Apartments For Rent

• The remote work experiment of the past year has constituted a step change in a long-term trend of remote work becoming increasingly common. Many Americans who worked in offices before the pandemic are likely to continue working remotely even after it subsides. By severing the link between job choice and housing choice, remote work could have a profound impact on where Americans choose to live.
• We estimate that nearly one-in-three jobs in the U.S. are in occupations that can be performed remotely, and in some places, the share is much higher. In the San Jose metro encompassing Silicon Valley, 46 percent of jobs are remote-friendly.
• Since jobs are not the only factor that keep people rooted, we propose a new concept -- the "untethered class," composed of workers who are employed in remote-friendly occupations, but also are not tied down by homeownership or family obligations. As we’ve defined it, the untethered class consists of 8.7 million workers accounting for 5.6 percent of the total American workforce, but with significant regional variation.
• The San Francisco metro has the highest share of untethered workers at 13.5 percent, followed closely by neighboring San Jose. The remainder of the top 10 consists primarily of "superstar cities" that are characterized by their high housing costs, including Los Angeles, Seattle, New York City, and Boston.
• The untethered class are highly-educated and high-earning, and with a median age of 32, many are likely on the precipice of settling down. The untethered class are also more likely than the general population to be living in a different state than where they were born, indicating a propensity to relocate.
• Given that so many untethered workers are living in the nation’s most expensive housing markets, many may choose to relocate to markets where they can afford to purchase homes and raise families more comfortably. While such a trend would be unlikely to lead to the demise of superstar cities, it has significant potential to reshape the markets that the untethered class moves to.

Millennials are officially the nation’s largest generation,¹ and spanning the ages of 24 to 39, they are now in their prime home-buying years.² But for as long as they have been old enough to buy homes, millennials have lagged previous generations in fulfilling that goal. In this study, we combine data from the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey and our annual Apartment List Renter Survey to assess whether millennials are catching up, or if they are truly less likely to attain homeownership than prior generations. Though the millennial homeownership rate is rising, we find that a generational homeownership gap persists and the impacts of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic are likely to reinforce the trend in years to come.

The COVID-19 pandemic made housing affordability a persistent concern throughout 2020. And as we enter the new year, rent payments remain a financial obstacle for many families. According to our latest survey, 30 percent of renters did not make their January payment on-time at the start of the year.¹ This is down just slightly from the mid-summer peak when unemployment was at its worst, but up significantly from historic baseline levels.²

For minority renters, the missed payment crisis has been even more damaging. In the fall of 2020, the missed payment rate for non-white renters was nearly 50 percent higher than that of white renters. This is just one of many ways that minority groups are burdened with an outsize share of the pandemic’s economic fallout; beyond housing, people of color have disproportionately experienced loss of employment, loss of health insurance, loss of food security, and more severe health impacts.

As we did throughout much of 2020, our team collected data on housing, race, and financial outcomes using a nationally-representative survey of over 4,000 respondents taken during the first week of January 2021. The findings below highlight how the persistent and unequal effects of 2020’s housing crisis are spilling over into the new year.