Housing prices, mortgage rates, and inflation have skyrocketed. Yet many young couples are still buying homes. How are they doing it? And should they be?

You’d never know from looking at them. He pushes the stroller, she smiles and the kids run ahead, laughing and holding hands. He takes out the garbage, she joins the meal train, and they’re just the sweetest little family of six.

But the baby sleeps among the suits and dresses in his parents’ walk-in closet. First-grade Chaim sometimes locks himself into the kids’ bedroom just to be alone. The dining room features a precariously balanced pile of toys; the blow-up pool and roller blades and boxes of succah decorations and old stretchies all live on the five-foot-wide porch. There’s nowhere else to put them.

Even the bathroom, which used to be a sacred space, has its door banged down if occupied for any number of consecutive minutes.

Sometimes, Brochi straps all four kids into the car and drives, drives, drives.

She isn’t ready to go back to her cramped two-bedroom apartment.

At their wits’ end, Brochi and her husband are searching for a place to call home.

Though they spent their entire married life carefully saving up for a down payment, with sky-high home prices and mortgage rates that make grown men weep, the Lakewood, New Jersey couple was quickly losing hope.

In Brick, a township adjacent to Lakewood, a foreclosed house was up for auction. “We didn’t have a better bet. We bid for that dim, little ranch like our lives depended on it,” Brochi recalls.

A Nation-wide Issue

There’s a housing crisis in the frum velt in the United States.

There aren’t enough properties in the main hubs, driving the prices up. “Here in Monsey, there are bidding wars on most houses we sell,” says Rachel Schnitzler, a real estate associate broker at Q Home Sales.

Mortgage rates and inflation are sky-high. “There’s no question about it,” says Queens realtor Shlomo Meirov. “The real estate market was hit tremendously with the impact of interest rates and inflation.

And many of those who do own properties are struggling to meet their monthly payments. Simi Mandelbaum, founder of PROSPR Financial Wellness, a certified financial therapist and coach, explains, “Because rates were so low during and immediately after Covid, along with government Covid checks, people rushed to buy houses. They overextended themselves and assumed that the lower rates would balance things out. Then mortgage rates went up, and inflation skyrocketed. I’m seeing clients who purchased those large houses and are now feeling a lot of tension around money and earning potential.”

But families are purchasing homes at a younger age than ever. Despite exorbitant listing prices and rising fees and asphyxiating monthly payments, they’re somehow making it work.

How are they doing it?