A "starter" home for $1 million?
Marketplace All-in-One
Marketplace
4.5 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 23 June 2026
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A typical starter home in nearly 250 U.S. cities is now worth $1 million or more, according to Zillow. Is that even a starter home anymore? In this episode, how rapid housing inflation has changed the game for first-time homebuyers and why more Americans are opting for a starter home in the suburbs. Plus: Manufacturing data reflects strong sector growth, U.S. trading partners bear the economic brunt of Trump’s war with Iran, and the 1973 oil crisis provides lessons for dealing with chaotic fuel costs today.
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Read the stories from today’s episode:
- A key index shows the U.S. economy is expanding. Elsewhere, not so much
- Strong manufacturing numbers mask a sector hedging against war and tariff uncertainty
- For this London honey seller, Brexit has been "a chaotic 10 years"
- When the "starter home" price tag hits $1 million
- What can the oil crisis of 1973 teach us about today?
- A fixer-upper became a forever home for this Massachusetts couple
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The economy is changing at a dizzying rate. |
| 0:03.7 | Entered the chart topping and critically acclaimed managing the Future of Work podcast from Harvard Business School, hosted by me, Bill Kerr, and by managing the Future of Work Project co-chair Joe Fuller. |
| 0:16.2 | The show explores workforce development, technology trends, demographic changes, and many other forces |
| 0:22.8 | transforming the landscape of work. Follow the HBS Managing the Future of Work podcast wherever |
| 0:28.8 | you get your podcasts. The big economic picture is good. Sometimes the tighter view is good, too, so we'll do both. |
| 0:40.7 | From American public media. This is Marketplace. |
| 0:53.9 | In Los Angeles, I'm Kyle Rizdahl. It is Tuesday. Today, this one is the 23rd of June. Good as it always is to have you along, everybody. |
| 1:03.2 | We're going to go macro and micro in our approach to the economic news of the day today, global and local, if you will. |
| 1:10.5 | We learned this morning, courtesy of S&P Global's Purchasing Managers Index, that's PMI in the vernacular, |
| 1:16.8 | that growth in both services and manufacturing in this economy picked up in June. |
| 1:21.6 | Take a look around at other major developed economies, though, and it is a whole different ballgame. |
| 1:26.9 | In the Eurozone |
| 1:27.6 | overall, business activity contracted for the third straight month, albeit just slightly. Also, |
| 1:34.1 | though, some of Europe's biggest economies were some of the weakest. Germany's PMI had a one-and-a-half-year low. |
| 1:40.2 | France clawed its way back from a bit more than a two-year low. |
| 1:47.8 | So, Marketplace of Mitchell Hartman explains the good news and the bad news. |
| 1:53.3 | Seems like we've got another demonstration here of U.S. economic exceptionalism. Yet again, the United States continues to post pretty robust growth amid all the global turbulence and uncertainties. |
| 2:03.6 | Ishwar Prasad teaches economics and trade policy at Cornell. |
| 2:08.6 | For the rest of the world, it's not as pretty a picture. |
| 2:11.6 | And the U.S. is a major spoiler of that picture |
| 2:15.6 | because of oil and supply chain disruptions caused by the war on Iran. |
| 2:20.3 | Prasad says Japan, the EU, the UK. |
... |
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