Only about a third of U.S. adults believe the American dream is still alive, a Wall Street Journal / NORC poll published Wednesday found.
A survey of 2,501 people conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute twelve years ago found more than half of respondents believed the American dream “still holds true,” but now only a third feel that way, according to a recent WSJ/NORC poll of 1,502 adults. The study also found an increasingly large gap between people’s economic goals and what they think is actually attainable — a trend that was consistent across gender and party lines, but was especially common amongst younger generations.
“Key aspects of the American Dream seem out of reach in a way that they were not in past generations,” Emerson Sprick, an economist at the Bipartisan Policy Center, told the WSJ.
The American Dream Feels Out of Reach for Most
A Wall Street Journal poll shows people want a home, a family and a comfortable retirement, but say those goals are tough to achieve even with hard workhttps://t.co/Chr1Ix7bQW
— Anthony LaMesa (@ajlamesa) August 28, 2024
The decline in faith in the American Dream coincides with a decline in the share of Americans who believe homeownership and financial security are attainable, the poll shows. Only 10% of respondents to the WSJ poll believed becoming a homeowner is “easy or somewhat easy,” despite 89% of respondents viewing homeownership as “essential or important to their vision of the future.”
The same was true of financial security, with only 9% of respondents claiming achieving financial security is “easy or somewhat easy,” despite 96% believing financial security is “essential or important,” according to the WSJ.
“They don’t tell you how hard it is to obtain the American Dream,” Marquell Washington, an employee at a youth development nonprofit who makes roughly $30,000 a year, told the WSJ. “You have to learn that on your own.”
The decline comes amidst years of inflation, with prices rising by more than 20% since President Joe Biden took office in January 2021. It also coincides with a surge in credit card debt as delinquent credit card balances reached a 12-year high in the first quarter of 2024.
Homeownership has also become increasingly untenable in recent years as the U.S. faced a shortage of 4 to 7 million homes as of November 2023, and interest rate hikes have brought the average 30-year fixed-rate mortgage north of 6% Thursday, up from under 3% when Biden took office, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
Nearly 9% of homes are now worth a million dollars or more, and the median price of a previously-owned U.S. home reached a record high of $419,300 in May. Moreover, housing costs accounted for 90% of inflation in July.
“For me, the American Dream feels further away than it’s ever been,” Kevin Murphy, a 31-year-old from Des Plaines, Illinois, who earns $95,000 annually but does not own a home and is unable to always pick up the check on dates, told the WSJ. “I worry about when I’m 50 or 60 and if nothing changes, I’m going to be totally screwed.”
The poll was conducted June 26-July 8 and has a margin of error of 3.3%.
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