I think this is key. Property ownership comes with both opportunity costs and liability. When people have choices, sometimes they prefer to avoid those downsides to ownership for economically rational reasons.
I think a lot of older generation Americans grew up obsessed with ownership, particular of cars and houses, as crucial symbols of status and success. In my conversations with them I often hear them portray these as indicators rather than just symbols. So it’s not just that owning a home impresses your parents, it’s that you’re not an adult until you own your own home.
At the end of the day I think it’s hard for each generation to understand how much the world has changed and how much the culture of next generation has changed as a result. And they’re uncomfortable with this change, maybe understandably.
Therefore it’s understandable, though IMO misguided, for them to point at changing preferences and behaviors and mistake these as causes of the negative societal shifts they see, rather than understand them as being effects of the societal changes that have happened already.
Easiest case in point, the first generation of car-using adults suddenly experienced a massive glut of “useful” land and housing, and then a subsequent era of high inflation, thus it was very easy for them to buy a home and those who did prosepered at the expense of the banks as their mortgages hedged a bunch of value against inflation.
The second generation (the boomers) didn’t get quite as good of a deal, but it was still pretty easy for them to own a comfortable home with a reasonable commute, and they experienced long runs of appreciation, so their belief that this was the “best way to live” was validated.
But for the kids of the boomers (millennial), urban sprawl had already consumed most of the best near-city land, while the rural economy has been stagnant. Thus the trade-off to follow the old recipe is a brutal commute or else house prices that are out of reach for most of us. Many also came of age in the recession.
Therefore it should not be surprising that the Millenials did not find it viable to be obsessed with ownership, and that they would have backlashed against it in some ways including this preference for finding ways to enjoy things without incurring capital costs, as the so-called “sharing economy” has emerged to offer.
It may be that the Millenial generation is much less wealthy in the end. But that seems to me mostly the fault of the Builders and the Boomers and the result of the choices they made, and that the “renter” mindset is more a result of their lower wealth and harder economic prospects rather than the cause.