Data from a recent RentCafe survey indicates Hartford is an outlier in a national trend, which has seen Millennials go from a generation of majority renters to a generation of majority homeowners.
RentCafe, an apartment search website, compiled data from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Survey (IPUMS) Current Population Survey. They found that though Millennials dominate the rental market as the nation’s largest generation, they became an owner-majority generation in 2022, with approximately 52 percent owning a home.
But in the Hartford metro area, the majority of Millennials remain renters, despite a 51.6 percent increase in the number of Millennials who became homeowners between 2017 and 2022. Overall, only 40.7 percent of Millennials in the city are owners, while 59.3 percent are renters.
Of the four generations surveyed, Millennials in the Hartford metro area had the third highest ownership rate. Baby Boomers had the highest generational ownership rate, at 75 percent. Gen X came second, with a 73.1 percent ownership rate. Despite having a five-year ownership growth rate of 384.5 percent, Gen Z had the lowest ownership rate, at 23.7 percent.
Hartford’s 40.7 ownership rate among Millennials puts it below the national average of 51.5 percent. But the city does outpace Millennial home ownership rates in other metro areas in Connecticut. 40.4 percent of the Millennial population in Bridgeport are owners, a rate that is slightly above New Haven’s Millennial owner rate of 39.7 percent.
Despite falling behind Hartford in terms of the overall share of Millennial homeowners, RentCare identified Bridgeport as a metro area where Millennial home ownership more than doubled, increasing by 101.9 percent between 2017 and 2022.
That rate puts the city among the top 30 metro areas in the country for increases in Millennial ownership. Other cities with similar rates of growth include Memphis, Tennessee; Austin, Texas; and Orlando, Florida.
Ownership among Millennials in Hartford grew by 51.6 percent in the same time period while New Haven saw the number of Millennial owners fall by 6.9 percent.
