It can now take more than a decade for a typical U.S. first-time buyer to afford the down payment on a modest house, ravaging American middle-class basics that have been in place for 75 years.

• Why it matters: "Affordable homes" are no longer affordable.

🖼️ Zoom out: Surging mortgage rates are making the prospect of an affordable home even more distant, Axios chief economic correspondent Neil Irwin tells me.

• The rate on a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage spiked last week, reaching 6.7% Friday, according to Mortgage News Daily. That's up from 3.3% at the start of the year.

🧠 What's happening: The U.S. has a deepening housing crisis, including an acute shortage of "small, no-frills homes that would give a family new to the country or a young couple with student debt a foothold to build equity," The New York Times reports in a front-page story (subscription).

• Factors include land costs, construction materials and government fees.
• The typical new home has grown in median square feet over the past 60 years — while the typical household has shrunk in number of people.

Those long-term trends were accelerated by the pandemic, which drove up demand and prices as people scattered, worked from home and snapped up second residences.

• Local policy is also driving this new reality. Communities nationwide "are far more prescriptive today than decades ago ... Some ban vinyl siding. Others require two-car garages. Nearly all make it difficult to build the kind of home that could sell for $200,000 today," The Times explains.

🧮 By the numbers: By the end of this year, it'll take 11.3 years for a first-time homebuyer with median income to save for a 10% down payment, S&P Global wrote in a July report, "The American Dream May No Longer Be In Reach" (registration required).

• It would take that would-be homeowner 22.6 years to save for a 20% down payment.
• Both are more than twice their pre-pandemic rates — 5 years for 10% down, 10.6 years for 20% down.
• 60% of U.S. households could be priced out of the housing market by 2025, S&P estimates.

🔮 What's next: Communities, builders and buyers may be forced to rethink what a starter home looks like.

• The answer, The Times says, might be a condo.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom warned fellow Democrats yesterday that the GOP is "winning right now" by controlling the national conversation, CNN's Maeve Reston writes from the Texas Tribune Festival in Austin.

• "These guys are ruthless on the other side," said Newsom — a prospective presidential candidate for 2024 or 2028, even though he denied it during the festival conversation.

"They dominate the most important thing in American politics today and that’s the narrative — facts become secondary to narrative," Newsom continued. "They dominate with illusion. And we are getting crushed. We are on the defense over and over again."

• Newsom said he didn't blame President Biden, but he said Dems need to be "organizing from the bottom up": "Where are we — going on the offense every single day? They’re winning right now."

Also at the festival, Rep. Liz Cheney told Texas Tribune CEO Evan Smith she'd do "whatever it takes" to make sure former President Trump isn't the GOP nominee in 2024 — including campaigning for Democrats:

• "[I]f he is the nominee, I won't be a Republican."

Go deeper

Maggie Haberman — in an excerpt by The Atlantic from her forthcoming book, "Confidence Man," out Oct. 4 — writes that former President Trump told her about running for president:

"The question I get asked more than any other question: 'If you had it to do again, would you have done it?' ... The answer is, yeah, I think so. Because here’s the way I look at it. I have so many rich friends and nobody knows who they are."

The CIA yesterday revealed a model of Ayman al-Zawahri’s safe house in Afghanistan, shown to President Biden before the al-Qaeda leader was killed in a U.S. drone strike this summer, AP's Nomaan Merchant writes.

• The model — depicting a white-walled home with five stories, three obscured balconies, and razor wire around the outside — is now displayed in the museum at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va.

This display shows the cover of the President's Daily Brief + a PDB tablet cover used during President-elect Biden's transition.

• The museum is closed to the public, and access is generally limited to the agency's employees and guests. The CIA gave journalists a tour of the museum after it was refurbished for the 75th anniversary of the agency, established in July 1947.

Most of the exhibits took years or decades to declassify.

• Explore the exhibits.

The U.S. is alone among 22 of the world's wealthiest countries in not guaranteeing workers some form of paid sick leave, the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) found.

The NFL has had 191 head coaches since 1989. Just 25 have been Black — shown above on today's Washington Post front page.

• This season, there are three: Tampa Bay Buccaneers' Todd Bowles ... Houston Texans' Lovie Smith ... and Pittsburgh Steelers' Mike Tomlin.

"That's the same number as in 2003 — the year the NFL, under intense external pressure, introduced the Rooney Rule, which required teams to interview at least one candidate of color for open head coach and front-office jobs," The Post writes in Part 1 of a series that will continue through the season.

• Between the lines: The Post said it's "examining the NFL's decades-long failure to equitably promote Black coaches to top jobs, despite the multibillion-dollar league being fueled by Black players."

What's happening: Many Black assistants in the NFL "have resigned themselves to the notion that they will never get an opportunity to be a head coach — a position that, in addition to the immeasurable prestige, also could pay, on average, 10 times what a mid-level assistant makes — while others have left the profession entirely," The Post writes.

• "Nearly half of Black coaches played in the NFL compared with a quarter of White ones."
• "The leaguewide push to hire young, offensive-minded coaches with experience coaching quarterbacks also has shut out Black coaches, who for decades largely were steered away from offensive coaching."

Read the investigation ... Key findings.

Pope Francis last year told Catholic priests in Slovakia to cut homilies from 40 minutes to 10, or people would lose interest.

• "It was the nuns who applauded most because they are the victims of our homilies," he joked.

📚 That’s basically a papal order for all our readers, faithful or not, to buy our new book, "Smart Brevity."

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