Harnois is an elementary school teacher in Boston Public Schools; together she and her husband make $175,000 a year. And their monthly rental costs are modest, considerably less than the typical household around here.

“If homes here cost $400,000, we’d be homeowners,” said Harnois, who is 32.

Such is reality now for Greater Boston’s next generation, particularly younger and middle class people.

The cost of buying a home has been steadily rising for decades, and recently it has exploded, growing far faster than incomes.

The typical house in Greater Boston sold for $833,900 in the second quarter of 2025, more than 7.5 times the region’s median household income. Five years ago, a household needed to earn $126,519 a year to afford the median-priced single-family home in this region, according to an analysis by Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. Today, that figure has more than doubled, to $259,648.

The result is people who 20, 10, or even 5 years ago would have been able to purchase a home — teachers, nurses, and academics — can hardly even conceive of it.

“The door to homeownership in the Boston area has really been shut,” said Daniel McCue, a senior research associate at Harvard’s housing studies center. “There are hundreds of thousands of people here staring at these numbers saying, ‘Who can actually afford this?’ ”

The consequences are being felt by an entire generation, forced to make a choice their parents did not: Stay in Massachusetts, and rent forever, or leave, and put down roots somewhere less expensive.

“We work really hard, and we feel like we’ve done everything right,” said Harnois. “It is difficult to accept that there is no pathway for us to own a home in the neighborhood I’ve spent my whole life in.”

Since the 1940s, when the 30-year mortgage emerged and made home buying more accessible to many workers, owning a home has been a symbol of success. To achieve the American dream was to work hard, save up, and buy a house, which would serve as both a stable home and a valuable asset that would appreciate with time. For many working class families in Massachusetts, homeownership was the ticket to the middle class.

It was exactly that path that Ben Watts hoped to follow.

Growing up, Watts’s parents did not own their home, a fact he became aware of when he visited friends’ houses as a kid. As he got older, he came to assume that he, someday, would.

“It was ingrained,” said Watts. “That’s what you’re supposed to do, right?”

Now his goal has collided with economic reality. Watts, who is 33, works three jobs — as a bartender and for a French spirits company — and earns nearly $90,000 a year. His rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Belmont, which he splits with his fiancé, is $2,850.

Watts has effectively given up on owning a home. He can hardly find any listings on Zillow for less than $700,000, at least not ones that look like they wouldn’t require tens of thousands of dollars in maintenance. At that cost, Watts would be more than doubling his monthly housing payment, and likely paying at least half of his income toward a mortgage. And that’s after a six-figure down payment, cash he simply does not have.

The prevailing feeling, he said, is resentment.

“I’m being priced out because I’m working to try and make the city that I love better with great bars and restaurants,” said Watts, who grew up in Arlington. “It feels like I’m being told that there’s no place for me here anymore.”

Perhaps what is most frustrating to people like Watts: They know it wasn’t always like this.

Home prices have been on the rise for decades. But the biggest shift in housing affordability began in the aftermath of the pandemic, as home prices rose even faster, and mortgage rates more than doubled, leaving prospective buyers to pay both sky-high total price tags and huge monthly payments.

In 2010, for example, the median home price was $360,800, but the average on a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage was 4.75 percent, meaning the mortgage payment on that median-priced house was only $1,816 a month, almost the same as it was in 2000. Now, with a median house price of $833,900, and a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage around 6.79 percent in the second quarter of the year, the monthly mortgage payment on that median-priced house is $5,240 a month — before homeowners insurance, property tax, and mortgage insurance, which can tack on $1,500 more each month.

The shift is pricing a startling number of would-be homeowners out of the market. Roughly 100,000 people who made enough money to afford an entry-level home in 2021 could no longer afford that home in 2025, according to data from Boston Indicators.

“Tell me how many people can afford to buy an almost million dollar single-family home?” said Gail Latimore, executive director of the Codman Square Community Development Corporation. “Tell me how many people can afford to buy an $800,000 house and pay $5,000 a month for the mortgage? We’ve always been an expensive area, but this is unmanageable.”

What happens when so many people are priced out of homeownership all at once?

Right now, a generational wealth divide is emerging, said Albert Saiz, an associate professor of urban economics and real estate at MIT.

While 50 years ago, nearly half of young adults age 25 to 34 in Massachusetts owned a home, today barely one-third do, and a recent analysis by Boston Indicators suggests the true rate is even lower, roughly 24 percent. Those people who were able to buy in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s have seen their investments turn into a launching pad for generational wealth: Those homes, in many cases, are now million-dollar nest eggs that have double or tripled in value, particularly in Boston and its suburbs.

“Unless we do something about housing stock — building, building, building — this is a dangerous situation for working class folks who used to depend on housing as their main way to accumulate wealth,” said Saiz.

Take Coire Jones, 38, who makes almost $50,000 doing administrative work at a real estate law firm. Jones sets aside roughly $200 a month, mostly by cutting out extraneous spending, and by choosing to rent a small room in an apartment in Somerville for just $750 a month.

This is not how he pictured things going. Jones’s family has been in Massachusetts for generations, and he loves it here. He graduated from college with a history degree in 2009, in the middle of the Great Recession, and struggled to find a job.

He’s now switched career paths and found stable income. But Jones can do the math. He knows that at his current income, he’ll never be able to afford even a tiny home of his own.

“We millennials were told that you could be whatever you wanted to be and if you went to college you’d be in the middle class,” he said. “I don’t mind renting for the rest of my life. But the foundation of the American economy is that everyone buys a house, and that equity allows you to do a lot of different things and achieve financial stability. And that no longer exists for my generation.”

That doesn’t stop people from trying.

Every year, 200 to 250 people enroll in first-time homebuyer classes at the Chinatown-based Asian Community Development Corporation, one of countless groups that aim to teach would-be buyers the ropes of mortgages, property inspection, and other intricacies of the biggest investment most people will ever make.

In previous years, it was common for 20 to 40 people who took the class to purchase a home, said Angie Liou, the Asian CDC’s executive director. Last year, only six did.

Latimore, of the Codman Square CDC, said a lucky few are able to purchase with the help of down payment and mortgage assistance programs sponsored by the city and other public entities.

Those who aren’t able to buy are left to grapple with what it means that they may never access homeownership.

Some, like Harnois, are willing to stick it out as renters. She is too connected to the neighborhood where she grew up and today works in to consider leaving.

And then there are people like Lillian Rotondo, an East Cambridge resident who works in biotech sales. She said she can’t quite believe the prices of the homes she sees on the market.

She has a familiar story: She and her husband, a chef who works in the Seaport, make good money — roughly $240,000 a year. But it still doesn’t feel like enough to afford a $600,000 or $700,000 place, especially because Rotondo is pregnant with their first child, which they know will be expensive in its own way.

Rotondo’s parents migrated to the US from El Salvador with $20 to their name, she said. Years later, they were able to save up enough to buy a home on Long Island.

It’s important to Rotondo, who is 40, to do the same. And because they cannot afford it here, Rotondo and her husband are going to move, most likely to Rhode Island, somewhere near Providence.

“We have worked hard our entire lives,’ she said. ”We should be able to afford a two-bedroom. So we’ll go somewhere we can.”

Andrew Brinker can be reached at andrew.brinker@globe.com. Follow him @andrewnbrinker.