{"id":711096,"date":"2026-07-25T21:42:22","date_gmt":"2026-07-25T21:42:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/711096\/"},"modified":"2026-07-25T21:42:22","modified_gmt":"2026-07-25T21:42:22","slug":"the-millennial-generation-is-split-in-2-an-older-crowd-with-boomer-style-comfort-a-younger-set-going-back-to-the-early-1900s","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/711096\/","title":{"rendered":"The millennial generation is split in 2: an older crowd with boomer-style comfort, a younger set going ‘back to the early 1900s’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Millennials were supposed to be one generation with one story \u2014 priced out, saddled with debt, perpetually behind. Jessica Lautz, has been tracking this story for years, even commissioning an annual \u201cgenerational trends\u201d report from her perch as deputy chief economist at the National Association of Realtors. When the report was released in April, she told Fortune<\/a> that we\u2019re at the point where it\u2019s a structural issue: older millennials are now living a boomer-style existence where they can expect to own their own homes, while their younger counterparts aren\u2019t so lucky. <\/p>\n

But Lautz didn\u2019t know that housing affordability experts at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis was working on the same issue. <\/p>\n

Last week, researchers at the Minneapolis Fed led by Erik Hembre published research showing that the real under-35 homeownership rate is closer to 22% than the widely cited 37%, when measured by head of households: or, whether you own the home you live in.<\/p>\n

Lautz told Fortune that she\u2019s been circling the same trend in her own generational research for months. \u201cI was excited when it came out,\u201d she said. \u201cI had no idea, obviously, but I think it captures the change in how people are living, and it does so in a smart way where it\u2019s really looking at who\u2019s in that household as opposed to the structure of that home.\u201d When she really digs into the data, she added, she sees younger Americans under 35 years old being pushed toward a housing arrangement not seen at scale in America for more than a century.<\/p>\n

Two Cohorts, Two Economies<\/p>\n

NAR now splits millennial data into two groups \u2014 ages 36 to 45, and ages 27 to 35 \u2014 because the gap between them had grown too wide to report as a single number. Lautz called it a \u201cdefinite split\u201d in April, because older millennials have become the highest-earning, biggest-spending buyer segment in the entire housing market. <\/p>\n

Their median household income is $132,700; they\u2019re buying the largest homes of any generation at a median 2,100 square feet; and only 33% are first-time buyers, meaning most already own and are leveraging equity to trade up, running the same playbook boomers used for decades.<\/p>\n

Younger millennials are still fighting the battle their older counterparts just won \u2014 and the numbers show how wide the gap has gotten. They\u2019re buying 1,600-square-foot homes, a 500-square-foot gap from their older peers. Their median down payment is 9%, compared to 13% for older millennials, 19% for Gen X, and 26% or more for Boomers \u2014 meaning the equity flywheel that lets older buyers keep trading up is barely turning for the younger cohort. Forty-four percent of younger millennials who struggled to save said student loans delayed their purchase; high rent held back 42%; credit card debt, 30%. It\u2019s a three-way squeeze that older millennials largely escaped by buying earlier. <\/p>\n

The Minneapolis Fed research underscores not only \u201chow difficult housing affordability is,\u201d Lautz said, \u201cbut also how difficult high rents can be in many communities.\u201d It underscores that while people may want to live independently, they may be forced to make the choice illustrated in Hembre\u2019s research. But she went further in describing the younger cohort\u2019s predicament \u2014 not as a temporary delay but as a reversion to a much older pattern.<\/p>\n

Younger Millennials, Meet 1900<\/p>\n

The NAR data shows clearly that more families double up during times of unaffordability, Lautz said, citing the housing bust of 2008. It\u2019s something that is clear to see in the data today as well \u2014 with one counterintuitive wrinkle: it\u2019s Gen X, not younger millennials, buying multigenerational homes at the highest rate (19% vs. 9% for younger millennials). That gap makes sense once you realize the Hembre research is capturing something the NAR data can\u2019t: the young adults who live in those multigenerational households without being the purchaser. When younger millennials do buy multigenerational homes, the NAR data shows cost savings is the driver for 55% of them \u2014 far higher than any other generation, and a telling sign of who\u2019s making this choice by financial necessity rather than family preference.<\/p>\n

When asked whether this means America\u2019s housing market is turning more European or Asian, where multigenerational homebuying is more common, Lautz said, \u201cabsolutely.\u201d Describing it as \u201can older way of living,\u201d she said it\u2019s \u201cbringing us back, perhaps, to the early 1900s,\u201d where data shows families doubled up at higher rates period based on the availability and cost of housing.<\/p>\n

The multigenerational shift Lautz describes isn\u2019t a story about idle young adults. According to\u00a0Realtor.com\u2019s latest research<\/a>, a record 25.2 million adults under 35 lived with their parents in 2025 \u2014 nearly one in three, a rate that has now surpassed even the pandemic-era peak. Roughly 70% of them are employed<\/a>, and many hold college degrees. This isn\u2019t a generation avoiding work; it\u2019s a generation working full paychecks that still can\u2019t clear the cost of independent housing, driven largely by a national median home listing price of $430,000 \u2014 34.4% above 2019 levels \u2014 and asking rents nearly 18% above pre-pandemic norms.<\/p>\n

The trajectory is what makes the moment historic. In 2014,\u00a0Pew Research documented a genuine milestone<\/a>: for the first time in more than 130 years, American adults ages 18 to 34 were more likely to live with a parent than with a spouse or partner in their own household, a turn of events \u201cfueled primarily by the dramatic drop in the share of young Americans who are choosing to settle down romantically before age 35.\u201d Of course, that\u2019s a chicken-or-the-egg question that defines much of modern economics, culture and even society: is the extended adolescence that reaches out to 35 because of changing behaviors around marriage and homebuying, or do those reflect the fact that they\u2019re not affordable until 15 years into one\u2019s career?<\/p>\n

The Boomer Silver Lining<\/p>\n

Lautz did not put a purely negative framing on the current state of generational housing economics, including the fact that Boomers appear to be upsizing and using their wealth advantage to upsize. Boomers between 61 and 70 sell a median 2,000-square-foot home and buy a median 2,000-square-foot home. Net change: zero. Boomers between 71 and 79 downsize by just 100 square feet. Meaningful downsizing only appears among sellers 80 and older \u2014 and even they only give back 300 square feet.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey want to hold onto their space,\u201d Lautz said, \u201cand that could be [that] they like their things [or] they want to host their families at the holidays.\u201d The modern lifespan, with Boomers living decades into their retirement and facing huge expenses if they move into retirement homes, is a \u201chuge contributor\u201d to this dynamic, she added, along with the fact that many Boomers are working into a later age. The data also indicates that some Boomers are recognizing their children and grandchildren\u2019s affordability struggles and purchasing multi-generational homes, she added. <\/p>\n

To be sure, she clarified, the \u201csandwich generation\u201d of Gen X \u2014 caught between aging parents and dependent children \u2014\u00a0is the largest purchasers of multi-generational homes, and many older millennials are beginning to, as well. \u201cThey\u2019re hitting their 40s and older millennials may have aging parents that they need to take care of in that situation.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lautz isn\u2019t entirely pessimistic. Gen Z\u2019s homeownership rate is running slightly ahead of where millennials stood at the same age, something she attributes partly to stronger uptake of government homebuying assistance programs. \u201cI am encouraged by looking at that data,\u201d she said. But she stopped short of predicting the pattern breaks for Gen Z on its own.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not going to be an overnight [fix where] we flip the switch and we\u2019re going to see a different housing market tomorrow,\u201d Lautz said. Building enough smaller, more affordable housing will take roughly a decade, and an aging boomer population eventually vacating larger homes \u201cis not the solution\u201d on its own, she said.<\/p>\n

The generational label \u201cmillennial\u201d now obscures more than it reveals. The real story isn\u2019t one generation lagging behind or catching up. It\u2019s a fault line running through the middle of it \u2014 one side building wealth on equity and square footage, the other moving back in with family in a pattern their great-grandparents would have found unremarkable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Millennials were supposed to be one generation with one story \u2014 priced out, saddled with debt, perpetually behind.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":711097,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[84,59,4658,1907,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-711096","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-business","tag-gb","tag-housing","tag-millennials","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/711096","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=711096"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/711096\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/711097"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=711096"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=711096"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=711096"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}