I wrote earlier Friday about US housing. Again. Again squared. Then cubed. The vexing circumstances still plaguing a half-frozen resale market are the editorial gift that keeps on giving.

Suffice to say it’s rough out there if you’re an aspiring homeowner. Rates are high, prices are higher and if you manage to get your foot in the door, upkeep’s a real b-tch.

If you’re young — and here I mean actually young, not “young” like “50’s the new 30” — you might rationally ask if it’s worth the hassle. Homeownership’s supposed to be the “American dream,” but it looks more and more nightmarish by the year financially.

Besides, who wants a mediocre house in the middle of nowhere when you can rent a great apartment in the middle of everything for the same money, often with some cash to spare. Cash you can spend on stuff you actually want, like designer clothes, vacations and “experiences,” whatever that means in your personal context.

Something else you can buy with the money you “save” (note the scare quotes) by renting instead of buying are stocks and meme coins, like $TRUMP. (“I don’t know much about it other than I launched it,” said Trump this week, of his namesake token which, however briefly, minted the president and his family nearly $30 billion on paper.)

“Housing is a source of funds for both stocks and crypto,” BofA’s Michael Hartnett said, demonstrating his penchant for what, on Wall Street, counts as out-of-the-box thinking (that’s a low bar in the staid world of sell-side strategists).

There’s the chart. Or there’s a chart. I like it, because it underscores my point from the article linked here at the outset — namely that the rent-versus-buy calculus is far from clear-cut these days, and it becomes even more equivocal when you factor in shifting preferences and priorities for today’s young adults versus previous generations.

“US housing affordability [is] hovering at 40-year lows [and] the price-to-rent ratio close to all-time highs,” Hartnett wrote, editorializing around the figure. On that simple measure, there’s almost never been a “worse” time to buy versus rent.

That, and changing views on what makes life worth living, go a long way towards explaining why, as Hartnett went on to note, the median age of first-time homebuyers in the US is now 38.

38’s not “old” in an absolute sense, but relative to the same metric tallied four decades ago, it’s Methuselah. In 1985, the median first-time buyer was just 29.

If you ask Hartnett, that trend, and particularly the sharp inflection in the 2020s, may be contributing to buoyant stocks and crypto.

“Millennials’ and Gen Z’s ‘can’t-buy-a-home’ liquidity” is getting “recycled into risk assets,” he said.