Majority of millennials in Austin remain renters

When it comes to bucking national real-estate trends, Austin millennials aren’t exactly mavericks. According to apartment listings site Abodo, only 26.5 percent of Austinites in the designated age group (18- to 35-years-olds, in the case of this study) own their homes.

That puts the city way down at No. 121 in a ranking of cities with the most millennial homeowners, according to the report cited by Abodo: The 2017 State of the Nation’s Housing, by the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard,

The study drops some hard numbers into recent conversations about millennials living with their parents and accusations that they buy too much avocado toast. Nationally, it reports, 1.4 million recent homebuyers were under age 35 in 2015; however, it also notes that this figure is well below what boomers bought in comparison: The number of homeowners over age 55 jumped by 13 percentage points, to 54 percent, between 2001 and 2015, while the share of homeowners under the age of 35 shrank by 5 percent, to about 33 percent, over the same period.

Austin is currently home to 73.5% millennial renters, according to the report, who would on average have to save for 11.8 years (or forgo more than 6,000 orders of avocado toast), in order to afford a down payment on a home valued at the local average for millennial-owned homes—$247,319.

The full report can be found at the link below, as can a link to our sister site Eater Austin’s guide map to local toasts.

• Millennial Homebuyers [Abodo]

• It will run you 11,556 avocado toasts to put a down payment on a D.C. home [Curbed DC]

• Top Toasts to Try in Austin [Eater Austin]