Gen Z Can’t Afford to Buy Houses, and Millennials Are to Blame

This is a short snippet of Bloomberg Opinion Today, an intergenerational rant of Bloomberg Opinion’s opinions, by Jessica Karl . To get the full version of this newsletter in your inbox daily, sign up here.

Today’s Must Reads

• Gen Z will have the housing blues.
• Women have no right to choose.
• Japan still has tools to use.

Coquettecore

What do home ownership and flirting have to do with one another? Consider this: Gen Z girlies have spent the month of December tying every object they own in dainty, pale pink bows. It’s festive for the holidays, sure, but it’s also a coping mechanism for the joyless winter months. Enter: coquette, the French word to describe flirtatious individuals, which has evolved into a full-blown aesthetic that would make Marie Antoinette keel over in delight.

No item is safe from getting coquetteified: The ice cubes in your drink? They’d be prettier in pink. The box of SSRIs in your medicine cabinet? Your seasonal depression deserves to look adorable. A corn dog at the fair? It’d be cuter with coquette! The pickle and chicken nuggets on your plate? Add a little whimsy, why don’t you. The husband in your living room? Wrap him up in ribbon, baby. Heck, I bet they’d be wrapping their houses in ribbon if they could. But they can’t, and it’s not because there’s a ribbon shortage. Instead, many Gen Zers may never own a home at all. That’s because millennials — the avocado-obsessed generation that came before them — locked in ultra-cheap mortgage rates and probably won’t move out of their houses for a very long time.

Although millennials certainly mastered the “exceptionally fine art of intergenerational ranting” — especially when it came to whining about never, ever being able to afford a house — Allison Schrager says it’s actually Gen Z that’s getting a bad deal. For the past decade, millennials have been saying that earlier generations robbed them of resources. But that changed during the pandemic, when they snatched up ultra-cheap mortgages. By 2022, 47% of millennials owned a home — a substantial increase from 2016, when only 25% of them did.

“As Gen Z looks to buy their starter homes in the next few years, they will face both high rates and high prices. It may be years before the housing market is affordable again,” Allison explains. Although some economic headwinds are improving — Conor Sen says homebuilding stocks are climbing higher and mortgage rates fell today — it’s still early days. And even if those metrics continue to head in the right direction, there’s still going to be a lack of properties for sale, which means that housing prices will stay elevated for many years to come. Already, we’re seeing stories of young people “house hacking” — renting out a portion of your home — in order to afford property in such a tough landscape.

The housing market is more distorted than a TikTok filter, and no amount of pink ribbon can reduce the ugliness of that reality. I guess we’ll just have to use AI to imagine what Gen Z’s coquette houses would look like:

Bonus Gen Z Reading: Biden forgave billions in student debt, but a new poll shows it’s not enough for Gen Z.

Telltale Chart

What if someone took this yen chart and made a viral TikTok dance out of it? There’s so much movement! I’m dancing in my seat just looking at it. “Last week’s extraordinary yen advance — from around 147 to 141 versus the dollar in less than a day — is the kind of action you’d expect to see during a natural disaster, not a change from effectively zero to absolutely zero,” Gearoid Reidy and Daniel Moss write.

Further Reading

Democrats should reconsider the GOP's proposal for tougher immigration in exchange for Ukraine aid. – Bloomberg’s editorial board

How did a Russian man with no passport fly 12 hours from Copenhagen to Los Angeles with no ticket? — Howard Chua-Eoan

Volodymyr Zelenskiy begged Congress to defend his beleaguered nation. He got stiffed. — Admiral James Stavridis

Whether or not Israel's bombing in Gaza can be rated as “indiscriminate,” it is counterproductive. — Marc Champion

Industrial companies had a crazy year. Here’s who won, who lost and who improved. — Brooke Sutherland

The Senate’s Basel III endgame is bad news for the West, and worse news for the rest. — Mihir Sharma

Loyalty programs can help restaurants struggling with food inflation and labor shortages. — Bobby Ghosh

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Notes: Please send pink ribbon and feedback to Jessica Karl at [email protected].

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.