The nature and strength of the American Dream is dependent on generational differences, economic conditions, and political and social times of the period.

Academic research, namely studies that incorporate public opinion polling methodologies, has found that belief in the attainability of the dream fluctuates over time.

“Our findings are consistent with past scholarship on macropolitics showing that people’s belief in the American Dream is responsive to real-world conditions (Page and Shapiro 1995). People are more optimistic about their ability to achieve a better future when income inequality is lower and when prospects for social mobility are higher.”

The study published in the American Journal of Political Science defined the phrase social mobility as the measure in which younger generations have the hope to earn higher incomes in comparison to their parents.

The earliest perceptions of the American Dream were popularized by James Truslow Adams’ narrative in his 1931 book. Adams wrote that Americans forgot the aspirations that founded the country amid the Great Depression. He thought the dream meant freedom, mutual respect and equality of opportunity.

The up-and-coming generation of young men and women after the Great Depression had aspirations of their own to build a secure lifestyle that slowed economic growth and increased rates of unemployment had deprived their parents of achieving. Rates of matrimony increased, and many couples purchased homes where they could start families of their own.

“In 1940, the rate of homeownership in the U.S. was 43.6 percent. By 1960, it was almost 62 percent,” (CUNY). According to data from the U.S. Census Bureau, homeownership has remained consistently above 60% since the 1960s.

The promise and pursuit of the American Dream continues to be a reoccurring rhetoric.

Minority groups, namely African Americans, and women were often excluded from the promise of the American Dream, leaving it to community activists like Martin Lurther King Jr. and feminist leaders to enlarge the dream to include Americans of every heritage, ethnicity and race.

A 2019 Gallup poll reported that the nationwide outlook on the American Dream masks disparities in the data. Women between the ages of 18 to 49, for example, are significantly more likely than older women – and men in all age groups – to say that even through practicing hard work principles, the American dream is unattainable for them in their lifetime. The 16-point gap corresponds to earlier data reporting on perceptions of how women feel they are treated in society.

“The American Dream is itself a metaphor for occupational success, a metaphor that works for the winners of the educational and occupational career game, but that remains elusive for growing numbers of men and women across age, class, educational, racial, ethnic, and geographical divides,” Phyllis Moen and Patricia Roehling said.

Civil rights leaders in particular targeted racially discriminatory housing practices and legislation that required African Americans and whites to be educated separately.

Advocates and scholars say that one of the clearest examples of racial discrimination exists in the housing market where the gap in homeownership rates between Black and white Americans is wider than it was before the Civil Rights movement.

America’s housing boom “ballooned” after the New Deal, experts say, when the federal government introduced a suite of programs — including the G.I. Bill — to boost homeownership in the wake of the Great Depression. The G.I. Bill guaranteed low-interest mortgages and other loans for World War II veterans returning to postwar America.

But Black households were excluded from the homeownership boom because of redlining, a practice in which maps were labeled to indicate areas that were occupied predominantly by people of color and “characterize[d] the risks of lending money and providing insurance.” Lenders blocked poorer neighborhoods, thus ensuring that loan assistance and insurance would be denied. Furthermore, many of America’s new suburban neighborhoods prohibited African Americans from moving into the community.

Many of the programs were making buying a home much more affordable for white families.

“By 1950 only about a third of Black households owned their homes, compared to more than half of white households,” NBC News reported in the 2020 article “The American dream while Black: ‘Locked in a vicious cycle.’”

The homeownership gap between Black and white Americans 65 years old and over reached a 30-year high in 2018, according to a 2019 Harvard University Joint Center for Housing Studies Report.

Homeownership became a centralized portion of the American Dream, often described as owning a piece of the American Dream. Today, it remains one of the defining factors of the dream, alongside: finding happiness, personal independence, fulfilling one’s potential and freedom, according to a report from advertising agency JWT. The study collected data from 203 adults living in the U.S. between 2008 and 2012.

Although, in more recent decades, Americans’ perceptions have unconsciously shifted to associate the American Dream with wealth, access to credit, fame and recognition.

The majority of U.S. adults believe that the dream, however they define it, is achievable.

In 2019, 70 percent continue to view the American Dream as personally achievable, with nearly 29 percent describing it as unattainable according to Gallup. The poll surveyed over 1,000 adults living in the 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia.

“For the vast majority of Americans at every point in history, the prospect of achieving the American Dream has been slim, but the promise has been huge,” Barry Glassner told The New York Times. Glassner is a professor of sociology at the University of Southern California, acknowledged for his studies in contemporary culture and beliefs.

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