93% of Americans Say Housing Costs Are Too High—and These Are the Factors They Blame

A recent survey finds that Americans are nearly unanimous in agreeing that the cost of housing is too high, but divided on what they believe are the main causes of the crisis.

Only 3% of respondents believe housing costs in the U.S. are "reasonable," according to the survey conducted by Tavern Research for the Searchlight Institute. A total of 93% said housing costs are unreasonable, either "a little too high" (15%), "too high" (36%), or "way too high" (43%).

The responses may be unsurprising, as they come at a time when housing affordability is near four-decade lows relative to income, and half of renter households are classified as cost-burdened.

Most housing economists believe a chronic shortage of housing is the main culprit, with an analysis from the Realtor.com® economic research team finding that the country needs nearly 4 million additional homes to meet the needs of the population.

But the new survey found that Americans hold a wide range of opinions on the cause of the housing crisis, with the top response blaming investors for snapping up homes for profit (48%).

That was followed by answers blaming the high cost of building materials (46%), greedy landlords setting rent too high (43%), and elected officials for not prioritizing affordable-housing policies (33%).

Meanwhile, just 17% believe immigration is responsible for driving up housing costs, which was an explanation raised by GOP vice presidential candidate JD Vance during the 2024 campaign.

Only 9% say one of the biggest problems is the length of time it takes to build housing, which is a key factor cited by homebuilders frustrated with red tape in the permitting process.

Blaming investors is misguided, economists say

When it comes to blaming investors for the high cost of housing, there is some partisan divide, with more Democrats (52%) listing investors as a top-three culprit than do Republicans (43%).

A majority of college-educated respondents (52%) also named investors, compared with just 45% of those without a college degree.

However, most housing economists say that investors play a small role in overall housing costs, primarily because investors purchase homes to rent them out, which means those units are still contributing to the total housing supply.

"It's been popular among some to blame investors, but with housing, the economics of that don't make a lot of sense," says Robert Dietz, chief economist of the National Association of Home Builders. "The fundamental driver of housing costs is the shortage itself—it's driven by the fact that there's a mismatch between the number of households and the actual size of the housing stock."

As well, investors play a smaller role in the market to purchase single-family homes than most people might suspect.

Among homes sold last year, just 13% were purchased by an investor, according to a recent analysis from the Realtor.com economic research team. On the other side of the transaction, 10.8% of sellers were investors in 2024.

The majority of investor purchases were by small mom and pop investors with 10 or fewer homes, while large investors with more than 50 properties purchased just 132,500 homes.

That represents a tiny fraction of the roughly 4.7 million total home sales last year, and stands in stark contrast to the popular image some may have of major Wall Street firms snapping up huge swathes of the single-family market.

It is true that investors have a more concentrated role in certain markets and neighborhoods, and could conceivably contribute to bidding up home prices in isolated areas. But investors are limited in what they can pay for a home by what they can charge in rent, and are unlikely to engage in irrational bidding wars.

"Investors do own significant shares of the housing stock in some neighborhoods, but nationwide, the share of investor-owned housing is not a major concern," says Realtor.com Chief Economist Danielle Hale.

The majority welcome more home construction

Hale and Dietz both note that, although the survey suggests many Americans are overly focused on the investor issue, the responses also show that many people are aware of the nation's housing shortage and some of the factors that contribute to it.

"While it may be disappointing that the typical American underappreciates the contribution of regulation, permitting, and delays to today's high housing costs, roughly a third of consumers think elected officials have not prioritized policies that make housing more affordable," says Hale.

"If elected officials will lean into policies that make it easier to build, they can address some of the root causes of the housing shortage and insufficient homebuilding in the U.S., whether the typical American understands the root causes or not."

Notably, the survey also found that a majority of Americans (54%) said that they believed building more housing in their community would be a good thing, including 51% of homeowners and 56% of renters.

The economist Dietz finds that response encouraging, as it suggested most Americans recognize the benefits of adding additional housing in their community outweigh any perceived downsides.

"When you have higher-quality housing in a neighborhood, whether it's rental or for sale, that means people are living a higher quality of life," says Dietz. "That's going to raise the value of living in that neighborhood, and that tends to be good for the neighborhood as a whole."