For Kansas Sen. TJ Rose, addressing Kansas’ widening housing shortage and growing housing unaffordability is a family matter. His son, Garrin, is a 24-year-old member of Gen Z who recently moved back to Johnson County. Rose worries that people in Garrin’s generation won’t ever be able to afford homeownership, something long considered a key tenet of the American dream. That fear isn’t totally unfounded. The median age of first-time homeowners in the U.S. has risen to 40 years old as the housing market squeezes more and more young people out entirely. At the same time, as construction trends move toward more high-dollar housing with large single-family homes and luxury apartment complexes, starter homes have all but disappeared from the market. Still, young adults like his son want to be homeowners, Rose said. Rose has also heard from constituents who are concerned that their adult children are finding fewer economic opportunities, like homeownership, available to them than their parents or grandparents had. All of that is what inspired Rose, a first-term Republican from Olathe, to pursue changes to Kansas state law to make it easier to build smaller single-family homes at a lower price point.
Read more: Johnson County Post
