Millennials have it rough these days.

The job market is abysmal, they are saddled with enormous college loan debt and many are living at home long past the age when their peers of past generations would have moved out on their own.

Millennials Entering Housing Markets

Even when millennials are successful in getting a job and wish to enter the hallowed ranks of those who purchase a home, they will find that there just aren’t many homes in their price range (usually under $200,000) to purchase. Many cities with high median home prices are simply out of their reach.

Some of this is due to a phenomenon known as NORCs, which stand for Naturally Occurring Retirement Communities. This is when a community comprised mostly of Baby Boomers decides to continue living in the homes they currently occupy, which means less homes coming onto the market for sale and less remodeling jobs available from home buyers in a given area.

Combine that with the trend of home builders catering to the aged-55-and-older luxury market, and you have a drastically reduced inventory of applicable homes for sale in the lower price ranges.

In addition, in many areas, land prices are at historically high levels, so even when construction costs might make a project marginally profitable, the added land costs can kill an incentive for a developer. Developers also relate that costs of labor and materials have increased and new zoning laws have put a crimp on density possibilities.

Local Governments Getting Involved

The only hope for millennials may be an idea from the past, whereby local governments provided an incentive, in conjunction with a standardized design (in some cases developed by a noted architect or firm) for a consortium of banks, local developers and community groups to build a prefabricated or pre-planned development on a grand scale. In past decades, millennials could pick out projects such as Moshe Safdie’s Habitat, built in the late 1960s in Montreal, or the Weißenhof housing estate, built in Stuttgart in the 1920s, that were constructed along these lines.

But such consortiums need to have an impetus to form and need powerful cheerleaders in their communities. In some cases, local governments and architects have started to make some progress toward these goals. In other places, such as Toronto, ON developers such as Alair Homes, a national homebuilder, have started to address this market segment.

It’s recognized that among the millennial generation, there is at least the desire, if not a demand, to own a home. A recent survey by Better Homes and Gardens magazine noted that, among Post-Millennials of adolescent age, 97 percent of those surveyed believed that one day they would own a home and 82 percent stated that home ownership is the most important component of the American Dream.

Now what millennials need to do is to be more vocal with this belief and perhaps to start taking action toward forming such consortiums with architects and local leaders. Of course, they also need to improve their financial standing, so that if and when such homes appear, they’re able to afford them.