“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.

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.

Archive link

  • QuarterSwede@lemmy.world
    838·
    10 months ago

    For those downvoting, the most effective lies always have some truth to them.

    Honestly the biggest reason they can’t afford housing is because the majority don’t know how to budget and/or stick to it. This goes for a large amount of the poor as well. They’re constantly spending their money on consumables and other non-wealth building things. In the US, as a society, we’ve done a shit job of teaching our kids this valuable lesson, pun intended.

    Doesn’t mean the value of the dollar isn’t lower than it has been in a while and that mortgage rates aren’t high (they aren’t the highest, by the way; it was at ~12% in the 90s). That food prices aren’t insane and that corporations aren’t taking advantage and jacking up their margins, they are.