photo credit: the London Evening Standard
Homeownership levels are currently at 20-year lows, last year at just about 64%. You’ll frequently hear that this is largely because the Millenials (those aged 18-33) aren’t buying homes like previous generations did.
The conventional wisdom goes something like this: Young people are just not interested in buying a house. Instead they want to rent in a hipster neighborhood where they can walk to get their cold-brewed organic coffee or craft beer. Besides, they are too overburdened with student loan debt. The slow recovery of homeownership rates is seen as being largely due to this younger generation not stepping up to the plate for the American Dream.
In fact, it’s the Gen-Xers whose rates of homeownership have fallen the furthest, according to the recently released State of the Nation’s Housing 2015 report, produced each year by the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University.
The report shows that Gen-Xers (those aged roughly 34-54) got a double whammy. The younger members of this group were in their prime first-time homebuying years when the economic crash hit. Older members were at the stage when households tend to trade up or make major home improvements. “When prices plummeted, many of these owners had little or no equity to weather the recession.”
The report notes “whether these households eventually catch up to the baby boomers in terms of homeownership is unknown.”