The new problem for millennial parents in the Northeast: the million-dollar starter home

They waited out the pandemic boom. They saved longer, rented longer, delayed longer, and watched the typical first-time homebuyer age climb to a record 40. Now, the buyers who did everything right are running into a new problem: The Northeast just became the fastest-growing region for million-dollar starter homes in the country. It’s especially imperfectly timed for millennials entering their peak household spending years and beginning to form their own families (or at least try to). A Zillow report published Monday counts a record 242 U.S. cities where starter homes cost $1 million or more—nearly triple the 80 cities that cleared that mark before the pandemic, and up from 226 one year ago. The share of first-time buyers has fallen to half the historical norm. For millennial parents in the Northeast—now in their late 30s and early 40s, often with kids, hunting for more space—the numbers have a specific shape. New Jersey had one million-dollar starter city before the pandemic. Now it has 26. New York used to have 12; now it has 41. The two states added 15 cities to the list in the past year alone—faster growth than anywhere else in the country. The New York City metro now leads all with 63 cities where a starter home runs $1 million or more. That growth didn’t happen in a vacuum. Six of the 10 most competitive housing markets in the country are in the Northeast, per Zillow’s 2026 analysis, a region where new construction has chronically lagged and inventory deficits run deepest. California still leads the raw count with 105 cities, but the Northeast is where the crisis is actively spreading. “A housing shortage a decade in the making ran headlong into intense demand with mortgage rates at historic lows, driving up home values at a record pace,” Zillow senior economist Kara Ng wrote. For Northeast buyers, those forces have compounded. The 40-year-old housing virgin First-time homebuyers are historically younger, although the typical age o