What Do Americans Spend on Housing?
“At this point, investing in real estate—given our ages, financial resources, and a terrifying, unstable global resource grid—would just be criminally foolish,” wrote a 51-year-old
“At this point, investing in real estate—given our ages, financial resources, and a terrifying, unstable global resource grid—would just be criminally foolish,” wrote a 51-year-old living in New Haven, Connecticut. But pragmatism couldn’t remove the sting of disappointment. She continued: “Knowing we will be confined to the same cheap rentals until we cannot be there anymore has, however, broken our hearts.” Some of those forever renters might take heart in what homeowners have to say about their pain points. The Owner Who’s Stressed About Bills and Climate The toll of monthly bills is escalating, according to many homeowners in WIRED’s survey, especially for insurance and utilities. Respondents across the country say they are planning—or at least aspire—to improve the energy efficiency of their homes to offset their region’s deteriorating climate. A 62-year-old owner in Chandler, Arizona, wrote that “heat is getting worse, air-conditioning is coming on earlier in the year.
We want to make changes to make our house more efficient.” In Grass Valley, a California town near the Nevada border, a 46-year-old owner cited “out-of-control wildfires” for driving up home insurance rates and creating “months of edginess and terror at times if temperatures are high and there’s dry lightning and winds.” The owner wished for solar panels and fire-proof renovations—“anything to help us and our home to survive fire.” Others mentioned the arrival of invasive insect species and the loss of snowpack, which have meant less tourism. In Duncan, Oklahoma (population 23,238), a 55-year-old owner said that her family’s farmland is turning to desert. “It is now impossible to grow anything without a lot of expensive irrigation. We have about 5 months of over 90-degree high temps and frequent droughts.” In Portland, Maine, a 35-year-old renter in the process of buying a home mentioned that the state’s climate initiatives are a reason to stay put.
“We want to be able to garden, and to have more choices to invest in sustainable energy,” she wrote. “Especially now that fuel costs are skyrocketing.” Residential electricity rates have spiked in the past year, with a nationwide average increase of 10 percent between March 2025 and March 2026. A huge factor has been the build-out of data centers. They’re not only straining the grid. As one Virginia resident noted, “Data centers have replaced all the trees.” This story is part of The Future of Home, a collaboration between the editors of WIRED and Architectural Digest to help you understand what “home” will look like tomorrow and beyond. The Resident Who’s Affected by Politics It’s always trendy to dream of moving abroad; New Zealand, Costa Rica, Spain, Portugal, and (of course) Canada were among the desired locales in WIRED’s dataset.
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