Australian millionaire and property developer Tim Gurner made international headlines after stating that millennials can’t afford houses because they buy smashed avocado for $19 and four $4 coffees a day. It received sharp backlash, and was reminiscent of Utah Rep Jason Chaffetz’s comment that “poor people shouldn’t buy iPhones if they need money for health care”. Laments about consumer habits that come courtesy of the elite can be tedious and can reinforce annoying ideologies that suggest no one except the wealthy are entitled to indulge.
First, the numbers are off. The Los Angeles Times published a story on the relationship between avocado toast afflictions and purchasing power when it comes to millennials and real estate. A study featured in this article revealed that the median cost of a house in Los Angeles was $525,000 earlier this year, compared to the cost of eating $19 avocado toast every single day for one year, which would cost $6,935. At this rate, one would have to forgo daily $19 avocado toast for over 15 years to save up the recommended 20% down payment for an average house. The numbers are silly, and seem futile as opposed to legitimate.
Millennial behaviour is also much different than previous generations. “These days, Millennials are veering from the traditional routes their parents took,” says Jordan Sachs, CEO and Co-Founder of Bold New York, a Manhattan-based Real Estate Firm. “It’s no longer about taking the beaten trail from college to the first job to marriage to kids. This is a generation who no longer feels that home ownership and staying in one career for 40 years are the most important things one can achieve. Millennials are known to lean towards new and innovative approaches to their career and long-term plans, which has left some folks from older generations with the impression that millennials are entitled and don’t work hard. That’s simply not true. We now have more billionaires under 30 than ever thanks to innovation, hard work, and true brilliance”.
Sachs and other millennial-savvy brokers are simply bored of the entitled millennial narrative. “This generation is up against a lot. Student loan debt, market instability, and heavy inflation has stacked the deck against millennials. Entitled should not be used as a blanket statement against millennials. I would like to see this narrative evolve into a productive discussion about how student debt, inflation and interest rates have made homeownership in major cities next to impossible for this demographic.”