The American Dream has typically looked something like this: A steady job, a shiny new set of keys to a first home, marriage, two kids (and maybe a dog), all while building wealth along the way. For generations, that’s been the familiar “white-picket fence” picture of making it in America.
But that has run smack into “the great postponement,” an affordability crisis and economic stagnation that haven’t been seen in many years. Some of the younger generation’s response to these factors has been caricatured as “financial nihilism,” but young adults are still by and large hitting the same milestones their parents did, just in a different sequence, in a different timeline and often with different tools. It’s a more improvisational shot at the American Dream, because it has to be.
Young Americans have spent years watching home prices climb out of reach, while marriage and children are happening later and the traditional career ladder has become less predictable. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they’ve given up on the milestones generations before them chased. Instead, some are finding workarounds: buying homes that need work, renovating them piece by piece, earning money outside a traditional 9-to-5 and worrying less about doing any of it in the order they were supposed to.
And despite all the talk of Gen Z’s financial nihilism, many remain surprisingly optimistic. Nearly two-thirds of Gen Z adults say their generation faces tougher economic circumstances than previous generations, according to a nationally representative Urban Institute survey published in July. However, 56% still expect their personal financial situation to improve within the next year, and 42% think they’ll eventually be financially better off than their parents.
“They’re not just postponing life markers,” said Susan Wachter, a professor of real estate and finance at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, who has argued that this era amounts to a “great postponement”. Of Gen Z, she told Fortune,”They’re also taking a different path.”
To Wachter, the changes showing up in where young adults live, how they work and when they start families aren’t isolated trends. They’re different responses to the same economic constraints reshaping early adulthood.
Wachter said the economic world facing young people today looks dramatically different from the one their parents, and even some of their older siblings, entered. Housing affordability is a major part of it, but its effects extend well beyond whether someone can scrape together a down payment.
“We’ve not seen challenges in terms of affordability like this in more than a generation,” Wachter said.
The starter home isn’t so ‘turnkey’ anymore
Between 2019 and 2024, the inflation-adjusted median U.S. home value jumped 30%, from $269,600 to $350,000, according to Pew Research Center. Over the same period, inflation-adjusted median household income for households headed by someone under 40 increased just 9%.
The squeeze has dramatically changed who can afford to buy. In 2019, 56% of renter households under 40 earned enough to afford the monthly cost of owning a home. By 2024, just 37% did. And 89% of adults under 40 now say buying a home is harder for young adults than it was for their parents’ generation.
For young adults who do manage to break into the housing market, getting the keys may increasingly be just the beginning of the work.
Wachter said some young buyers are overcoming high housing costs by looking at older homes and fixer-uppers, putting their own time and labor into improvements or even renting out part of the property to help cover costs.
Those workarounds require “time, effort, and often creativity,” she said, and sometimes “an element of entrepreneurship.”
There’s plenty of evidence aspiring homeowners are willing to make those tradeoffs. Half of Americans planning to buy their first home in 2026 said they would feel comfortable buying a fixer-upper, according to a TD Bank survey of more than 1,000 prospective first-time buyers published in May. And despite the affordability crunch, 81% said they were optimistic about the housing market and the same share still considered homeownership a smart long-term investment.
The shift toward smaller projects is showing up at the country’s largest home-improvement retailer. Home Depot said this week that customers continued to spend on smaller repair and maintenance projects in its second quarter, even as housing affordability weighed on demand for larger renovations. The company said housing turnover remains at historically low levels, with no clear inflection point yet in sight.
Taskrabbit is seeing a version of that willingness to compromise play out among its customers.
As housing has become harder to afford, Chris Ager, Taskrabbit’s chief commercial officer, said the company is seeing younger customers take on smaller homes or properties that need more work rather than move farther away.
“Particularly younger generations are making the decision to optimize for location over perfection,” Ager told Fortune.
Once they’re in, the compromises continue. Customers are increasingly tackling renovations gradually rather than handing an entire project to a contractor.
“There isn’t the budget to do it all at once,” Ager said.
Instead, Ager said TaskRabbit is seeing clients renovate one room at a time, doing some of the work themselves and bringing in Taskers to handle other pieces as their budgets allow.
The shift is showing up in what people need help with, too. Furniture assembly, mounting, moving and cleaning are among TaskRabbit’s biggest categories, but yard work and outdoor maintenance is one of its fastest-growing categories this year, up roughly 40% year over year, according to Ager.
For a generation entering a housing market where the typical first-time buyer is now 40, those compromises offer one way around an affordability problem that isn’t going away quickly. Even prospective Gen Z buyers are still aiming considerably younger: 46% surveyed by TD said they expected to purchase their first home between ages 25 and 29.
The corporate ladder isn’t the only way up
Work is becoming less linear, too.
For many young workers, one paycheck is no longer the only way they earn. About 43% of Gen Z adults ages 18 to 29 report having a side hustle, according to a 2026 LendingTree survey. Gig and on-demand work, including food and grocery delivery, ridesharing, babysitting and pet sitting, was the most common form of side work among respondents.
Side hustles aren’t necessarily replacing traditional employment. For some, they’re another way to earn alongside it.
TaskRabbit is seeing its own version of that more flexible approach to work. The platform has Taskers who effectively use it as their full-time source of income, Ager said, alongside others who pick up jobs to fill gaps in their income or schedules while pursuing something else.
The company sees a bump in younger applicants each summer, he said, including people using TaskRabbit alongside school, part-time work or other pursuits.
“I think what we see in the Gen Z community is just a desire to have more non-traditional career paths,” Ager said. For some, the goal isn’t necessarily to leave a traditional career behind but to also have more than one way to earn.
And as artificial intelligence raises questions about the future of entry-level work, TaskRabbit occupies an unusual corner of the labor market. AI might help match a customer with the right person or better define a job before someone arrives, Ager said. It still can’t carry a couch up four flights of stairs or repaint a bedroom.
TaskRabbit sees its business as “pretty AI-resilient.”
“At the end of the day, those problems are going to be solved by two humans getting together to do the work,” said Ager.
The platform offers a window into how earning a living can increasingly be assembled from different sources rather than tied entirely to one employer.
Life doesn’t have to happen in order
Housing and work aren’t the only pieces moving around. Wachter’s research has found evidence connecting housing affordability with young adults remaining with their parents longer and postponing household formation, marriage and children.
For some, family wealth provides another route around the affordability problem. Parents who can afford to do so are helping adult children with down payments or giving them somewhere to live while they save, Wachter said.
That help is already built into the expectations of many would-be homeowners. Two-thirds of prospective first-time buyers surveyed by TD said they were receiving or expected to receive financial support from family or loved ones. Among Gen Z respondents, that figure climbed to 70%.
But that solution isn’t available to everyone. A parent’s home may not be near a strong job market, may not have room for an adult child, or the family may simply not have the wealth to provide a down payment.
For Wachter, those constraints help explain why the traditional sequence of adulthood is breaking apart. Young people are investing in financial assets, businesses and themselves while taking advantage of choices that weren’t always available to previous generations.
The bigger change may be the assumption that any of those milestones have to happen in a prescribed order.
“I do think this is the new normal,” Wachter said.
The American Dream hasn’t necessarily lost the house, financial independence, fulfilling work, marriage or children. But the step-by-step instructions that once came with it are becoming easier to ignore.
“It’s not a settled step-by-step pattern going through the march to adulthood markers that we’ve seen in the past,” Wachter said. “I think that’s a permanent shift.”
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