It’s common knowledge by this point that millennials are killing everything. From napkins to diamonds to the future of the human race, it seems like no sacred institution or consumer good is safe from this generation of selfie-snapping murderers. Imagine my surprise, then, when Bloomberg News revealed that my generation is now beginning to have kids, move to the suburbs and purchase homes and cars like real Americans.

According to data released by Zillow Group, 18-to-34-year-olds have become the largest group of homebuyers in the US, making up some 42% of the total pool, and almost half live in the suburbs. This tracks with earlier data that said the average age of first-time home buyers is falling and millennials’ representation among said buyers is rising. It is also supported by studies showing that the flow of young professionals to cities has peaked, and the outflow of young couples to the suburbs has started up again.

Guess we weren’t bluffing when we said we’d love to buy homes and raise children, if and when we could afford it

“As more people move out of their parents’ basement – and there’s still quite a few living there – we expect to see continued healthy demand for homes,” Svenja Gudell, chief economist for Zillow, told Bloomberg. (Real original basement jibe, there.)

“Millennials delayed home ownership, just like they delayed getting married and having kids, but now they’re making very similar decisions to their parents.” Guess we weren’t bluffing when we said we’d love to buy homes and raise children, if and when we could afford it.

This data should come as sharp comeuppance to those who proposed a cultural or (lol) spiritual explanation for millennials’ failure to take on the conventional trappings of adulthood, aka the Leave it to Beaver ideal of a nuclear family living in a single-family home in suburbia. (An ideal which, it bears mentioning, only became widely available to working-class people – or the white ones, at least – during the post-second world war period.) While I’d love to claim some kind of unique moral depravity or punk rock iconoclasm for my generation, there’s simply no evidence to support it.

What the evidence does support is that millennials want the same things as our baby boomer parents, it’s just taking us longer to get them due to a flagging economy, crushing student loan debts, and the difficulty of getting a mortgage in the years directly following the financial crisis.

If anything, the fact that we are managing to buy homes at any age speaks to our enduring belief in the American dream and our dogged resilience in pursuit of it. (I say “our” like I’m not a broke, childless 32-year-old determined to stay in my rent-stabilized Bushwick dirt hovel till I die.)

Of course, we’re a bit different from our parents, in ways both good and bad. While the suburbanization of the mid-20th century was largely the result of “white flight” from crumbling inner cities, the current, slightly more diverse phenomenon is fueled by the high cost of urban living. The rent is too damn high.

In the past year, buying a home became more affordable than renting in 66% of US markets, up from 58% last year. In the markets where renting is still more affordable, like New York and San Francisco, the cost of housing is so high across the board that it doesn’t make much of a difference to rent instead. Plus, suburbanization is a worse indicator of prosperity than it used to be. As urban renewal pushes low-income people to the suburbs, suburban blight is on the rise, bringing shuttered shopping malls, opiate addiction and strained social service networks to these areas.

Still, the recent rebound in home ownership is a tentatively encouraging sign that the kids are, in fact, all right.