This is the most important chart in America right now. Can NC do anything about it? | Opinion

If you spend time on X, you’ve probably seen the chart by now. It looks simple enough — just a line trending sharply downward — but the longer you ponder it, the more you realize about our country.

The graph tracks the share of 30-year-olds in the United States who are both married and homeowners. A majority of young people fell into that category a half-century ago, but today it’s closer to one in 10.

For the sake of argument, let’s accept the data at face value. It’s based on estimates and isn’t perfect. But it certainly feels accurate, does it not?

The venture capitalist who made the chart called it a “critical civilizational problem,” and a handful of cultural commentators have treated it as such. Usually, they find it so self-evident they don’t bother to explain why it’s so important.

The more common reaction, though, has been a shrug. Who would want to settle down in their 20s anyway?

Not by choice

I don’t think personal preference is the main thing at play here. Instead, it seems to boil down to two intertwined trends.

First, home prices have grown at a breakneck pace all over the country, but especially in the cities where young adults tend to start their careers. New home construction just hasn’t kept pace.

At the same time, marriage has come to be viewed as a luxury good, reserved for people who have their lives figured out. Our grandparents often married to build stability. Today’s 20-somethings feel they must achieve stability before they can afford to marry — or expect a mate to be financially secure before being marriage-worthy.

One feeds the other. Family life nudges a man to buy property and put down roots. But if you wait to marry until you can afford a home, you may never get there.

We have to tackle both at once, and fast. Artificial Intelligence is already nibbling entry-level white-collar work, just as globalization gutted manufacturing.

North Carolina numbers are on the same track

I couldn’t recreate the national chart just for North Carolina, but the numbers we do have point the same way.

In 2000, a majority of young-adult households here owned homes. By 2014, that had fallen to 37%, and the decline has only continued.

Marriage rates have declined as well: In 2010, 47% of women had been married before age 34. In 2023, it was 39%. For men, 37% had been married by that age in 2010, falling to 32% by 2023.

Home prices have skyrocketed here, too, with the median list price in July exceeding $408,000, according to Zillow.

I’ve seen the difference firsthand, and I’m sure you have, too. What was normal even just a decade ago has slipped out of reach for too many young families.

I was lucky enough to be married and a homeowner by 30, but it’s safe to say that wouldn’t be the case today. My wife and I bought our first house in 2014, each of us working standard-paying jobs and with barely enough saved for a down payment.

Within a few years, the value of that house had nearly doubled. If we were that age today, there’s no way we could buy it.

Imagine a state policy agenda designed around turning this number around

Rings and mortgages aren’t life checklist boxes — they’re the anchors of the American Dream. They keep people rooted in their communities. They push us to plan for the future instead of drifting through the present. They give kids the kind of stability no government program can replicate.

Without them, schools lose steady parents, churches and civic clubs thin out, neighborhoods churn, and politics gets louder. This isn’t about ordering anyone’s life; it’s about restoring the freedom to choose the oldest, most reliable path to a stable future.

So what if we judged success not by tax rate or GDP, but by whether more 30-year-olds in North Carolina were married and owned a home?

That kind of agenda would look different. It would mean teaching teenagers the success sequence — graduate, work, marry, then have kids — as a roadmap.

It would mean swapping marriage penalties for bonuses in the tax code. It would mean building transit that connects affordable towns to job centers, so builders can stand up starter homes again.

That kind of clear target isn’t new in North Carolina.

Gov. Luther Hodges once wrote that he organized his whole agenda around a single number: North Carolina’s per-capita income. At the time, we were one of the poorest states in the nation. Hodges set out to raise that number and, in the process, sparked the creation of Research Triangle Park and transformed our economy.

If we reverse the chart, everything else we care about — schools, churches, communities, civic life itself — gets stronger. If it falls, we’re failing, no matter how glossy the job-announcement ribbon cuttings look.

That’s the number I’d tape to the desk of every state lawmaker and government official. Because if more young families can put down roots here, North Carolina’s future will take care of itself.

Contributing columnist Andrew Dunn is the publisher of the Longleaf Politics newsletter, which offers thoughtful analysis of North Carolina politics and policy from a conservative perspective. He can be reached at andrew@longleafpol.com.