Right now, millennials are the housing market. Whether they are supposedly delaying it or the thriving force behind multifamily housing, they are all housing over headlines.
Then comes Jacob Davidson’s, a reporter with Money, argument, saying that the generalization that millennials don’t really want to own homes is largely untrue.
According to Zillow’s data, young married couples in which both partners work (represented by the orange line in the left graph below) currently own homes at a rate close to or above historical norms for their demographic.
Even single employed millennials (the yellow line in the right graph) are slightly more likely to own a home than their counterparts in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s.
So if young adults want homes more than previous generations, why is their homeownership rate at a historic low?
The answer is that millennials are getting married later in life, and not having two income streams makes it much harder to scratch together a down payment.
Recently, Zillow reported that the number of Americans living with roommates or adult family members jumped to more than a third of U.S. adults in 2012, up from 27.4% in 2006, a new report from Zillow said.
As a result, a total of 5.4 million households have been lost to doubling up as housing costs outpaced income over the last decade.
“But there is a silver lining behind this data. Like a coiled spring, all of these doubled-up households represent tremendous potential energy for the market. If and when these compressed households begin to unwind and these millions of Americans do start to create their own households, demand will bounce back, possibly even causing household growth to outpace population growth,” Humphries added.
The charts are getting a fair share of attention on social media websites such as Twitter.
And these tweeted charts tell the story best:
Surveys don't actual bear out the idea that millennials have given up on ownership http://t.co/LsW8mnr04t via @JakeD pic.twitter.com/jOfAmqPyD2
— Nick Timiraos (@NickTimiraos) November 12, 2014
@NickTimiraos @JakeD Nor do actual homeownership data, adjusted for demographic shifts. pic.twitter.com/8tZ9awDvlE
— Jed Kolko (@JedKolko) November 12, 2014
