October 2020
For decades, it was a given: buying a home of your own was the ultimate realization of the American dream, the surest path to building savings and net worth. If there was no place like home, there was also no investment like a home.
Then came a series of events that shook that truth to the core, fundamentally shifting the choices of a new generation, the millennials, born between 1981 and 1996.
The first was the 2008 housing crisis, which left wide swaths of the American public financially battered. Millennials, then in their teens and 20s, watched as friends and families lost their homes and the world fell into an economic slide.