Philadelphia Millennials Wary of Homebuying

For generations, American young adults have followed a certain life script: move out of your parents’ home, go to college, get a job, get married, buy a home, start a family. There’s some wiggle room for the order of events, but the gist is clear. As the generation known as Millennials continue to grow up and move through the milestones of adulthood, however, one thing is becoming clear: they are, en masse, rejecting the homebuying step. At least, it seems like that’s what they are doing in Philadelphia.

For Philadelphia Millennials, homeownership isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. 

An article that broke yesterday in the Philadelphia Inquirer alleges that the current crop of adults aged 20 – 34 can’t afford to buy homes – and anyway, they don’t want to. The generation that came of age with the Great Recession is, in a nutshell, simply too wary of the long-term commitment and potential for disaster represented by buying a home. This is a generation that employs more freelance employs than any one previously, and one that has seen firsthand that home values can plummet virtually overnight, leaving one upside down on hundreds of thousands of dollars of mortgage debt. Add to that the low savings-to-debt ratio of the average Millennial and you have a recipe for terminal rentership.

Those young adults that are buying homes, the article claims, are often priced out of living in Philadelphia proper. They face the daunting challenge of either investing in a “project” home that needs lots of improvements or moving away to neighboring counties for life in the suburbs (and, potentially, a long commute). Either way, it seems clear that Millennials are forging their own idea of a life script, and it’s one that doesn’t necessarily include buying a home.