On a liberal arts campus with an Irish dance troupe and a contemporary science fiction club, Angelo Mazza recently fell into a singularly niche pastime: reading up on archaic zoning laws.
It would seem a curious obsession for a college sophomore. But Mr. Mazza, 19, was born and raised in New York, one of the world’s costliest cities. He has watched as a housing crunch in his hometown exploded into a full-blown crisis.
So with a friend, Mr. Mazza formed a student-led organization last year that breaks down in-the-weeds zoning and policy debates for a youth audience.
“We’re young, but we’re getting older,” said Mr. Mazza, a Fordham University student who lives with his Italian immigrant parents in Queens. “It sounds weird coming from a young person, but the next generation is going to have to pay attention to housing.”
Generations of young people have taken up a cause and stood at the vanguard of movements for change.
College students were pioneers of the Vietnam War protest movement. Sixteen- and 17-year-olds rallied at congressional offices after a gunman’s rampage at a Parkland, Fla., high school. And people in their 20s fought fossil fuel companies, anxious that climate change would derail their lives.
If every group of young people has its driving cause, this one’s might be boiled down to six words: The rent is too damn high.
“That’s the only thing I hear now,” said Samantha Bravo, 21, who was raised in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, and worries that housing costs are at a breaking point for young New Yorkers starting their lives. “Every single day, I think about it.”
Ms. Bravo was only 11 when she started testifying at the city’s Rent Guidelines Board hearings, as her family routinely lacked heat and hot water, and clashed with the landlord. “It’s just so frustrating and disheartening. We’re the culture of the city. We deserve to be here,” she said.
Older adults have traditionally been the face of grass-roots housing campaigns and tenant groups. Today, even young people who have never signed their own apartment leases are jumping into the movement in surprising ways.
Teens are coding websites to help neighbors find affordable housing. College sophomores are joining picket lines to protest unaffordable off-campus housing. Students at Columbia University and the University of Texas at Austin started their own tenant unions.
There’s no large-scale youth housing campaign akin to the Sunrise Movement, the climate activist group, or March for Our Lives, which summoned students to Washington to rally for gun control legislation.
But the pent-up frustration among the country’s youngest residents appears destined to shape the politics of a generation.
In this spring’s Harvard Youth Poll, four in 10 young Americans agreed that housing costs are snowballing into a national emergency. No other issue — except for inflation — ranked as an urgent crisis for broad shares of 18-to-29-year-olds.
They were born into, or grew up during, a housing crash, sometimes watching as their families lost homes to foreclosure amid the financial collapse of the 2000s. They spent months stuck inside during the most dire global health crisis in a century, and then witnessed weather disasters force their friends into hotels and emergency shelters.
Now, many see a future where they can barely afford a place to sleep.
John Della Volpe, the director of polling at Harvard University’s Institute of Politics, regularly hosts small focus groups across the nation. Without fail, at least one young person shares a harrowing story: They’re homeless, or deeply afraid of becoming homeless.
“I literally don’t remember the last time that didn’t happen,” he said.
As many as two-thirds of Gen-Z renters across the nation struggle to afford housing, according to polls and surveys.
And in New York City, young people are often exposed to the housing crisis before they pay a first month’s rent. Some of their middle school classmates might live in homeless shelters. Or they might turn to a parent on a frigid winter night and ask why someone’s sleeping in their subway car.
Emely Rodriguez, who was 16 when she embarked on housing advocacy, watched with frustration as her North Brooklyn neighborhood gentrified — eventually pushing out many of her high school classmates.
She grew up in Williamsburg sharing a small bedroom with her three sisters in a railroad apartment, and later joined a fledgling youth housing alliance that was created by other city teenagers dissatisfied with the status quo.
More recently, she scored big on an apartment, winning the city’s housing lottery. But Ms. Rodriguez, 24, is still championing change: She wants to organize the tenants in her luxury building.
“When I look at the state of housing, I feel a lot of anger,” she said.
For other young people, the epiphany came in the form of a remarkable statistic: In the 1990s, the median age of first-time home buyers was in the late 20s; last year, it reached 40, an all-time high, according to the National Association of Realtors.
All of that made Farid Sofiyev think: Something has gone deeply awry.
When Mr. Sofiyev, 19, studied abroad in Copenhagen recently, he was amazed by the city’s myriad five- and six-floor apartment buildings, rich with green space and courtyards. It made New York’s restrictive zoning rules all the more glaring.
“If you want to start a family, if you want to provide for your kids and not be worried all time, it’s going to get perpetually more difficult,” he said. “And I don’t see it becoming less difficult unless there’s a collective movement — especially in New York City.”
So Mr. Mazza, who was exasperated as he watched the median rent on new leases in his Astoria neighborhood balloon to $3,100, teamed up with Mr. Sofiyev to start a nonprofit whose members have interviewed urban planners and written short articles on the housing crisis.
Mr. Sofiyev has been floored “by how many people are actually interested in this.”
The two friends placed a call-out for passionate students who are eager to pitch in. “It filled up within a few hours — and we weren’t offering anything other than to just help out,” he said.
One of them, Nara Kong, 17, was already itching to get involved.
She wondered from an early age why homelessness seemed so pervasive and neglected. “It’s become something so normalized,” she said. “It almost feels dystopian.”
She and her friends aren’t yet renters — they are still living in their childhood bedrooms. But when they envision their grown-up lives, they “always bring up that it will be so much easier” to move out of New York.
“We’re all worried,” said Ms. Kong, who lives in Queens and is a junior at a public high school. “What if we can’t live here because of a housing crisis?”
Alain Delaquérière contributed research.
Troy Closson is a reporter for The Times covering children, teenagers and young adults in New York City.
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