Sadly, Millennials aren’t handy. Baby boomers are famous for the idea of being able to fix it themselves. If the dishwasher broke, they fixed it. If the carpet needed cleaning, they cleaned it. They enjoyed doing these tasks on their weekend. That is not the case with Millennials. They don’t care to understand how to fix something.

These are the same people that can't use an iPad unsupervised without somehow getting tricked into sending $2k worth of bitcoin and their SSN to a scammer.

That last article comes sooo close to figuring it out.

Finally, renting allows millennials to live in more desirable or “happening” parts of cities that would otherwise be cost-prohibitive for home ownership.

That sure sounds like a fancy way of saying we can't afford to buy houses.

I thought we couldn't afford a home because we bought too much avocado toast?

Around me all the 55+ condos are dirt cheap and price controlled, while the regular condos and sfh are 2-3x price. So, when the boomers want to downsize they can just sell their that the vigorously fought to keep zoned without density to a millennial for a huge profit and then buy a cheap condo (conveniently dense and conveniently 55+) and live off the rest of the proceeds. It’s as if the boomers get to use their kids future earnings as a piggy bank for their retirement. It’s the same story with offloading the climate change impacts of their gluttonous lifestyle to their kids as well. They really did pull up the ladder.

At least in our area, most of the starter homes were purchased and then completely redone internally to fancy up and then flipped. All of the homes went up about $100,000 at minimum because of people trying to profit off the housing market.

Ehhh, I disagree with this a bit. People are still putting LVP instead of hardwood in new builds, with granite instead of quartz countertops, and no fancy heated floors, and the cheapest carpet they can find at Home Depot. I feel like most new builds I see going up are more on the "starter home" side of things, but maybe it's an area specific thing.

The real problem though, is even these cheaper options still end up being unaffordable.

Wait, why didn't you get a 34k gift from your grandfather to buy your first property, like avocado toast dickhead did?

Youre just doing it wrong, bro

Mmmm... Avocado toast sounds yummy... Here I go again wasting money on silly things like food. I can't help myself 😭

Ooh, I feel like rent payments should be pretax or tax deductible and it would help a ton of people out.

Someone tell me why that would be a bad idea, I'm genuinely curious.

Probably the same reason I didn't - waited too long, and missed the window of affordability.

Weird to me how hypothetical a landlord's "job" is compared to, y'know, any actual job.

Wait that's what landlords have to do. Idk how it is in America. But in Europe is pretty much a law

Knock that shit off. Millennials wrote the story, for starters. That journalism degree had to go somewhere.

They probably wrote a perfectly reasonable story about people not buying homes for obvious reasons, and then, like always, some editor with a Master's Degree in Being A Cunt put a clickbait title on it so we'd end up talking about the stupid thing and oh look is that the CNBC brand all over the place? It is. OP even typed it into the title, how helpful.

The last time I chased down one of these shitty meme stories, you know, the ones about too many avocado is why you can't pay rent, I came to the sort of realization you don't have because you just jump in here and have an emotional squirt about the meme.

Namely, the reason so many of these stories seem so fucking absurd is because the "young people" in the news story are specifically the adult children of the wealthy, the actual 1%. So yes, those assholes, all spending daddy's money, are real bad at holding onto a buck and legitimately need scolding.

The target audience for ALL these articles is "daddy", the holder of 1% wealth. Everyone else is too poor and the ad rates are abysmal for that demo.

If the article is in Forbes, WSJ, or Bloomberg then this is absolutely the case. They are talking to genuinely wealthy people about their own wasteful children and THAT is why they always seem to have absurd ideas about how much money the "millennials" have to spend. Their children really do have a lot of money to waste, that's why they can't stop paying $8 for a coffee. I guess CNBC wants a piece of the action, too.

And that's the thing. None of this is about you. None of this is about most of the people reading the article or making stupid Tweets about it.

The typical millennial online has a fairly middle-class upbringing with a college degree for better or worse. Many of them have boss jobs, either holding positions of authority, or just working in the office, and not in the factory, which is a boss job enough.

So they get delusional. The floor monkeys at the factory know that they're "the help", but the college-educated types? They struggle. They delude themselves into thinking this is about them, that they are part of the conversation.

Nope. You're "the help". You may as well be one of the Filipinos in the sweatshop making underwear, you basically do not exist in this conversation, at all. It's a tough pill to swallow as a Westerner with a degree.

So that's why the articles are so "clueless". The people writing them, for the intended audience of wealthy old people, mostly men still, are ignoring you as completely as you ignore the janitor at the mall. You might as well be a water cooler or some furniture to them.

They know why you're poor. They employ you and control your access to money. They have all the records and it was them who made you poor. That's not news. They know why you can't buy a house because they made sure you wouldn't have the funds. Instead, they bought 12 properties to rent this year and decided to lay off 500 people to tighten up the ship. They know why you're fucked, because they're fucking you.

But why their own kids, the wealthy babies of the 1%, are acting all stupid? That is a mystery to them, so they're liable to read news articles about it. They don't think of you as a child of concern, any more than you think of the eggs a housefly lays. You? You just come with the building. You're the help.

Once you grasp that these news articles are aimed way, way, way over even your college-educated, "knowledge worker" head, then a lot of stupidity suddenly makes more sense.

The previous owner of my place "fixed" the front door handle by gluing the mechanism into it. Now if I want to change my locks I have to replace the entire door. Cheers mate.