The 5 best companies to work for if you are a 'millennial' 0:55
(CNN Business) --
Here at Nightcap HQ, we have a special alarm that goes off every time a study is published in which Baby Boomers shame Millennials.
(I'm kidding, of course, but we have the internet and a nose for unfair generational disparities.)
Here's the thing: a UK study this week says half of Britons think young people can't afford to buy a house because they spend too much on coffee, Netflix and travel.
It's the avocado toast debacle all over again.
In case you forgot, in 2017 an Australian millionaire said millennials couldn't afford to buy a home because they spend "$40 a day on mashed avocados and coffee and don't work."
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Of course, generational misconceptions are nothing new.
The idea that young people don't work as hard dates back to ancient Greece, according to researchers at the Policy Institute and the Institute of Gerontology at King's College London.
"Today's young people love luxury; they have bad manners, disregard for authority; they disrespect elders and love to gossip instead of doing something."
This sentiment, frequently attributed to Socrates, is more than a thousand years old, but 51% of the British public agree with it, according to the researchers.
Naturally, on the Internet there were opinions about the researchers' conclusions.
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"True. Millennials are only $19.99 a month away from being able to pay off the mortgage on a million dollar home that Boomers bought for a piece of gum and a couple of packs of matches," @StephenPunwasi tweeted.
"You'd have to cancel Netflix for 2,300 years to save enough to afford the median US home price," @femmissgeek tweeted.
Even the researchers themselves expressed frustration with the narrative.
"The suggestion that the huge challenges young people face in buying their own home can be solved by ditching fancy cafes and Netflix doesn't make sense, but half the public still believes it," said Bobby Duffy Director of the Policy Institute at King's College London.
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Of course, millennials' inability to afford housing has nothing to do with our Netflix subscriptions (which, ironically, some of us continue to steal from our boomer parents, thank you very much) or our daily $1 coffee. 7 (I'll die renting before I give up my cold brew, idiots).
Let me briefly review some of the real barriers to home ownership among people born between 1981 and 1996:
We can't pay it.
Median home value in 1980 was $47,200, or $167,000 adjusted to today's dollar value.
The median price of a single-family home in the first quarter of 2022 was more than two and a half times higher, at a whopping $428,700.
We graduated into financial and economic hell.
Does anyone remember the generation of 2007?
Overwhelming student debt.
The college degree that all of our mentors promised would be the key to success has become a dead weight for millions of graduates.
Stricter lending standards.
Following the 2008 recession, banks lowered their underwriting standards and made a 20% down payment the norm.
For a median value home today, that's an $86,000 down payment.
I die laughing.
millennialsHousing
