Adulting While Poor

Why can't millennials afford their own homes? A rigorous explanation for their failure to launch is that the Great Recession stunted millennials' economic lives at a critical age. As a result, they're still struggling to obtain gainful employment in a more demanding labor market, or find affordable housing in a contracted mortgage market. In other words, it's not their lousy values—it's their lousy economic prospects. Victor Chen explores this generational trend, and also how the slanted focus on middle-class, if downwardly mobile, millennials obscures just how diverse a generation millennials are.