I know more than a handful of people who have done this successfully, so I respectfully disagree.
I agree with the rest of your comment, just not the discounting hard work and being frugal part.
It's not a matter of working hard; sometimes there just aren't enough jobs to go around, or existing demand for someone to start a business to satisfy that demand.
I've known people who have saved for years, put down payments down, and then lost it all when their builder went bankrupt (and they had no recourse). Welcome back to square one.
5 years after I (a Gen Xer) finished college, I faced unemployment and mortgage rates just under 6%.
Today the unemployment rate is 5.5% and the mortgage interest rate is under 4%.
While buying a first house is never an easy thing to do, there are plenty of indicators that it's not harder today than it was in the past.
People wanting to start a business that isn't viable, bummer. Not enough jobs: I delivered papers, barbacked, worked a day job, figured it out. If they picked a bad builder, that sucks. Find your recourse. Be smart, be mature, figure it out.
Entitlement is a problem, working hard is not.
As a millenial with hope of some sort of real estate in my future, I've been thinking of buying an empty/distressed lot and rebuilding it, but I don't know how realistic that is.
Very reasonable. I've done this before. Let me know if you'd like to chat over email, and I'll get you my contact info.
People don't want to subsidize first time homebuyers, but they have no problem with the government subsidizing landlords (depreciation allowances, tax deductible mortgage interest). After so much distressed property ended up on the market after the housing collapse, private equity money swooped in to suck all the property up and charge "market" rent.
Millennials either need to adjust their expectations (get remote jobs, not be tied to areas with high cost of living that are going to extract a large part of their income from them) or fall into enough money to not only buy a property, but to weather any financial disasters they have so as to not lose their equity by losing their home. Hustling hard for years on end while being frugal is another option, but it is no guarantee of success.