When we talk about homeownership rates across different generations, the story is usually pretty simple. Baby boomers bought a lot of homes. Millennials haven’t.
A new report from Apartment List, under embargo until Tuesday 3/17, explores age-adjusted homeownership rates across the generations and tells a different story. Millennials, it turns out, aren’t the first generation to drive a dip in homeownership.
In fact, the last 3 generations have owned fewer homes than their predecessors. Even baby boomers have lower homeownership than the silent generation that came before them.
Below are some highlights from the report:
- Millennials are the least likely to own a home, but the most likely to purchase a new one today. Their homeownership rate is rising faster than any other generation and has been increasing steadily for the last decade.
- Over time, declining homeownership rates is especially striking among middle-class families, less-educated households, and black millennials:
- Many low-income families struggle to buy homes, and this fact hasn’t changed significantly over time. Yet, the homeownership rate for middle-class millennials and gen Xers significantly lags prior generations.
- The importance of higher education has increased substantially over time. For baby boomers without a college degree, 64% owned homes by age 38. For gen X, that homeownership rate drops to 57%, and for millennials it falls to 48%.
- The generational homeownership gap is widest for young African-American families. For the oldest millennials, black homeownership is a staggering 42 percentage points lower than white homeownership.
