Millennials Aren't Just Renting in the City

Housing and city planning experts and scholars have long debated which type of markets homebuying Millennials favor. A new paper lends more support to the argument that Millennials want to buy their first homes in cities.

Published in the Journal of Planning Education and Research, the paper posits that first-time Millennial homebuyers are more likely to buy homes near urban cores than are first-timers of Generation X, in fact, they are 21 percent more likely. Another interesting finding in the report is that even though Millennials have long gotten a bad rap for having low incomes, little savings, and massive student loan debt, the generation has a higher median credit score than do older generations for most of the study period (2001 to 2016), CityLab reports. 

The study’s dataset was a random sample of more than 100,000 personal credit records from 2001 to 2016. Out of that, the researchers selected people who took out mortgages for the first time, then narrowed that subset to first-time buyers within a 10-mile radius of the country’s 50 biggest Metropolitan Statistical Areas. “It’s a random sample of a very large slice of the population, and it’s truly random,” said Raymond. Collecting 15 years of data let the authors compare Gen Xers and Millennials buying first homes at the same ages—but also at different ages.

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