By Sydney Maki
Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University
The U.S. housing market has been through hell, but a SABEW panel of housing experts said it is making a slow and strenuous climb toward stability.
The panel explored the outlook of millennials and the housing market’s sustainability during Friday’s lunch keynote at SABEW’s 2016 annual conference.
“To Hell and Back: The Path Forward for the Housing Market” provided a platform to discuss challenges faced by today’s homeowners and renters, especially those most affected by the Great Recession. Although the market has improved — as unemployment rates have dropped from 10 percent at the height of the recession to the current 5 percent — lower income families continue to struggle to find affordable housing, the panel said.
“It was a house of cards that toppled,” Redfin chief economist Nela Richardson said. “And we’re still not quite recovered, though there has been some progress.”
Attendees and panelists discussed how younger generations will play into the reemergence of the housing market.
Twenty-three-year-olds are the largest age group in the U.S. — and 31 is the average home buyer age, said Rob Dietz, chief economist of the National Association of Home Builders.
Despite the fact that many millennials are not yet buying homes, they will.
“The traditional objectives are still in place,” Dietz said. “They may take a little longer. They’ve said the great delay follows the Great Depression. They’re going to go to school longer, get married later in life, have kids at an older age and probably buy a home later in life.”
Although millennials wait longer to buy homes, they see the financial benefit of buying rather than renting.
“This is the single best place where you can leverage your income at higher leverage rates than Wall Street is ever going to go,” said Mark Fleming, chief economist at First American Financial Corp.
For now, however, many millennials choose to rent, and half of all renters put one-third of their income toward rent, the panelists said.
Housing finance reform could push renters toward buying, session moderator David Jeffers said. Reform would allow an avenue for those with less-than-perfect credit to apply for loans they could actually afford. However, financial reform can take years to be debated, legislated, drafted and implemented.
“In the best case scenario, we’re a decade away from whatever this magic, new reinvention is,” said Jeffers, the executive vice president of policy and public affairs for the Council of Federal Home Loan Banks. “And I think that gives a lot of people pause.”
Looking toward the future, growing families are a prime group of potential homeowners that would benefit from financial reform and more affordable housing opportunities, the panelists said. However, growth is not only a matter of being able to afford a house, but owning one in a  good enough school district.
“The next four years are key,” Richardson said. “By 2025, 12 million new families will be created. Seventy-five percent will be Hispanic or African American.”
