The millennial response

Great news, guys. To get your foot on the property ladder all you need to do is stop brunching. Well, that’s according to a 35-year-old millionaire developer who made his money gentrifying urban areas with high rises… the type of areas that prospered with the influx of cafes and restaurants filled with young people eating brunch.

Let’s put the avocados aside for a moment, as delicious as they are, and consider this: did young adults in the 60s stop going to the cinema and instead use that money as the down payment on a house?

Did twenty-somethings in the 80s stop buying records and instead keep their change in a piggy bank, proudly upending its contents as they signed their mortgage agreement? No. Like young people of this generation, they still enjoyed life’s small fripperies while studying, working and saving with the hope that it would all amount to them owning a home of their own.

And for those generations before us, it generally did. But that opportunity simply does not exist for most young people today and it is nothing to do with avo toast. Stock has dwindled severely, house prices have inflated and our salaries haven’t.

Comments like those made by Tim Gurner imply that millennials don’t know sacrifice. The general belief is that our penchant for flat whites supersedes our ability to say ‘no’ to daily luxuries in order to achieve a long term goal.

But the issue is not that we are averse to sacrifice, or saving. It’s that there simply isn’t enough affordable housing, whether you are in Dublin or Dulwich Hill. A mortgage is both a sacrifice and a privilege, but for most young people it’s a pipe dream. Can you really blame us for drowning our sorrows in Saturday morning mimosas?