Buy a house? Here’s what you need to know
From the cheapest cities to the best time to buy, here’s everything you need to know if you’re looking to buy a home.
america today
Patricia Kidd has a front-row seat to the ups and downs of the housing market from her office in Painesville, Ohio, just north of Cleveland.
The area was often considered the epicenter of the 2010s foreclosure crisis, but since then, many residents have struggled with housing affordability issues like other parts of the country due to skyrocketing home prices.
Kidd is executive director of the Fair Housing Resource Center, an agency certified by the Department of Housing and Urban Development that provides a full range of services, from counseling to help people achieve homeownership to complaints about civil rights violations by landlords.
But Kidd’s budget was cut when President Donald Trump took office in 2025 and his administration made widespread cuts to the federal budget. She had to lay off four full-time and 12 part-time employees, and subsequent policy changes have left her remaining staff unable to provide many of the services Ohioans have relied on for years.
“People can’t afford it and they’re falling behind,” Kidd said. “Their budgets are tighter than before, and they have nowhere to turn.”
“HUD has focused on strengthening housing programs and supporting the households most dependent on federal assistance. As a result, approximately 1.5 million Americans have obtained FHA-insured single-family mortgages, and more than 80 percent of them are first-time homebuyers,” a HUD spokesperson said in an emailed response to USA TODAY’s request for comment for this story.
Despite the bullish glow of official economic data, many Americans are struggling. Delinquencies are on the rise for everything from student loans to credit cards. But perhaps no indicator is more closely monitored than mortgage failures, perhaps because they played such a large role in bringing down the financial system in 2008.
Observers say we are far from that. But the economy of 2026 presents unique challenges that were unimaginable just a few years ago. And as observers like Kidd help average Americans navigate the housing market, it’s sometimes hard to remember the meticulous planning that took place after 2008 to predict the next economic downturn.
According to real estate analysis firm Kotality, as of March, the percentage of home loans nationwide that were in any stage of delinquency, that is, home loans that were 30 days or more past due, was 3%, an increase of 0.2 points from March 2025. The national foreclosure inventory rate, or the percentage of all homes with mortgages that are foreclosed on, rose to 0.4%, the highest level in six years.
Thelma Hepp, chief economist at Kotality, said that was to be expected. Once the subprime bubble woes left the system, delinquencies and foreclosures remained near their lowest levels for several years. Lending was tightened significantly after the bubble burst, and then policies enacted in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic gave homeowners some respite on mortgage payments during difficult times.
Hepp said delinquency rates remain low today compared to history. But the fact that they’re concentrated among buyers who generally have to stretch their legs to buy a home, especially those with loans backed by the Federal Housing Administration or the Department of Veterans Affairs, suggests that even more trouble may lie ahead.
What’s even more worrying is that the people who are having the most trouble are recent borrowers, meaning those who bought in 2022 or later. This suggests that the combination of rising house prices and rising interest rates may prove too burdensome for many companies that have recently entered the market.
The cuts to agencies like Kidd come at exactly the wrong time, she said in an interview. As the overall cost of living rises, homeowners in her area are finding it increasingly difficult to pay their mortgages.
Cuts to both funding and programs mean she and her staff have to turn away people seeking help. Kidd says it’s “heartbreaking.”
Are the rise in foreclosures a sign of worse things to come?
“This is a canary in the coal mine,” said Sharon Cornelissen, director of housing for Consumers Federation of America, a national nonprofit advocacy group. “We come from historically low levels of distress, and we recently had historically low interest rates, which pushed up affordability.”
However, conditions worsened as the standards by which lenders evaluated borrowers became slightly more relaxed. “People are really struggling to afford a home,” Cornelissen said. She said she felt uncomfortable that a key lesson of the subprime bubble – that lenders had to ensure that borrowers were “able to pay” – was being ignored in a well-intentioned push to get people into homeownership.
Even after a financial crisis, the vast majority of borrowers will almost always suffer from some sort of distressing event, such as a job loss, a natural disaster, or the death of a family member.
Based on what Cotality’s data shows, Hepp believes we’re in much the same situation today. For example, devastating hurricanes in 2024 could lead to defaults in South Carolina and Georgia, while rising insurance costs could put pressure on borrowers in California and Florida, he said.
But despite these exogenous factors, the struggles of borrowers who bought their homes relatively recently and are unable to make just a few monthly payments or none at all points to something more troubling, Hepp said. Many of these owners may have bought with the idea that they would be able to quickly refinance to a lower interest rate, but that didn’t happen and they were stuck.
Housing crisis guardrails are eroding
Whatever the reason for the default, housing observers are most concerned that the guardrails put in place after the housing crisis are no longer useful. It wasn’t just the housing counseling program that was destroyed. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has fired employees, removed online resources, and discontinued regulatory enforcement actions.
“2026 is exactly the wrong time to make it harder for homeowners in need to get help,” Kidd said. “Access should be easier, not harder. When someone is facing hardship, the first question should be, ‘How can I help?'” Not, “What funding category do you fit into?” ”
This story has been updated with additional information.
