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Newly published research in the Journal of Planning Education and Research shows millennials are continuing to stay in urban landscapes even as they stop renting and become homeowners. The study, written by Elora Raymond of Clemson University, Jessica Dill of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, and Yongsung Lee of Georgia Institute of Technology, says the odds of millennials buying near a city center is 21% higher than for Generation X. CityLab’s Amanda Kolson Hurley has more details on the paper’s findings.

The study’s dataset was a random sample of more than 100,000 personal credit records from 2001 to 2016. Out of that, the researchers selected people who took out mortgages for the first time, then narrowed that subset to first-time buyers within a 10-mile radius of the country’s 50 biggest Metropolitan Statistical Areas. “It’s a random sample of a very large slice of the population, and it’s truly random,” said Raymond. Collecting 15 years of data let the authors compare Gen Xers and Millennials buying first homes at the same ages—but also at different ages.

Interestingly, despite all we’ve read about ballooning student-loan debt and stagnant incomes, Millennials buying homes for the first time had a higher median credit score than their older counterparts for most of the study period. The median age of first-time homebuyers actually went down slightly year on year from the peak of the housing boom—from 35 in 2001 to 33 in 2014. Credit tightened more for older buyers than for younger buyers after the crash, possibly because it had loosened more for them during the boom. That “may explain why first-time home purchases have fallen faster for older buyers than younger buyers,” the authors write.

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