Millennials can't afford houses because they spend all their money on avocado toast and oat lattes. If they cooked at home, walked instead of Uber-ing, and stopped going to brunch, they'd have a deposit by 30. Tim Gurner said it on 60 Minutes in 2017. Boomer dinner-party orthodoxy ratified it. Whole columns in Australian newspapers built careers on the line. The avocados, somehow, are the variable.
Median Sydney house prices grew 547 percent between 1990 and 2024, adjusted for inflation. Median full-time earnings over the same period grew about 80 percent. Brisbane is similar. Melbourne is similar. The house-price-to-income ratio for Australian capital cities went from around 4x in 1990 to 11-15x today, which is one of the highest in the developed world. To match the deposit savings of a 1990 first-home buyer, the average millennial would need to save the entire pre-tax wage of a senior nurse for about a decade, with no rent, no food, and no transport costs. An avocado is $2.50. Brunch for two with coffee is around $50. Skipping it weekly saves around $2,600 a year. A 20 percent deposit on a Sydney median house in 2024 is around $250,000. The maths does not survive contact with the maths. The reason millennials don't own houses is house prices. The reason house prices are high is supply constraints, tax incentives for investors, and population growth. None of it is fruit-based.