The Americans giving up on homeownership: Economists Seung Hyeong Lee (of Northwestern University) and Younggeun Yoo (of the University of Chicago) “built a mathematical model of consumer behavior,” per The Washington Post, that attempts to model out what happens when people believe early in their careers that they will never be able to afford a home purchase.

“Using a database that has tracked the transactions of more than 500,000 Americans since 2014, they examined what happened when home prices rose in a given county. In communities where such spikes occurred, they discovered that renters within the top income quintile (who earned more than $7,500 a month, on average) pulled back on credit card spending, especially on luxuries and non-necessities. This suggests they were trying to save more for a home purchase, the researchers said,” per the Post‘s writeup. “But renters in the lowest income quintile (generally those earning less than $3,000 a month) did the opposite: They upped credit card spending, by 3 percent on average, the paper said.”

Though their research may be sound, there is something rather odd about people seeing homeownership as the only—or even the best—way of investing their money and building toward a financially secure future. The idea that one must buy a home before they can move on toward other markers of adulthood retains a firm grip on the American psyche but has become increasingly difficult to effectuate, particularly in the high-cost-of-living areas where the best-paying jobs can be found. Still, there are lots of other ways to save your money for your future, and feeling that a home purchase is out of reach doesn’t render those useless.

Scenes from New York: “A New Jersey musician filed a lawsuit on Monday against a prominent Off Broadway theater, alleging that a discount offered to people of color to attend a recent performance of a play was racially discriminatory,” reports The New York Times. “The lawsuit, filed against Playwrights Horizons, a highly regarded Off Broadway theater in Midtown Manhattan, was facilitated by Edward Blum, a nationally known lawyer who for years has challenged affirmative action and other race-based policies in higher education and beyond. Blum leads an organization, American Alliance for Equal Rights, that has filed 21 lawsuits in the last two years, including one last year that successfully challenged an internship for Latinos at the Smithsonian Institution.”