“Buy or Rent”: What Do Metropolitan Youth Choose

In the framework of financial literacy research, young people look like a not-too-responsible subject, prone to irrational consumption and not having the habit of long-term financial planning . However, the social context in which the burden of social spending is increasingly shifted onto the shoulders of the citizens, requires from them financial discipline, knowledge of financial instruments, and rational decisions . The article analyses the behaviour of metropolitan youth in the housing market . We showed that in the long term, the majority of young people are focused on the purchase of their own homes . It is due to the reluctance in the presence of the family to depend on the landlord and direct their funds into the “other people’s pocket”, as well as the perception of their housing as an asset . Satisfying modest requests of respondents is impossible without seeking financial assistance . A little more than half of the respondents see a bank as a lender, and more than a third of respondents see relatives or friends as a lender . Nearly half of the participants in the mass survey directly or indirectly faced mortgage lending; in most cases this experience was “rather positive” . As an alternative solution to the housing problem, young people see rent, the main advantage of which is increased mobility . Rent is not excluded and in the presence of own housing, which in this case will be rented . Despite their generally optimistic attitude, about half of the respondents believe that today housing is an intractable problem for young people . According to respondents, the state could help young people by implementing such measures as monitoring the reasonableness of pricing; subsidising mortgage interest or allocating quotas for young families and scarce staff; development of rental housing; increase of scholarships and promotion of employment for graduates so that young people start forming savings as early as possible; effective regional development policy allowing to unload the capital.

youth, residential real estate, rental housing, housing policy, financial literacy, sharing economy

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