Real-Estate Trends: Renting Gets Glamorous - The Daily Beast

There was a time, not so long ago, when recent college graduates dreamed of a mortgage on a starter home replete with granite-topped kitchen counters and a few bedrooms to grow into. Remember when “cocooning” was all the rage?

How quaint. With an uncertain economy, the rise of social networks that redefine “community,” and more people moving to take jobs where they can find them, renting rules the Millenial generation. The new dream? A no-frills apartment in one of the new “destination living” communities, lush with multiple swimming pools, chain restaurants, and volleyball courts.

For the first time since Herbert Hoover pushed homeownership as a way of staving off communism’s Red Menace, owning has lost its luster for the young. Since 2008, when the economy faltered, the percentage of young people who think that owning a home “is without a doubt always better than renting” has fallen by several percentage points, according to study (PDF) released in October by the Center for Behavioral Economics at the Federal Reserve of Boston.

Renting, it seems, once the province solely of the disenfranchised, has acquired a sort of cool respectability. Empty nesters got the same religion a couple of decades ago, when droves of them began cashing out of their high-maintenance houses, but the embrace of young professionals is a postrecession phenomenon. For developers, says the futurist Richard Florida, whose most recent book is The Great Reset: How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity, “multifamily is the only game in town.”

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