Right, so the “where” is the USA.

If we take this definition of the generations and table 12 from here, we can compare the values 16 years apart to see generations at equivalent ages. 2023 is the most recent data on that table, so millennials would be 27 to 42. We can’t match that perfectly with the 5 year bins on the table, so I’ll just average every bin that that generation covers a majority of. With that, we get:

We can compare generations at the same age by looking along the topleft-bottomright diagonal. This shows gen Z having a lower ownership rate than Millennials did 16 years ago. Millennials were doing better than gen X 16 years before that, but have now fallen behind both gen X and the boomers.

Sure enough, the entirety of the discussion of homeownership in the article you linked is:

American Zoomers’ home-ownership rates are higher than millennials’ at the same age (even if they are lower than previous generations’).

Not sure what data they’re using since that doesn’t tally with the above, but that’s still second-worst, and the actual worst is the generation the post is actually talking about.

Your link is paywalled. But I’ve also heard this before and the main reason for this is that we’ve changed how inflation is measured, among other things. I don’t like replying with a half-hour video link but coldfusion’s “why is gen z so poor” Video gives a good overview, also using the article you linked as a source in the video.

The wording is highly biased and the article is poorly sourced. Here’s another link for the article referred to: https://archive.ph/wJJZv .

The Fed working papers ctrl-f “generation” -> : https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/feds/has-intergenerational-progress-stalled-income-growth-over-five-generations-of-americans.htm - the pdf paper includes the figures with non-biased language and here’s the conclusion:

Using data from 1963 through 2022, we evaluate whether younger generations are seeing slower income growth relative to the generations that came before. We confirm that there has been a slowdown in intergenerational progress, except for Millennials who saw their incomes grow slightly faster than Generation X but still more slowly than Baby Boomers and the Silent Generation. Intergenerational progress has remained positive for all generations. Positive growth has been maintained for Generation X and Millennials in spite of their stalled growth in hours worked. We investigate the role of two potential explanations for perceptions of worsening outcomes for Millennials despite their observed income growth relative to previous generations. First, we find that the higher household incomes of Millennials relative to Generation X, through their 20s, is a result of dependence on their parents rather than a rise in their own market incomes. By age 31, however, less than 10 percent of Millennials are still dependent on their parents and by then their own market incomes exceed that of previous generations. Second, we find that the rising cost of college offsets only a small portion of the income gains achieved by Millennials, especially when accounting for the growing generosity of financial aid. Our results focus on aggregate comparisons across generations, as opposed to direct comparisons between individuals and their own parents. Each type of comparison provides important information about absolute improvements in economic wellbeing across generations. Future research should continue to consider alternative measures of wellbeing for evaluating intergenerational progress, including consumption, wealth and social wellbeing (e.g., Fisher and Johnson 2022). Results on changes in wellbeing over time, including the intergenerational 26 progress made in rising incomes, should inform discussions about how best to promote wellbeing in the future.

Gratitude - I learned something despite the misleading trailhead.