The Community Home Lenders of America (CHLA) is calling on the baby boomer generation to deliver a “moon shot” to help Gen Z members in their 20s and 30s achieve homeownership in the face of “unprecedented affordability challenges.”

In a white paper released Monday, the community lender group proposed tax code changes it believes could unlock trillions of dollars in intergenerational wealth not easily transferrable for downpayments.

More broadly, the CHLA argues that reversing the national housing shortfall will require leadership from older generations and federal government intervention amid declining financial and homebuying literacy.

“We are experiencing an unprecedented intergenerational wealth imbalance,” the report’s preface reads, pointing to the overwhelming amount of stock market and real estate wealth concentrated within older consumer demographics.

In the 1980s, the average first-time homebuyer was in their late 20s, according to the National Association of Realtors. It has risen steadily in recent years, the Realtor group maintains, from 35 in 2023 to 40 in 2025. (The Mortgage Bankers Association disputes that estimate of first-time homebuyer age, maintaining it has instead remained close to 30 over the past decade.)

“Accumulating the cash necessary for a downpayment is the single greatest Gen Z homeownership challenge,” stated the CHLA in its white paper, which synthesized findings from three homebuyer surveys conducted by CHLA members Veterans United Home Loans, Guild Mortgage and Homewise, a community development financial institution.

A Gen Z buyer’s ability to make a downpayment is “often based on whether parents can assist financially,” the survey highlighted, citing wages not keeping up with rapid home price appreciation.

“Many persons entering the workforce start off making contributions to their 401(k) — then realize 5 or 10 years later they need savings for a home downpayment — but tax rules make it difficult to access these funds,” said the CHLA. “Parents have significant investment assets to help — but are discouraged from using them due to tax consequences.”

Ultimately, the CHLA thinks the housing market suffers from no shortage of demand, but rather options for flexibly financing first-time buyers with hard-to-reach capital.  

While “federal tax policies disproportionately benefit stock investments” compared to first-time home purchases, “federal mortgage policies are not sufficiently focused on entry level, affordable home purchase options,” the group believes.

“There is an unprecedented level of interest in housing affordability — but the ability of the federal government to have a significant impact is constrained by budget limitations and an unwillingness to act boldly,” said the CHLA, whose members primarily include small and midsized independent mortgage banks.

‘A top national priority’

Recent analysis published by dv01 provides further evidence of a deepening housing fissure occurring amid prolonged dislocations in the homebuying market.

The data analytics platform owned by Fitch Solutions believes a return to housing affordability standards of the 1990s and 2010s is “structurally out of reach,” a shift driven by sustained population growth, chronic underconstruction and evolving demographic preferences.

“The challenges confronting younger households are not isolated; rather, they are symptomatic of structural imbalances that have been building for decades,” dv01 explained. “The intent is not to suggest that outcomes are fixed, but that the forces driving affordability challenges are deep, persistent, and not easily reversed through incremental policy adjustments alone.”

Separately, the CHLA has identified a deeper crack it hopes to seal before it spreads.

As it concerns access to entry-level homes for first-time homebuyers, the CHLA suggested government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac should eliminate loan-level pricing adjustments (LLPAs) on loans for condominiums, “high balance” loans and real property manufactured home loans.

“There is no apparent data showing that these loans are riskier than site-built homes,” the CHLA said of the latter category in arguing for the phasing out of risk-based LLPAs.

The lender association also called on the Trump administration to create an interagency task force to analyze the effectiveness of the federal government’s myriad downpayment assistance programs and “make recommendations on how to reform programs and direct or redirect federal assistance to the most effective programs.”

Underscoring its view that addressing declining financial literacy nationwide should be “a top national priority,” the CHLA proposed that all high schools “require at least two years of financial literacy courses” on various topics, including homebuying and mortgages.

To that end, the CHLA also suggested that Congress, along with federal housing agencies, should reinstate funding for prepurchase homeownership counseling that has been slashed under the second Trump administration. That counseling could be augmented, the group said, with the publication and distribution of a total homebuying guide.