The millennial generation is split in 2: an older crowd with boomer-style comfort, a younger set going ‘back to the early 1900s’

Millennials were supposed to be one generation with one story — priced out, saddled with debt, perpetually behind. Jessica Lautz, has been tracking this story for years, even commissioning an annual “generational trends” report from her perch as deputy chief economist at the National Association of Realtors. When the report was released in April, she told Fortune that we’re at the point where it’s a structural issue: older millennials are now living a boomer-style existence where they can expect to own their own homes, while their younger counterparts aren’t so lucky.

But Lautz didn’t know that housing affordability experts at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis was working on the same issue.

Last week, researchers at the Minneapolis Fed led by Erik Hembre published research showing that the real under-35 homeownership rate is closer to 22% than the widely cited 37%, when measured by head of households: or, whether you own the home you live in.

Lautz told Fortune that she’s been circling the same trend in her own generational research for months. “I was excited when it came out,” she said. “I had no idea, obviously, but I think it captures the change in how people are living, and it does so in a smart way where it’s really looking at who’s in that household as opposed to the structure of that home.” When she really digs into the data, she added, she sees younger Americans under 35 years old being pushed toward a housing arrangement not seen at scale in America for more than a century.

Two Cohorts, Two Economies

NAR now splits millennial data into two groups — ages 36 to 45, and ages 27 to 35 — because the gap between them had grown too wide to report as a single number. Lautz called it a “definite split” in April, because older millennials have become the highest-earning, biggest-spending buyer segment in the entire housing market.

Their median household income is $132,700; they’re buying the largest homes of any generation at a median 2,100 square feet; and only 33% are first-time buyers, meaning most already own and are leveraging equity to trade up, running the same playbook boomers used for........

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