crisis, Realtor.com reported.
About 70% of 25- to-34-year-olds living with their parents have jobs. In 2000, about one in nine employed adults in their late 20s lived at home. By 2025, that share had climbed to nearly one in seven.
For many young Americans, moving out has become increasingly expensive.
The national median home listing price is $430,000, up 34.4% from 2019, while the median asking rent has climbed to $1,673, up 17.9% over the same period, according to Realtor.com.
MEDIAN US HOME PRICE PROJECTED TO HIT $1 MILLION BY 2050 — RIGHT AS MILLENNIALS RETIRE
The delayed move into independent living could eventually translate into a wave of future housing demand.
As affordability improves or more homes are built, millions of young adults who postponed renting or buying could enter the market, Realtor.com reported.
“Twenty-five million adults living with their parents represents a generation of latent demand the market hasn’t absorbed,” Jones said. “Every adult still in a childhood bedroom is a household not formed, a lease unsigned, a starter home unpurchased. The typical first-time buyer is now 40 — that’s not a coincidence, it’s the math of a market that hasn’t built enough.”
The delay can also have long-term financial consequences.
Each year spent living at home can delay a young adult’s ability to build housing equity, Realtor.com noted.
MIDWEST AND SOUTHERN STATES DOMINATE HOUSING REPORT CARDS: SEE HOW YOURS SCORED
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The outlook is not getting easier. According to new projections from National Association of Realtors (NAR) chief economist Lawrence Yun, the national median home price is on track to hit $1 million by 2050 — just as millennials reach the traditional retirement age.
“Essentially, in about 25 years the national median home price will be a million dollars,” Yun said at a conference in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday. “It may be hard to envision that, but back in 1990, the national median price was $90,000.”

In late 2027, Qantas will launch the world’s longest nonstop flight, from Sydney (SYD) to London (LHR), using specially configured Airbus A350-1000ULRs, in what’s referred to as “Project Sunrise.” With a flight time of well over 20 hours, these flights will be an absolute marathon, especially for those in economy.
Fortunately the airline has been promising especially generous seat pitch in economy, though guess what? Well, the airline has now backtracked, and if you want more legroom, you’ll probably have to pay for it. Qantas management’s ability to overpromise and underdeliver never ceases to amaze me, and I don’t think the airline gets enough criticism for it.
Qantas Airbus A350ULRs will have less seat pitch than promised
Since 2022, Qantas has been hyping the passenger experience on its new Airbus A350-1000ULRs, promising how all passengers will “experience a new standard of comfort” on these planes. As part of that, the company has explicitly been promising 33″ of pitch in economy, with no strings attached. For example, here’s a direct quote from former Qantas CEO Alan Joyce:
“Economy travellers will have an OLED 13-inch TV screen, foot net and convenient storage space within arms’ reach to store glasses and personal items. The team has spent extensive time testing ergonomics, lumbar support and breathability of the seat fabrics in the new Economy seat which will have 33 inches of legroom.”
Typically on wide body aircraft, 31″ of pitch is the standard, so a couple of extra inches can make a difference. But really, it makes sense to offer a little more space, given the absolutely wild lengths of these flights, plus that they’ll come at a premium in terms of pricing. As it turns out, the airline now has a new strategy, and is now just promising that more than 70% of economy seats will have 33″ or more of pitch.
As reported by Executive Traveller, what’s going on here is that rather than offering everyone in economy 33″ of pitch, the airline will instead have sections with 32″ of pitch, 33″ of pitch, and 34″ of pitch. Qantas will offer an “economy plus” cabin, with 34″ of pitch, but that’s only made possible by reducing seat pitch by one inch in the back of the cabin, so that will have 32″ of pitch. Meanwhile the center of the economy cabin will have 33″ of pitch.
Qantas is great at hyping, bad at delivering
Qantas is a funny airline, because I know a lot of Australians have fond feelings about the company, given that it’s the national carrier (though there’s no denying the carrier’s image has taken a toll in recent years).
I know some people think I dislike Qantas, or something, but that’s not at all the case. I find most Qantas employees to be absolutely lovely, and I think the airline has great lounges. My issues with the airline is that I think the onboard product is just whatever (aside from the friendly crews), and I don’t love all the ways the airline has tried to screw its workforce over the years.
But as someone who has been covering the industry for close to two decades, what stands out to me most about Qantas is the never ending hype. I get it, it’s smart for airlines to try to generate good publicity from what they have planned, because good marketing can shift loyalty and passenger perception.
But I just can’t think of another airline that so consistently overhypes what it’s going to do. We’re talking announcing things so many years in advance, and also, often not actually following through on promises.
This is of course the perfect example of that. The airline promised 33″ of pitch for everyone in economy, but has now backtracked on that. Similarly, earlier I wrote about how the airline promised a Qantas First Lounge Heathrow, claiming it would have amazing apron views, and direct boarding from the lounge. As it turns out, the airline had never actually secured a space, so that was all just fantasy.
My goal isn’t to be overly critical here, but instead, to be balanced. All too often, media gives an airline credit for the announcements they make, but then don’t call them out when they don’t deliver on those promises. So they get the good publicity from taking some “liberties,” but not the bad publicity associated with making baseless announcements. So I at least try to be balanced here, and call things as I see them.
Bottom line
Qantas is getting closer to launching its Project Sunrise flights, between Sydney and London, using Airbus A350-1000ULRs. The airline has been promising a new level of comfort, including 33″ of pitch in economy.
Unfortunately the airline has now backtracked on those plans. It wants to introduce an extra legroom economy section, but rather than taking out a row of seats, the airline is instead simply reducing seat pitch in the back of economy, which will now see 32″ of pitch.
While that’s still a respectable amount of pitch compared to other planes, I wouldn’t want to be stuck in one of those seats for 20+ hours straight. And it’s also sad how the airline spent years hyping all of this extra space, only to then go back on that promise.

For years, a job at Google was the ultimate status symbol in tech. Now, a new pair of employers is attracting the industry’s most ambitious workers.
OpenAI and Anthropic have become the hottest career destinations in Silicon Valley, drawing a flood of applicants eager to work at the epicenter of the AI boom. The workers are chasing prestige and the chance to help shape a technological revolution — plus to potentially cash in on the most anticipated IPOs in tech history.
Across Reddit, Blind and X, job seekers are swapping interview tips and hiring rumors for both companies, hoping to break in. Several executives have ditched other employers to join the labs. Sundeep Teki, a career coach who helps place talent at AI companies, told Business Insider that nearly every candidate he speaks with has the same goal. On a form asking which companies they want to target, “nine times out of 10,” he said, applicants list OpenAI or Anthropic.
“Anthropic is the No. 1 priority,” Teki said. He added that with either name on a résumé, an employee has options: “No matter what you end up doing after you move on from Anthropic or OpenAI, you’re bound to be successful.”
The companies’ tech is reshaping the economy — and the workforce from which they hire. Codex and Claude Code have transformed the work of software engineers, helping usher in an era of AI-attributed layoffs at companies like Square and Cloudflare. Meanwhile, the two frontier AI labs have avoided job cuts, and offer lucrative compensation packages, abundant resources, and ambitious plans.
“There’s almost an exclusivity in it for those who are working there,” said Randy Ksar, a content marketer who applied to Anthropic for the same reason he once worked at Yahoo — it’s a brand he respects. “You want to be part of something big.”
Both companies are growing fast as they compete for customers, reckon with their impact, and fight for technological supremacy. Anthropic, which has more than 3,500 employees, lists around 380 open roles. OpenAI has about 720 open jobs — the company is looking to almost double its 4,500-person workforce this year, The Financial Times reported in March.
Business Insider spoke with applicants, job coaches, and Big Tech employees about the frontier labs, and why they’re drawing such rabid demand.
Workers see Anthropic as the new Google or Apple, and they want in
Jesse Ratner, a veteran tech copywriter and brand strategist, has watched firsthand as AI tools strip away some jobs from his profession. Still, he applied to Anthropic, and almost fell for a fake Anthropic recruitment scam this May. When he saw the scam message, he told his wife the “hottest company in the world” was recruiting him.
“It’s like, 10 years ago, landing a job at Google or before that, Apple,” Ratner, who is currently freelancing, told Business Insider.
Some workers are looking back further into corporate history. Marx Ojemudia, a designer, told Business Insider that he views a job at an AI lab as a route to long-term stability, likening it to his father’s 30-year career at Ford Motor Company in Michigan. He’s recently applied to both OpenAI and Anthropic, and has messaged the employees who posted the jobs, hoping to get his resume and cover letter reviewed.
Charles Broomfield, a 26-year-old ex-Amazon employee who recently started as an engineering analyst at Google, told Business Insider that his impression is that “Anthropic is winning the AI race,” and being at a top startup as the world undergoes a technological revolution offers a unique opportunity to prospective employees. While tech giants like Meta or Microsoft are past their hyper-growth phase, startups like OpenAI and Anthropic offer workers the chance to make millions off an IPO, he said.
“The exciting thing about startups is always that they have massive room for growth,” Broomfield said, adding that “everyone wants to work for a company that pays as well as Big Tech and seems like a sure bet for huge continued growth.”
Anthropic and OpenAI regularly list jobs with six-figure salaries, even before equity pay.
However, he has some concerns about those startups, given the possibilities of an AI bubble and further job automation.
“I’m hesitant to think any company is layoff-proof if they are able to do the work with AI,” said Broomfield, who was previously laid off from Amazon.
The best weapon in the tech talent wars might be Claude
Rune Kvist, who worked at Anthropic when it had fewer than 50 employees, told Business Insider he thinks that what draws the most interest to the top labs is simple — their results. Over the last two years, Anthropic and OpenAI have released one cutting-edge model after another. Anthropic’s safety-focused marketing wouldn’t really help the company sell itself, Kvist said, if it didn’t continuously impress with its tech.
“I actually think the vibes are downstream of the models, rather than the other way,” said Kvist. He called Claude a “powerful cultural force,” noting that if people are spending hours a day on the chatbot, they’re likely to put the company behind it in a positive light.
Kathleen Bartin, who estimates that she’s applied to 40 roles at Anthropic, is proof positive. She returned to the workforce after parenting full-time in 2025, and told Business Insider that her introduction to AI — first with ChatGPT, then in a Zoom presentation — had her swiftly hooked. After the presentation, she immediately bought subscriptions to Anthropic and Perplexity, a research-oriented AI tool.
Within the week, she was looking for jobs at Anthropic. She said she’d open doors, fetch coffee — she just wants to be part of it.
“I was smitten,” she said. “It was all that I talked about. My kids thought I was crazy… They were all like, ‘Mom, don’t talk to me about AI. Just don’t. You’re nuts.’ But yeah, I started applying kind of immediately upon meeting Claude and I just haven’t gone back. It’s like my dream job.”
While applying for jobs across the company, Bartin has fashioned herself into an AI consultant. She’s learned more about the tools, attends hackathons, and got a contract gig helping a fintech startup integrate AI into its work. At her part-time jewelry store job, she once whipped out a laptop and gave her visiting friend a Claude demo, she said.
Bartin was offered an interview at Anthropic but missed the email while on a trip, she said. She didn’t hear back again, and hasn’t for dozens of the other applications. Still, she brims with praise for the company, which she said she trusts more than others to shepherd the tech forward. Bartin was one of a few applicants who praised Anthropic’s spat with the Department of Defense earlier this year to Business Insider.
Karli Jaenike, a marketer who has also applied to Anthropic, said the lab’s stance against surveillance of Americans “solidified my love for them.”
“AI could go a few different ways,” she said. “So seeing a company that’s really taking responsibility to build something in a more ethical way really, really resonates with me.”
For a top-end job, workers face an uphill fight
If getting a Big Tech job is a challenge, landing a role at a frontier lab is a whole different beast.
“The competition is fiercer than anywhere,” Michelle Perchuk, founder of MTV Coaching and a career acceleration strategist, negotiation coach, and former talent acquisition worker, told Business Insider. “It’s like getting into the hot new restaurant in town.”
She said while Big Tech companies might highly value an Ivy League degree or a big-name company in the hiring process, frontier AI labs are increasingly focused on identifying exceptional talent outside of conventional standards.
“AI companies hire based on critical thinking and test thinking,” Perchuk said, adding that the latter skillset refers to people who can be patient and iterate until a desired solution is reached.
Teki, who has placed one client at Anthropic and has others in the interview process, said that both OpenAI and Anthropic have some of the most difficult technical interviews in the industry right now. He’s seen new kinds of hiring hurdles, like a take-home assignment that assesses how an applicant uses AI coding tools. For technical roles, the companies usually have one or two rounds of screening followed by multiple interviews, he said. There are usually several focused on coding, machine learning, and designing systems. There’s also usually a behavioral round, with more value-oriented questions to test for culture fit.
Both startups seem selective about candidates who align with their missions, Teki said. Anthropic tends to be very “safety-centric,” while OpenAI is more focused on AGI, or artificial general intelligence, he added.
“The demand is so high that the companies are very, very selective, and they get to pick and choose the very best of talent that’s available right now, coming either from the Big Tech or from some of the leading startups in the US and other countries,” Teki said.
Proven executives have flocked to the labs. OpenAI plucked Instacart’s and Slack’s CEOs for its leadership team, and picked up Sarah Friar, who steered Square and Nextdoor through IPOs, as its CFO. Anthropic employs execs who cut their teeth at Google, Microsoft, Instagram, and Stripe, and the lab recently hired Tesla’s former AI director, Andrej Karpathy.
Teki said some candidates land interviews when the company comes to them. People who build projects in public and showcase their work on GitHub or social media can catch the attention of recruiters, particularly when their projects closely align with the work being done by specific teams at Frontier AI Labs.
Kvist, the former Anthropic employee, said he thinks the company has kept up a high bar for its workforce since its early days. But the rapid growth is a chance for less well-known workers to get a foot in the door.
“To grow over the last year from 1,000 to 4,000 people, you have to hire a lot of people who are not top 10 in their fields,” Kvist said. “You just run out of the top 10.”

According to Bloomberg, U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has, in a series of recent meetings, told senior ASML executives he’s concerned that one of the Dutch chipmaker’s extreme ultraviolet lithography machines — the EUV systems that are the only tools on Earth capable of printing the most advanced semiconductor patterns — may have ended up in China. That would be a major breach of export controls that have barred ASML from selling EUV to China since the first Trump administration.
It’s a serious claim. Senior administration officials told Bloomberg they have evidence that ASML shipped EUV-related components and transport equipment to China, though they’ve declined, repeatedly, to show it — to Bloomberg or, apparently, to ASML itself. The company says no such machine exists in China and has never existed there. The Commerce Department didn’t respond to Bloomberg’s questions about whether it has evidence of an actual EUV system on Chinese soil.
You might think this isn’t worth paying attention to if you’re outside the chip industry, but it is. ASML is a Dutch company most people have never heard of, but it is, by a wide margin, the most important company in the global AI buildout that isn’t named Nvidia or one of the hyperscalers. It makes the only machines on the planet capable of EUV lithography — the process of printing the microscopic circuit patterns that define the most advanced chips.
Every cutting-edge processor made by TSMC, the foundry behind Nvidia’s and Apple’s chips, depends on ASML tools that took the company roughly two decades and untold billions to develop. There is, at present, no second supplier. That monopoly has made ASML Europe’s most valuable public company, with a market capitalization that has been trading in the neighborhood of $700 billion as of this week, up sharply over the past year on the back of insatiable AI-driven chip demand.
That scale is exactly why the China question matters so much. If even one EUV machine made it into Chinese hands, it would represent one of the most consequential breaches of the export-control regime the U.S. has built over the past several years to keep advanced AI capability out of Beijing’s military and industrial base.
I sat down with ASML CEO Christophe Fouquet six weeks ago, well before this story broke, and asked him directly about the China question.
Fouquet told me ASML tracks every machine it has ever shipped — they’re either in active use with monitored customers or have been dismantled and returned to the company. He said the firm built an internal firewall years ago: employees who can access EUV technology, documentation, and training are walled off from those who can’t, and ASML’s China-based staff sit on the wrong side of that wall by design. He argued the only reason ASML could build an EUV machine at all was that 80% of it already existed from decades of prior knowledge, and that solving the one genuinely new problem — generating EUV light itself — took 20 years on its own. His broader point seemed to be that you can’t reverse-engineer a machine you’ve never had, and nobody in China has had one.
There’s also a simpler commercial logic that cuts against the idea that ASML would risk its export license to quietly arm a Chinese customer. ASML does sell older-generation deep ultraviolet tools to China — gear it first shipped a decade ago — but Fouquet framed that explicitly as a protective calculation, not a loophole. The idea, he suggested, is that it keeps enough of a generational gap that customers can still do business — but without manufacturing its own future competitor. ASML expects roughly 20% of its 2026 revenue to come from already-permitted sales to China. Risking the EUV ban entirely would put that revenue, and the company’s standing as the most valuable monopoly in European industry, on the line over a single illegal sale.
None of this proves the allegations are false. The government hasn’t yet made its evidence public, and it’s worth withholding judgment until it does.
The Commerce Department, under Lutnick’s leadership, agreed late last year to put up to $150 million of taxpayer money into xLight, a startup developing a next-generation light-source technology that’s been written about as a long-term challenge to the core of ASML’s EUV monopoly. xLight’s own CEO told me last year that the company sees itself as a future partner to ASML, not a rival, building hardware meant to plug into ASML’s machines rather than replace them. When I put that framing to Fouquet in May, he was polite about it but unconvinced; ASML, he made clear, doesn’t see itself as needing xLight’s technology to keep its lead.
Does that have anything to do with why Lutnick is suddenly pressing ASML on EUV? Nothing public connects the two. It could be entirely unrelated. But a federal official scrutinizing a monopoly while his own agency has money riding on a startup angling to improve that monopoly’s core technology is worth examining.
xLight isn’t the only outside bet on the future of lithography. Peter Thiel — who has his own long-running ties to Trump’s political orbit — has backed Substrate, a separate startup explicitly pursuing its own EUV-rival technology, with ambitions to compete with ASML more directly than xLight says it intends to.
As Bloomberg notes, a bipartisan bill moving through Congress would go much further than EUV — it calls for an effective ban on all of ASML’s deep ultraviolet (DUV) shipments to China, the less advanced lithography tools that account for roughly a fifth of the company’s expected 2026 revenue. The bill cleared a key committee in April, and the Trump administration hasn’t taken a formal position on it.
Pictured above: ASML CEO Christophe Fouquet