From adolescence to our mid-30s, my wife and I have followed every common precept of responsible young adulthood – what conservatives venerate as “the success sequence”. We finished high school (then college, then grad school). We charged into the labor market and have stayed there. We had kids in a stable marriage. Neither of us quit our jobs or took a year off to “find ourselves”. We cut coupons and buy food in bulk.

We did this, in part, because we trusted what we believed was America’s basic bargain: work hard, play by the proverbial rules, and you’ll enjoy a healthy middle-class life. You’ll have a decent job, stable housing, affordable education and healthcare, and a clear route to retirement. But that old, potholed path doesn’t deliver like it used to, even for responsible rule-followers like us. Here in our mid-30s, my wife and I are still chasing homeownership, that final, elusive piece of middle-class life.

Today’s young families started to hit the labor market during the great recession. We’re buried in educational debt, and college costs for our kids are predicted to be even higher than ours. Housing near good-paying jobs is wildly expensive. Healthcare costs are uncertain. We’re less likely to have a guaranteed retirement pension through work, and current signals suggest that government-funded retirement supports will be significantly smaller, if they’re there at all.

These are bread-and-butter issues. While national political leaders are gridlocked on how to address the crises of widening inequality and limited upward mobility, we’re struggling to simply provide our children with the same opportunities that came relatively easily to earlier generations. Most young families aren’t cynical because the rich have private helicopter fleets and offshore bank accounts, per se. We’re frustrated because the American bargain we believed in is broken.

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Take jobs and housing. Access to economic opportunity is increasingly regionalized in the United States. This means that many young workers can’t find good-paying jobs unless they move to communities – mostly urban, often coastal – where the costs of living are off the charts. The median list price for three-bedroom houses in our Washington DC neighborhood – which averages one violent crime approximately every five days – is nearly $600,000.

Sure, my family could move somewhere cheaper (and safer). But this wouldn’t just mean uprooting the kids; it would mean leaving the dynamic labor market where we’ve tripled our family’s income over the past decade. Even if my wife and I could both find jobs, median incomes in Kalamazoo, Michigan, my hometown, are about half of the DC metro area’s.

Perhaps we could have waited to have kids. But like most choices facing young families today, that involves a high-stakes catch-22: delaying having a family means taking on the additional health risks of “advanced parental age”. And then, don’t even think about taking time off to stay home and raise the kids full-time. Most families can’t afford to lose a parent’s income. Better to pay someone else (a lot) to parent your children all week.

Or, maybe, we could have saved less for retirement. But that doesn’t solve the problem; it only shifts it around. Absent a crystal ball, being behind on retirement savings isn’t better than being unable to buy a house in a community with meaningful economic opportunities.

The future belongs to the politician who comes up with a credible answer to address millennials’ struggle

In decades past, the “success sequence” path was much simpler, and yielded much more. A high school diploma offered a reasonable path to the middle class and a college degree cost one-third to one-half what it does today. Economic opportunity was more widely dispersed to small cities and rural communities, building broad-based prosperity and keeping housing costs down across the country.

When I was a teenager, older relatives hustled me off to summer jobs with tales of paying for college by working summers at the local grocery store. By contrast, my wife and I will start paying for our kids’ college expenses before we finish paying off our own student loans. Last year, I had three side jobs alongside my full-time position at a thinktank. That’s how we afford to save (and pay for emergencies). If a straight white guy like me has to grind like this to reach – and stay in – the middle class, know that it’s much more difficult for folks with fewer privileges.

These structural forces are reshaping the American family in painful, difficult ways. Is it any wonder that millennials are scuffling their way through work, life and love? In 2018, early-career monogamy can be expensive! Young workers can grow their income and build their assets, so long as they delay serious relationship commitments to follow professional trajectories that bounce them between high-income coastal cities. Pass up a new opportunity to stay near your college boyfriend? Enjoy that solitary studio rental, lovebirds – it’s your long-term home.

This should terrify you. The economics of early adulthood are fueling pessimism, radicalism, and a loss of faith in the basic premises of democracy. Half of all millennials today think the American dream is dead. No surprise, when the country’s implicit message is: “Go to school, work hard, and you might be able to enter the middle class – but not if you also want to raise a family.”

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Young families have rarely had it easy in the US. But it’s brutal for folks starting out now. What could we do to help? Well, greater public investments in paid parental leave and universal early education programs would make it cheaper for young workers to have and raise healthy children in the early years. We could also get serious about building (much) more affordable housing near dynamic labor markets, along with more affordable healthcare and higher education systems.

But we also need to rebuild broad-based economic opportunity across more US communities. The country needs major investments in regional economic development so that more places offer viable, humane ladders to the middle class. This would dampen housing demand in superheated real estate markets like Washington DC’s.

The future belongs to the politician who comes up with a credible answer – and slate of policies – to address millennials’ struggle to build stable families (especially ones with less of a privileged head start than mine). It’s the problem shaping the rest of our politics. Some of this will be expensive. Those with private helicopter fleets might need to pay a little more in taxes. I’d bargain they can afford it.