Millennials Are Buying Homes

The would-be Dian Fosseys who have built a cottage industry of issuing pronouncements about the Millennials In The Mist have suffered yet another blow. For the better part of a decade, these generational gurus have been prattling on about how those of us born, roughly, between 1980 and 1995, don’t believe in owning things. We’re the Uber, Airbnb, and permanent rental generation, you see: It’s just not in our nature to want to own. Ours are communal values.

Perhaps it’s less that we didn’t want to own things and more that we couldn’t afford to. But then, that’s a more banal point to make than one that ascribes huge philosophical generalizations to a wildly diverse cohort of more than 50 million people.

This week, more evidence has emerged that Millennials’ relatively low ownership rates come down to one thing: The economy, stupid. An earnings report from DIY home improvement chain Home Depot tells the tale.

The Atlanta-based chain just enjoyed a boffo quarter: Same-store sales were up 7.9 percent, and revenue topped $25 billion, outstripping analysts’ predictions. Part of this was due to hefty repair bills after the hurricanes in Texas, Florida, and Puerto Rico. But the rest, according to Home Depot honcho Bill Lennie, comes down to Millennials. With the economy finally in good health, that group is buying homes in droves, and "The types of projects that [Millennials are] going to engage in are very similar to any new homeowner, and in research we see that the millennial is showing an interest to be DIYers," he said. The Wall Street Journal noticed the same thing earlier this month, reporting that “Homeownership has risen to its highest levels since 2014,” largely thanks to Millennials entering the market. That’s caused a “chill in the rental market,” the Journal reported.

So much of the allegedly strange behavior of the Millennials over the past several years—we rent! we ride bikes!—can be explained by two factors: We were young, and we were poor. Now that we are increasingly neither, Millennials are starting to look like every other generation of Americans.