Are Millennials Buying Homes In Los Angeles?

It’s become common knowledge lately that millennials are too busy chowing down on avocado toast to enjoy the benefits of homeownership, but members of the youthful generation are stuck renting more often in some areas more than others.

As it turns out, there may be no worse place to be a millennial looking to buy than Los Angeles. According to a new study from rental website Abodo, the metro area has the very lowest rate of homeownership among adults under the age of 35 in the nation.

While just over half of millennials own homes in the Ogden-Clearfield, Utah area—first place of the 135 cities surveyed in the study—just 17.8 percent of young adults in LA can say the same. The remaining 82.2 percent of LA millennials (who don’t live with their parents) are stuck paying rent.

Further discouraging to young home shoppers: with median home prices around $560,000, saving for a house in LA can be a truly monumental task. Abodo estimates that, assuming that prospective buyers are able to put aside 15 percent of their earnings a month, it will take the typical LA millennial more than 32 years to save for a hefty 20 percent down payment of $112,033.

Other urban areas, such as San Jose and San Francisco, require higher down payments, but young people also tend to earn more in those cities.

Since so many cities across the country require so much money for home financing, millennial homebuyers are either renting, as the report states, or looking for alternative financing methods. In some cases, specifically in the Midwest (states like Minnesota and Illinois) prospective homebuyers are using a contract for deed and other creative financing methods.

Obviously, predicting the time it will take to save for a down payment can be tricky because housing costs are bound to fluctuate over time, and many millennials will earn more as they grow older. Still, the estimate does help to illustrate why many younger renters won’t be opting out of their lease any time soon.

The data Abodo used to determine rates of homeownership among millennials comes from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2015 American Community Survey. According to those statistics, about 32 percent of millennials nationwide own th