American Dream Is Dead: Mexican and Chinese Millennials Have Higher Homeownership Rate Than Americans

From a cultural and economic perspective, American millennials will likely go down in history as a lost generation. We’re talking about an entire generation that was coddled, and bamboozled by an education system that tricked them into absorbing tens of thousands of dollars in debt for college degrees that are worthless.

They came of age at a time when America’s blue collar jobs were hollowed out and shipped overseas, and wages stagnated across the board. They’re in so much debt that they’ve had to postpone all of the hallmarks of adulthood such as marriage, raising kids, and homeownership. They simply can’t afford it.

For millennials the American dream is dead. However, that’s not the case for millennials living in other countries. Their version of the American dream is alive and well. According to a recent study from HSBC, the situation is totally different in Mexico, where 46% of millennials own their own home, and China, where 70% of millennials own a home. In China, this is largely due to the fact that wages are growing faster than the cost of homeownership, unlike the United States.

And this seems to be the case across the English speaking world, where the situation is far worse than what we see in America. While US millennials have a homeownership rate of 35%; in Canada it is 34%, in the UK it is 31%, and in Australia it is 28%. There appears to be a few pockets of financial success for young adults in America, such as Minnesota, Iowa, and West Virginia, where the millennial homeownership rate is between 48% and 50%. The situation is at its most dire in Washington DC, where only 23.5% of millennials own a home.