If you’re wondering — or perhaps I should say in case you had any doubts — the cost of homeownership in America’s still rising.

Mortgage rates moved higher for the first time in three weeks, the MBA said Wednesday, in the course of reporting a marginal uptick in purchase applications.

As the familiar figure below reminds you, would-be buyers struggling to make the math work are getting no relief on the financing side. Rates are ~75bps higher than they were when the Fed embarked on what Jerome Powell characterized as a policy recalibration late last year.

Suffice to say legions of beleaguered American renters learned the hard way that markets are forward-looking. The 100bps of easing the Fed delivered were priced in by the time the Committee convened in September.

Although the Fed’s expected to deliver another 50bps of rate cuts later this year, there’s no consensus on when that easing will commence. Unless and until the Treasury market starts to price a US recession, homeowner hopefuls shouldn’t expect sharply lower rates.

On Wednesday, MBA chief economist Mike Fratantoni struck a somewhat positive chord. “Despite the economic uncertainty, the increase in home inventory means there are additional properties to buy, unlike the last two years, and this supply is supporting more transactions.”

That’s all fine and good, but as I never tire of reminding housing market aficionados on whom this simple reality is often lost, if you can’t afford it, you can’t afford it. Period.

It’s nice that resale inventories are slowly normalizing, but as Redfin’s Dana Anderson noted earlier this month, the median monthly housing payment in America continues to notch record after record after record. In the four-week rolling period ended May 4, that payment was $2,868.

Consider that in January of 2022, those payments were around $1,600. Needless to say, the median household income in America isn’t up 79% over the past three years. The cost of housing is rising far, far faster than incomes, which means people are getting priced out in real time.

“Record-high housing costs, along with widespread economic uncertainty, are stunting this spring’s home-buying season,” Anderson wrote, on the way to quoting an agent who said, “Costs are so high that buyers who are moving forward with a purchase want the home to be perfect.” (If you’ve ever bought a home, you’ve heard the refrain: “No home is perfect.”)

Meanwhile, 2024 saw just 86,604 second-home mortgages, according to Redfin’s data.

As the figure shows, that was the fewest in at least half a dozen years, and down 67% from 2021.

“Americans are purchasing one-third as many vacation homes as they were during the pandemic buying boom,” Anderson remarked, in a separate piece published on May 8.

Last year, she went on, was the second-least affordable year for home-buying on record.