Millenial Housing Problems

"It leaves my friends and I, .... with gloomy prospects for how and where we can live. More people are being pushed out to the car-dependent suburbs because it's more affordable."

Millenial housing problems in a nutshell. Priced out of desired urban areas, exiled to suburbia, until you can make enough money to buy one of the few, rare, homes available in the urban areas. (And then you can get accused of gentrification! All because the local city counselor grew up in a 1950's suburb, and can't imagine anyone ever wanting to lie any other way, and so won't permit anything else to be built. Never mind that land values have tripled, and so to maintain the same level of affordability, densities need to triple as well. 

DEMOLISHED - The 'Millenials will move to the Suburbs, just like their parents' narrative

Millennial First-Time Homebuyers and Location Choice

Elora Lee Raymond, Jessica Dill, Yongsung Lee

First Published October 25, 2018 Research Article 

https://doi.org/10.1177/0739456X18807751

We research whether Millennial first-time homebuyers are more likely to purchase homes near city centers than Generation X. We use a random sample of individual credit records data to examine first-time mortgaged homebuyers from 2000 to 2016 in the fifty largest US cities. In a logistic regression controlling for age and generation, we estimate separate age and period effects. We also control for car ownership, income, credit score, mortgage size, mortgage payment, and student debt levels. We find that the odds Millennials buy near city centers 21 percent higher than Generation X. This suggests that as Millennials purchase homes, they do not move to the suburbs at the same rate as Generation X.

Is Uber causing car ownership to fall?

Car Ownership in by State

Hard to say with certainty. Car ownership is associated with a number of things, among them income and age. Utah has the largest Millenial population of all the states, and younger people tend to have lower incomes. Similarly, Utah has experienced housing price increases far beyond that supported by local wages (thanks California), making home ownership less affordable. Hypothetically, Millenials may be compensating by purchasing townhomes and condos (with limited parking) or by foregoing cars.