Few milestones in life mean as much to the American Dream as owning a home. And millennials have encountered the kind of trouble totally befitting their generation, which largely graduated into the teeth of the disastrous post-2008 job market. Just as they entered peak homebuying and household formation age, housing affordability is at 40-year lows, and mortgage rates are near 40-year highs.
The anxiety this generation feels about the prospect of never owning their own home affects their entire perception of their finances and the economy, says Moody’s chief economist Mark Zandi.
“If they feel like they’re locked out of owning a home it colors their perceptions about everything else going on in their financial lives,” Zandi says.
Millennials have long been dogged by a brutal housing market. They faced not one, but two, cataclysmic economic events—the Great Financial Crisis in 2008 and the pandemic in 2020. Both of which left them reeling financially and struggling to afford a home. The Great Recession decimated the real estate market as the economy nearly collapsed under the weight of tenuous mortgage backed securities. While the pandemic brought with it a remote work boom that caused millions of citydwellers to flee to the suburbs, sending housing prices soaring.
The worst part is, timeline-wise, still feeling like a teenager. Except physically stuff hurts more and memento mori is more of a thing now.
We’ve been set back so many times!
I feel like I’m forever working harder and thinking smarter and still trapped behind never really “being an adult”.
And by the time we finally feel like we’re actually starting our lives, they’ll have already been mostly robbed from us.
Gen Z here, basically the same shit as millenials except I don’t even remember there being anything else; not sure if that’s a blessing or a curse. Kinda worried if this keeps going on more and more generations will have experienced nothing else and come to see it as normal.
Most millennial’s don’t remember anything else either. What we had were parents that still believed in the “American dream” but weren’t living it themselves and a generation before us that saw the writing on the wall, but eventually checked out of the fight. Now Gen Z and A have a generation to look to that is still fighting, but has lost steam because we’re too bogged down with surviving while raising kids or working ourselves to death. We’re exhausted, and on our last leg, so we’re all pretty much counting on the younger generations (who have less to risk/lose) to pickup that torch. Thankfully, younger generations are realizing that voting only gets us so far, and mass civil disobedience is a far more affective strategy for real systemic change.
I’m super impressed with our young people and I’m with y’all 100% of the way!
This isn’t the first time this happened. When capitalism was first getting started, many people found themselves working in wage labour for longer and longer periods of their lives. In the mediaeval age, wage labour was for adolescents and young adults. Once you were done with your apprenticeship and your journey, you became a master and got your own house and spouse. Lifelong wage labour created barriers to home ownership and the stability required for marriage, and left many people feeling trapped in a state of permanent adolescence.
We need to focus on buying land instead of real estate.