> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.richmonder.org/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Data: Housing is more out of reach and homeownership is down for younger Richmonders - URL: https://www.richmonder.org/data-housing-is-more-out-of-reach-and-homeownership-is-down-for-younger-richmonders/ - Published: 2026-08-19T20:20:31.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-19T20:20:31.000Z - Description: New data from UVA's Weldon Cooper Center shows housing prices have risen three times faster than younger workers' wages in Richmond. - Author: Sarah Vogelsong - Tags: Housing, #the-bridge Housing has gotten “substantially more expensive” for younger adults in and around Richmond — as well as in metro areas across the state, according to UVA’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service. In [a presentation to the Virginia Housing Commission Tuesday](https://vhc.virginia.gov/VAHousing%5FCommission%5FAug2026%20Lombard.pdf), demographer Hamilton Lombard said median home values in the Richmond region in 2024 were about 5.3 times greater than the annual earnings of local workers aged 25 to 44\. “It’s up pretty much across the board,” he said. However, he told The Richmonder later, the Richmond metropolitan statistical area — a region defined by the U.S. Census Bureau as the city and 16 surrounding localities — “had the second largest increase in housing costs relative to young adults’ wages” after the Charlottesville region. Both have gotten influxes of new residents from the Washington, D.C. area and more high-cost parts of the Northeast. In Richmond, “after adjusting for inflation, the median home value rose close to three times faster than earnings for younger adults between 2014 and 2024,” he wrote in an email. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/99/06/99067822-fdfd-42b1-ab19-555c33eefb89/content/images/2026/08/data-src-image-c95d6e4a-54f0-4a49-aff8-923b24051e14.png) (Source: University of Virginia Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service) Lombard’s analysis found that “housing prices have outgrown wages for younger workers in every Virginia metro area since 2014” and “while smaller metro areas mostly remain the most affordable, they have seen faster increases in home prices than large metro areas.” Homeownership rates for residents of the Richmond region aged 25 to 34 are also down compared to 20 years ago, dropping from 45% to 32.1% between 2005 and 2024\. The overall trend for the area “lines up well with national trends,” Lombard told The Richmonder, with the homeownership rate for younger people rising after the pandemic and then falling in response to high home prices and higher mortgage rates. Still, the rate in Richmond today remains above where it was between 2012 to 2017, when Lombard said mortgage lenders were still recovering from the financial crisis, leading many young people to rent for longer periods. Across the U.S., the median age of first-time homebuyers hit an all-time high of age 40 last year, [according to the National Association of Realtors](https://www.nar.realtor/research-and-statistics/research-reports/highlights-from-the-profile-of-home-buyers-and-sellers). ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/99/06/99067822-fdfd-42b1-ab19-555c33eefb89/content/images/2026/08/data-src-image-7d3ffb70-e57b-4240-a016-013ecb9fa847.png) (Source: University of Virginia Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service) Lombard told the commission that in Virginia high housing costs are helping push demand from one city or county to the next — a trend evident in the Richmond area, which saw an increase of 10,500 residents with remote jobs tied to the Washington, D.C. area between 2019 and 2023\. “People are moving out of higher-cost areas and coming to areas where it’s more affordable. In turn, people are moving out of those areas and going further out,” he said. “In some ways it can be a good trend, but it’s also spreading that sort of housing market pressure much further out than you might have seen a decade ago.” And while the demographer said that young people’s earnings and workforce participation are at higher rates than ever before in Virginia, a large share are still living with their parents. “A lot of this seems to tie back to just housing affordability in general,” he said. Jovan Burton, executive director of the Partnership for Housing Affordability, a Richmond region nonprofit that provides research and policy recommendations on local housing trends, said that Weldon Cooper’s findings on younger people living with their parents mirrored PHA’s own. “That is certainly consistent with what we’ve seen,” he said in an email, pointing to [a finding by his group](https://pharva.com/housingdata/) that in 2020 more than 75,800 young adults in the region — about one in three people aged 18 to 34 in Richmond, Chesterfield, Henrico and Hanover — were living with their parents. Young residents' demand for homes to buy isn’t likely to disappear anytime soon, particularly because Lombard said across both Virginia and the U.S., data show older residents largely aren’t moving — and if they do move, they aren’t downsizing. “What that means is you have an incredible growth in an older population that has a good deal of equity in their homes looking for the exact same type of housing younger adults are,” Lombard told the commission. “If you have a competition there, it’s going to be pretty one-sided.” *Contact Reporter Sarah Vogelsong at* [*svogelsong@richmonder.org*](mailto:svogelsong@richmonder.org)