It's not as black and white as that, as NYC used to have a range of housing at affordable price points relative to your position, giving a lot of immigrants their head start. But the acceleration of people being priced out of the neighborhoods and communities they grew up occured while wages were pushed down. Overall homeownership in America is low thanks to the govt bailing out in 08 the very wall street companies that caused the crash instead of the builders and mortgage companies supporting lower income ranges. So now you've got NYC families being pushed out. A bigger issue for families on the lower income scale as picking up and moving to low cost states to compete with existing residents for low skill jobs is probably not practical. NY govt fails to do any long term planning and relies on "private sector" leadership which means no one will build low cost housing unless they make a lot of money. Affordable housing solution is to sprawl out to surrounding areas but that was already done with NYCers moving to NJ and transit infrastructure built. Now there's little political will for the effort to sprawl upstate.