Cheap mortgages over the last decade have enabled millions of millennials to buy homes, but it’s harder for younger buyers.
Becoming a financially secure adult is hard. Establishing yourself in your career, securing a home, starting a family … it’s a struggle as old as the modern economy, maybe even civilization itself. As is the lament of every generation that they have it worse than their forebears.
Millennials, assisted by the internet, made an exceptionally fine art of intergenerational ranting. For the last 10 years they have been saying that earlier generations not only had it easier, but they also robbed millennials of resources.
They’re wrong about that — wealth creation across generations is not a zero-sum proposition — but they do have a point about how different generations face different challenges. In this case, however, the generation that has it harder is Generation Z — and millennials are to blame. Ultra-cheap mortgages over the last decade enabled millions of millennials to buy homes, and now the housing market is distorted, which will make it harder for Gen Z to buy.
Continue reading the entire piece here at Bloomberg Opinion (paywall)
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Allison Schrager is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal.
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