Baby boomers and millennials are playing a housing crisis blame game

When assessing the landscape of housing affordability today, conversations between members of the millennial and baby boomer generations can often devolve into finger pointing over which of them is to “blame” for the high costs of housing.

New survey data from Clever Real Estate indicates that while the blame game continues, 31% of respondents blame millennials for affordability woes compared to 27% who blame boomers.

But the survey‘s respondent pool was composed primarily of baby boomers (52.4%), compared with smaller numbers of other cohorts like Generation X (27.2%), millennials (14.2%), the Silent Generation (4.6%) and Generation Z (1.8%). The survey was conducted over a four-day period in late February 2025.

In terms of the two generations blaming each other for these problems, “35% of millennials selected boomers, while only 25% of boomers picked themselves,” Clever explained. “Meanwhile, 33% of boomers blamed millennials, while only 21% of millennials pointed the finger at their own generation.”

Broadly, the full respondent pool mostly ascribes blame for the housing crisis to millennials (30%), agreeing with a statement that they are “most responsible for the lack of housing inventory, as opposed to boomers (24%), who largely led the policy, planning, and business decisions that shaped the current market over the previous decades.”

Specific to housing inventory, 19% of millennials blamed their own generation for a lack of supply versus 30% of baby boomers, while 24% of boomers say their own generation is responsible.

“Altogether, it’s discouraging evidence that different generations can’t even agree on how we got into the current housing trouble, much less the proper solutions,” Clever explained.

But there were a couple points of agreement. Nearly two-thirds of respondents across the board view down payments as a key hurdle to achieving homeownership.

The No. 1 housing affordability concern for baby boomers is home maintenance costs, with 64% of the cohort saying this makes homeownership unaffordable. This compares to 43% of Gen Xers and 25% of millennials.

Roughly 90% of all respondents also agreed with the notion that homeownership is still a part of the American dream.