Holly says schemes such as KiwiBuild will serve younger people better than 30-somethings who have already started families. (File photo)

Holly was born in the early 1980s - making her a "Xennial" part of the mini-generation born in the years that preceded the arrival of "Millennials".

But while she's got lots of the problems of the millennial generation - high house prices, a student loan to pay off and slowly rising incomes, to name three - she fears that she and others like her could become the lost generation.

They fall between Generation X, who were mostly able to get into the housing market before houses shot ahead of incomes in 2002 and then again in 2011, and the Millennials for whom a change could come in time.

SUPPLIED Gareth Kiernan says it will take a sustained period of wage rises and flat prices to make things easier.

"I am mid-30s. While younger families and couples will get more opportunities to be able to step into home ownership, people of a certain age group with families already seem to be a forgotten generation.

READ MORE: Young people 'expect to end up poorer' but it's not all gloom

"It is a lot harder and more expensive to cater to a family that is already made that requires more space than a young family just starting out who can grow out of their first home and buy another easily enough once on that property ladder."

The Hutt mother-of-two said she thought KiwiBuild would benefit many. "I'm just not sure if we would fit in with that 'many'," she said.

In 1983, about the time Holly was born, house prices were running at 2.3 times income nationwide. In 2017, they were 6.58 times.

In terms of the proportion of income required to service the cost of housing, it was about the same because interest rates were so high 35 years ago.

But - crucially - inflation rapidly reduced the real impact of debt through those decades, so the pain was shortlived.

Efforts are under way on multiple fronts to make housing less unattainable for young people.

KiwiBuild is one strategy. The government wants to add 100,000 affordable houses to the housing stock over the next 10 years

Economist Gareth Kiernan, of Infometrics, said it might take five or 10 years for those efforts to have an effect on house prices, assuming the programme could fix the under-supply of housing in Auckland.

If house prices simply stabilised, and incomes grew at 2.5 per cent a year for the next decade, house prices nationally would be 4.7 times income in 10 years' time.

But those born at the beginning of the 80s would be closing in on 50 by then - restricting how much they could borrow from the bank and hope to pay back by retirement, anyway.

Kiernan's team had originally forecast an 11 per cent drop in house prices over the next three years, which could have spurred house-buying attempts but he said it had moderated that view because there was no evidence that enough houses were being built.

ASB chief economist Nick Tuffley said wider efforts to determine why building a house was such an expensive prospect would also bear fruit but would take time.

"All these things will incrementally reduce the cost of providing new homes... it's not something that happens overnight."

The only bright spot for these "lost" or "forgotten" millennials is KiwiSaver. If they joined the scheme in 2008, and had been contributing steadily since, they should have accumulated enough money to form a deposit on an entry-level home, if buying as a couple.

That depletes retirement savings but getting in now may prove a better bet than sitting on the sidelines for another 10 years, waiting for a drop that might not happen.