29 Years To Earn A Down Payment For San Francisco House, New Study Doesn’t Look Good For Millennials


They read, learned, studied, and crammed, all to earn a part of the American dream but possibly not in San Francisco. Today’s college graduates will have to work 29 years to earn enough money to put a down payment on a house in San Francisco, a daunting prospect to say the least.

A new study by Trulia estimates a new college grad will need 29 years to come up with 20 percent to put a down payment on a San Francisco home, and non-college grads can forget it.

In San Francisco, those numbers are particularly important as the city is going through an identity crisis as long-term residents are being replace by high-paid tech workers.

Residents in certain high-rent trendy districts are being pushed out so their landlord’s can turn the property for a hefty profit, thereby changing the character of the neighborhood entirely.

The problem has gotten so bad that city supervisors are considering a ban on luxury housing construction. Being able to live where you work is a high priority for SF officials, but this new study isn’t going to help.

The average price for a home in San Francisco is more than $1 million, and it’s easy to pay more. Buyers typically get into bidding wars and wind up paying more than the asking price, and that’s if they can find something to buy.

In March, a rundown shack sold for $1.2 million.

How can today’s college grads earn enough money to buy their first home? The sad fact is that many can’t — not in San Francisco anyway.

They may have an easier time in other parts of the state like Los Angeles, where the average home price hit $475,000 in July. Trulia says it will take a mere 19 years to earn that downpayment.

That’s to say nothing about student loans owed by nearly all of today’s college graduates. The average college grad owes more than $26,000 — that’s three times what it was merely a decade ago.

These depressing facts are part of the reason today’s millennials have lost faith in the American Dream.

Going from rags to riches in a single generation by hard work used to be a popular culture myth, but today’s American teenagers are starting to realize that dream might be dead.

In a country where Wall Street gets a bailout and Main Street is forgotten, how should today’s youth plan for their future?

[Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images]

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