17 ms·

Report: Young adults more likely to live with parents than spouses

254 points by EndXA 7y ago

zarro 7y ago
Its because it doesn't make sense to move out, the real estate markets stagnation makes taking out a huge loan almost feel like indentured servitude. why? Because it feels like your always working to pay off the landlord or the bank just so you can have somewhere to sleep. Even if you own it outright, property and taxes are 10k/y, now your paying $1k/m just to have a place to sleep before you can even spend money and work for the things that you want. The worst of it, is as prices go up there should be a huge push to build more to balance the market, but than you have all these huge artificial barriers to entry to build preventing that from happening. So it makes sense to try to live with parents, make enough money to buy your house outright so at least than you have a chance to get out from indentured servitude. To be honest most of us are just hoping the real estate market collapses, or these barriers to entry are overcome so that prices can drop because we are not willing to pay these prices which amount to servitude. Our refusal for this type of "life" is what causes a decreased in birth rates and growth in general in the economy.
- refurb 7y ago
  You don’t think that 40 years ago people did the same? I remember my father buying a house for $30,000 (wow! So lucky) only to learn his home payment was over 50% of his take-home pay (oh, not so lucky).
  - whymsicalburito 7y ago
    I would be super stoked if I could find a house to buy in SoCal and only have to spend 50% of my income!
  - authoritarian 7y ago
    When my dad grew up (in Washington) he was able to pay his college tuition in full and save for a downpayment on his home by working in the kitchen at the university. Nowadays, if you went to University full time and then purchased a house out of college with your only income being a minor kitchen job at whatever school you attended you'd likely have $100k+ of debt
    - refurb 7y ago
      Desirability of housing in particular cities changes over time. Post college I lived in a small town in Michigan and saved up a down payment for a house in 2 years making less than $50k. You can still do it, but not in the most desirable US cities.
  - faissaloo 7y ago
    If I could buy a house for 30k I would be over the moon.
  - srj 7y ago
    The mortgage price as a ratio to median income has gone up since then (nearly doubled iirc).
gavanwoolery 7y ago
There is something to be said for more tribal-esque living. If you live with close relatives, you can probably drastically reduce the amount of bills, mortgages, babysitters / caregivers, and cars that everyone pays for, at the cost of having to buy a larger house potentially.
- zanny 7y ago
  The problem is that, while there is now a large stock of massively oversized residences to have large families occupy, said residences are built around an expectation of extravagance that makes them far removed from commercial, business, or even other residential areas. They are isolated by design and extraordinarily expensive to maintain both publicly and privately. If that square footage was simply placed somewhere with reasonable local access to services it would be less concerning how disastrous the housing and property markets are, but the McMansions are going to enter total obsolescence and abandonment when their current residents want to downsize and nobody can afford to live there.
binarymax 7y ago
Multi-generational homes are what we should really be doing as a society anyway. It's more efficient economically and environmentally. The benefits are significant in so many ways.
- SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
  It's also career limiting and traps your kids into a life they may not want.
- zanny 7y ago
  You don't get to choose your parents. You choose your friends, your career, etc. If economic pressure means you can't choose where you live, you can be left miserable or abused with no way out. I'd rather see a diversity of housing options ranging from very environmentally efficient dense apartments to unsustainable mcmansions than trapping people in often terrible circumstances.
opportune 7y ago
The issue with a housing crunch and run away rents is that due to our economic system, it’s kind of too big to fail. If rents and mortgages are a certain price, people keep taking out mortgages for that price with the assumption that prices won’t go down. So there is a huge portion of people and loans whose economic situation is dependent on rents and housing prices not going down. If enough people buy into a delusion with high risk to ruin, it’s not longer a delusion Let’s say over the course of 5 years rents decreased by half in the Bay Area. The real estate market would also probably decrease by about half. Suddenly tons of people are underwater on their loans, both regular homeowners and many investors who are no longer able to cover their loans with the market rent. That’s bad for banks and a huge portion of the populace, and could cause a huge economic meltdown. So it’s politically untenable. The only actual solutions I can think of are to never let housing supply become an issue, let inflation take care of it (if people’s income increases due to inflation, and housing prices stay the same, it prevents homeowner/investor insolvency while effectively reducing rent), or just wait for some big natural disaster. So hopefully the big one comes soon and gives us a chance to rethink how we build
- JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
  Most people are long-term owners. While I don't disagree that some people would experience a capital loss, you have to realize that only a small portion of the housing supply turns over annually. The percentage of people underwater may not be as high as you think. It prices fell by half, that would be all Bay Area homes sold after 2012. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SFXRSA https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SFXRSA
dang 7y ago
Submitted URL was https://www.apartmentlist.com/rentonomics/reconfiguring-the-american-household/ https://www.apartmentlist.com/rentonomics/reconfiguring-the-... but is down. Cached copy: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?ei=MUSWXbr9Lpb6-gTrxLP4AQ&q=cache%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.apartmentlist.com%2Frentonomics%2Freconfiguring-the-american-household%2F&oq=cache%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.apartmentlist.com%2Frentonomics%2Freconfiguring-the-american-household%2F&gs_l=psy-ab.3...2634.2634..2743...0.2..0.48.48.1......0....1..gws-wiz.......0i71.D5T3oYYJTmw&ved=0ahUKEwj62cGQ4oDlAhUWvZ4KHWviDB8Q4dUDCAs&uact=5 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?ei=MUSWXbr9Lpb6.... In the meantime we switched the URL above to a news article about the report. Edit: site seems back up now, so switched back to the original from https://www.10news.com/news/local-news/report-young-adults-more-likely-to-live-with-parents-than-spouses https://www.10news.com/news/local-news/report-young-adults-m....
bregma 7y ago
My kids haven't come home, but they keep sending all their stuff to my house every time they move. At their age, I just didn't have the stuff they have. I couldn't afford things like furniture, a TV, crates of dishes, or boxes of clothing. I had student debt to pay off, enough clothes to last between laundries without going too rank, and a set of pots and pans that were good enough to eat out of. When I moved, I'd share a borrowed station wagon with a friend to move all out stuff in one trip. I only just earned my empty nest. If one of my kids comes back for a "long term visit", they'll get tired of being questioned on when they're moving back to their own place.
- rocky1138 7y ago
  It's a fair point, but a lot of stuff these days is cheaper than it used to be. Consider Dollarama or Dollar Tree. You can outfit a kitchen with a full set of dishes and utensils and everything else for $50. TVs and other things are super cheap and sometimes free, as well.
notadoc 7y ago
It's the economy, to point out the obvious.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
fiftyfifty 7y ago
Is this such a bad thing? In places like Japan and Hawaii this has been a common practice for a long time. As long as the younger generation is contributing to the household in someway (working, helping out around the house or helping to provide care for younger or elderly family members etc) and not living in the basement and playing video games 24-7, it seems like a far better arrangement. Talk to almost any elderly people living alone and you'll find they are terribly lonely, and that seems to be a complaint with a lot of Millennials as well. If you have no plans to marry and start a family of your own in the near future why not live with you parents?
- war1025 7y ago
  My interpretation (which could be completely wrong) is that people perceive a difference between "living with your parents" and "your parents living with you". I think it's a matter of who is the head of the household (i.e. the person who is pulling the most weight regarding the financial stability of the household). So "young adults living with their parents" is interpreted as "young adults not becoming functioning members of society" That said, I agree pretty much entirely with your comment.
- chickenpotpie 7y ago
  There's a difference between living with your parents because it's more practical and living with your parents because it's all you can afford. It's fine to create a society that values taking care of parents as they age, but not okay to create one where parents are taken care of because their children have no other choice. I also have a hard time calling the parents of a 26-year-old "elderly." Young adults today don't hate their parents, they just want the same opportunities they had.
  - fiftyfifty 7y ago
    I'm a recent empty-nester, my kids are all in their late teens/early twenties, I wouldn't count myself as elderly either. I wouldn't mind at all if one or more of my kids moved back in with us long term, provided that they helped around the house and preferably were employed in some manner and could pay a bit of rent. I think where people have problems is when adult children are living at home and not working and are not really contributing members of the household. Heck I'd even be willing to support an adult child financially for quit a while if they were willing to really help with household tasks, like cooking, cleaning, grocery shopping, yard work etc. I'm not interested in supporting an adult child that just wants to do nothing all day and be taken care of like they are 10 years old the rest of their life, and that seems to be a common occurrence these days as well. I do think it's sad that modern society has kind of dismantled the extended family. That it's become such a faux pas to have multiple generations living under the same roof. Instead it somehow makes sense to leave our small children with complete strangers for most of the day and have our young adults living alone in apartments scarcely bigger than a box a continent away in the name of starting careers. I honestly think we are overdue for a reversal in some of these trends.
SubiculumCode 7y ago
When housing prices are nearly untenable for middle age adults, is it a surprise that young adults stay home longer?
cannabis_sam 7y ago
It’s a fucking crime how older generations are pulling up the ladder behind them. It works since these egotistical morons are democratically in a majority. Gonna be interesting to see how this shit develops when it hits the fan. If a democratic minority is demanding power based on land, how are we not gonna be in a feudal society?
- onlyrealcuzzo 7y ago
  I was at a party where the topic of discussion was that: You should only be able to vote if you own land. It was a pool party, of all things, and I contemplated slowly submerging into the water and just staying there until I drowned.
  - NTDF9 7y ago
    This is the exact rules for voting when women and slaves were disenfranchised. At its core, America has not changed one bit since.
    - skya 7y ago
      The most important point in this context is that non land-owning or poor white men were also disenfranchised.
      - NTDF9 7y ago
        Yep. I was not talking about racism. I'm talking fundamentally about systemic disenfranchisement that hasn't changed even today.
- john_moscow 7y ago
  The problem is that the alternative isn't sustainable. Sure, we can solve the problem for one generation by building enough small apartments to accommodate the current demand. Except once the demand picks up due to the population growth and immigration, the problem will return. So what do we do next? Communal apartments with one room per family? Some sort of dormitories with "hotbedding" for everyone? Given the massive inequality in the population density and cost of living, looking into remote work or starting your own business in a lower CoL area could be a much better alternative to demanding someone else to drastically lower their living standard.
zaroth 7y ago
Isn’t this mainly because young adults are much less likely to be married? Hard to live with your spouse if you’re not even married. What’s actually surprising to me is that 80% of 26 years olds were married 50 years ago!
davidw 7y ago
I guess that's to be expected when those parents are the ones going to all the planning commission and city council meetings to put a stop to the construction of housing. The US builds more 3 car garages than 1 bedroom apartments: https://www.curbed.com/2016/10/26/13423358/three-car-garages-us-apartments https://www.curbed.com/2016/10/26/13423358/three-car-garages...
- bjornjaja 7y ago
  They also build—knowingly—on flood planes without concern for buyers. They also use shitty materials. Compare a modern house with century-or-more home which are often timeless art pieces.
  - claudiulodro 7y ago
    I think this is selection bias, because all of the junk old homes have fallen apart or been torn down by now. I get what you're saying though: older houses tend to use more real wood and bricks and other materials which are now done with cheaper, modern equivalents like drywall and plywood.
- beams_of_light 7y ago
  The problem old people have with apartments is that they attract perceived ne'er-do-wells with little financial resources. Harold the Retiree does not want to hear your Subaru with the fart cannon on the back going up and down the road while he's trying to watch the sun set on his back porch, doesn't want your drug dealer causing trouble on his block, and certainly doesn't care to see your piercings and tattoos in the grocery store.
  - non-entity 7y ago
    > doesn't care to see your piercings and tattoos in the grocery store. Harold can fuck right off then because that's not his business. The other two, could potentially be an issue, however, but in my experience, most apartments like that are not filled with retirees, but working class individuals and to an extent working class families.
SamuelAdams 7y ago
Here's the reddit post, since the website seems to be crashing. https://old.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/dchx6y/in_america_young_adults_are_now_more_likely_to/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/dchx6y/in_... Here's the author's source data: https://old.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/dchx6y/in_america_young_adults_are_now_more_likely_to/f28a459/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/dchx6y/in_...
deevolution 7y ago
The_rent_is_too_damn_high.gif
- seph-reed 7y ago
  NEEERRRRRDSS.gif
distant_hat 7y ago
The claim here is confounded by overall decline in marriage rates. If you look at people living with a partner the numbers are not as stark though an increase in living with parents is still there.
- HarryHirsch 7y ago
  The decline of marriage rate may not be a confounder. Young people live with their parents because of the lack of financial stability and they are not good marriage prospects because of the lack of financial stability.
  - castlecrasher2 7y ago
    Does marriage increase financial stability? My personal bias says yes but I may be incorrect on that.
    - JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
      It doesn't increase financial stability, it's a sign that you've achieved it. Though, a married man may seem more hirable to a company, since they can presume he needs the income to support not only himself, but his family.
      - chickenpotpie 7y ago
        I don't see why marriage doesn't increase financial stability. Marriage is basically getting an incredibly efficient roommate. A spouse is a roommate that is fine with sharing a bedroom, a bathroom, can give you insurance, lower your taxes, etc.
        abledon 7y ago
        and each day a RNG fires off from 1->10000 and if it hits in the target range, you lose half your assets lol
zxcvvcxz 7y ago
This is what happens with feminism and modern loose moral culture: you have a constant dating roulette optimizing for novelty and fun.
ngngngng 7y ago
The missing number here is how many married people live with their parents? In my experience that seems to be rising. I live in an area with lots of people married before 26 (Utah), but a significant amount of my married friends under 26 live with one of their parents.
durnygbur 7y ago
At this point finding a job in any major EU city is easier than finding housing which is not teporary housing paid per night. Taking a mental shortcut, the housing market invalidates the EU free movement of workers. If getting through the interview processes is tiring enough already, so many ways one can get scammed, abused, cheated, exploited by all kind of dodgy landlords makes he whole deal just not worth it.
- zanny 7y ago
  Why are all western societies like this? East Asia doesn't hesitate to build dense apartments from Jakarta to Seoul. I don't buy the "cultural homogeneity peaceful society" argument because the amount of cultural diversity across the half the human population living in that area is colossal. But without fail almost everywhere in the Americas and Europe is structurally against density in any form and systemically fights it.
  - UnFleshedOne 7y ago
    It might be because west can (or could) afford to prefer low density (for a portion of people significant enough to affect laws and zoning). All those other places never could afford suburbs.
  - ChuckNorris89 7y ago
    Easy, I live in Western Europe and they absolutely hate high density living as it's seen as eye-sore sardine housing for the poor and lower class and nobody wants to live in or around such buildings/neighborhoods as it'll turn into slums so it's a real hot potato.
  - TrackerFF 7y ago
    There's also this quirky thought many medium-sized cities in Europe have: They want to upsides of being a "big city", but they don't want to identify as a "big city". This means: no big ugly blocks, skyscrapers, etc. People want to have spacious homes and living areas, and beautiful neighborhoods. They basically want to be suburbs, but 5 min walk from everything important, and max 30 min drive from work.
andrepd 7y ago
A bit misleading no? The percentage of people living "with spouse" has been cannibalized by the people living "with partner".
JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
If birth rates decline and immigration is stymied, the United States is going to find itself in an extremely difficult position with entitlement programs, which largely depend on the working population being as large, or larger, than the retired population, for adequate funding.
- ModernMech 7y ago
  If? "The United States’ birthrate fell for a fourth consecutive year in 2018, bringing the number of people born in the country to its lowest level in 32 years" https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/17/us/us-birthrate-decrease.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/17/us/us-birthrate-decrease.... I don't think I need a citation to support the claim that the US is also currently trying to stymie immigration.
  - greatestdana 7y ago
    No citation? No citation! The US is the most welcoming, does the best and greatest job at welcoming all immigrants from non-sh*thole countries! Countries like Norway, Sweden, Denmark. All the great countries! No collusion no collusion. China should really investigate the Biden crooks btw.
    - dang 7y ago
      Please don't do this here.
- standardUser 7y ago
  Up until now, the US has largely bucked this trend due to our above average immigration rates. The worst hit developed nation? Japan, which happens to have the most restrictive immigration policies. We limit immigration at our own peril.
- zanny 7y ago
  This thinking is counter to acknowledging the modern automation revolution. Wealth and productivity are largely becoming detached from people, and as such the sources of revenue western nations use to fund entitlements wouldn't be going to go away as people age out of hard labor years if the tax burden was on the corporate entities rather than individual income / social security / etc taxes. The money is still there and will likely not go anywhere except into fewer hands and pockets. Its up to societies to actually adjust their tax model to curtail it.
Dumblydorr 7y ago
Intergenerational housing is the historical norm. It seems the 20th century was a flash in the pan, if income and wealth inequality on top of social changes have led us here. Do the wealthy care about this and declining birth rates due to lower resources and strained youth? They control policy and there's no policy promoting improvements on this front except from optimistic primary candidates. I just don't see this changing. I'm 30 and over half of my friends spent at least 2 years at home in their 20s. Every single time the issue was finances, they needed cheap digs as their debt and low income disallowed renting.
- FreedomToCreate 7y ago
  Intergenerational housing doesn't work for people who end up living in a different city than there parents or grandparents due to work. And a large portion of the population is in that situation. I grew up in the rural mid-west. Good luck working on robotics there. I had to move to a city to get the resources I needed to do the work I want. However that city also happens to have no housing and exorbitant rent. With rent eating up 30% of my income, taxes the other 30%, the path to saving for a small home in the city puts me a decade, if not decades behind where the previous generation began to set-up there homes.
  - lotsofpulp 7y ago
    Hence it’s very important to be born to the right parents.
sproketboy 7y ago
FAIL
buss 7y ago
One of the myriad reasons I'm running for office here in San Francisco. We've created a completely broken system that's akin to generational theft by boomers from their own children. Time to build more housing. buss2020.org
- refurb 7y ago
  Good luck! SFers aren’t interested in more housing. That’s painfully apparent by who they re-elect each time.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
sgdpk 7y ago
This fact is slightly misleadin, because the data shows that there are more people living with a spouse _or_ a partner than with parents. So there seem to be two reasons for these figures: a larger fraction of people living with parents and less (or later) weddings.
eranima 7y ago
The sorry state of the housing market is probably the most to blame. In decades past people could get starter homes much closer to high-paying jobs. Now you have to suffer through a very long commute.
TrackerFF 7y ago
In my city a 400 sq.ft "starter" apartment will cost you around $300k, and there's 15% down payment too - so young adults straight out of college need to have $45k in cash, just to get a mortgage. Rent for a similar apartment is around $1200-$1500 month. If you start at zero, and have a regular paying professional job, you'll spend around 3-5 years saving up for the down payment - depending on how frugal you live. But if you have resourceful parents, it's no problem to get your own place. Banks will gladly re-mortgage their (paid down) house, or use it as collateral. In fact, there's quite a divide here, first-time house owners are getting younger, because their parents will bankroll the mortgage / down payment, just to get their kids in on the housing market. They know that if they have to wait 5-10 years, the market will be much more expensive. The big problem (IMO) with our housing market is that it takes too much time to get projects started, especially big affordable apartment complexes, because the established owners will engage in full-force NIMBY-ism warfare on any developers that dare to steal their precious sunlight or "visual pollution". I don't live in the US, but I feel we share a lot of the similar problems when it comes to the housing market.
- ghaff 7y ago
  How many people straight out of school even want to buy a place? Young people in general tend to be more mobile even if it's often within a general metro area. Buying a house (or even a condo) really limits your ability to easily move and, depending upon the type of housing, often is a significant time commitment as well.
  - vonmoltke 7y ago
    I wanted to, and did, buy as soon as I was able after graduating college. I admit to being an oddball, though. I hate moving and value the ability modify my living space without restriction (building codes notwithstanding) over location flexibility.
  - CountSessine 7y ago
    In most housing markets, the cost of housing is at least somewhat similar to the dividend-discounted future net cost of rent. High rents and high home listing prices are usually connected. So if you don't want to buy a house, you probably want to rent and that's going to be seriously over-priced too.
baked_ziti 7y ago
Decades of stagnant wage growth combined with decades of the "charge what the market will bear" mantra ensuring you're paying the absolute maximum you can possibly tolerate have resulted in people earning less with which to buy things that cost more. This setup is going to be difficult to navigate for a lot of people. The cost of housing and rent outpace inflation by a wide margin and cost considerably more than they did in the past. The age of the typical home buyer has increased 10-20 years in the last 40 years. Living costs more now than it did 40 years ago. It's not such a surprise then that fewer are able to achieve, or are achieving later in life, what used to be very common life milestones.
- war1025 7y ago
  If you average things out over a longer period, we are still significantly better off than we were say 100 or 150 years ago. Really I think a lot of the "things aren't getting better" mindset is just a reaction to the fact that the beginning of our current societal "working memory" is the post-WWII economic boom. When your benchmark for prosperity is literally the best growth period on record, you're bound to be disappointed.
  - Guvante 7y ago
    Please show an example of a 150 year gap where the average person wasn't significantly better off in written history. Otherwise your statement is tautological and thus worthless. Also your growth contrast is so lacking in details I can't find a counterpoint as you didn't really make a point. Especially when what you are replying to is about inequality and you are talking about economic growth.
    - war1025 7y ago
      > Please show an example of a 150 year gap where the average person wasn't significantly better off. I take this to mean where person living in year X was not better off than person living in year (X - 150). In that case, literally any time in human history before the industrial revolution. 150 years is an insignificant blip on the timeline of history. As to your other comment, inequality and economic growth are intrinsically linked. The inequality people are complaining about is an unequal share in the economic growth of the society.
opportune 7y ago
Even though the idea kind of disgusts me, I wish companies like Facebook, Apple, Google, etc would experiment with building new campuses in the middle of nowhere as “planned cities” complete with airports connecting to regional hubs, housing, good public transportation, etc. Employees could take home more of their salaries. The only thing disgusting me more is how expensive Bay Area rent and property are, and how people who moved here long ago and didn’t contribute to the tech boom get to cannibalize our incomes by restricting housing supply. This would also relieve housing pressure in the Bay Area, and let native kids not in the tech industry maybe one day move into their own places without waiting for their parents to die.
- magduf 7y ago
  Sorry, your idea is lunacy, and here's why: >Employees could take home more of their salaries. That's not how it works. These companies would pay much lower salaries, with the justification that "the cost of living is much lower". We already see this whenever companies have multiple locations, with any of those locations in low-CoL areas. They'll push employees to relocate to the cheap place, but the employees don't get to keep those high salaries.
  - opportune 7y ago
    We’ll see, since these employers are near the top of the pay scale usually they are pretty competitive with pay to attract employees. I know for a lot of them, they don’t pay that much lower (maybe 10%) even for offices in low CoL areas For businesses in general, I agree. But there’s a reason I listed these particular ones
  - srj 7y ago
    Pay is not based on the cost of living but on the area job market. These can have a relationship but are not the same. London is an example of an expensive city where software engineering wages are relatively low. If there's robust competition and a shortage of people, the salaries will be high.
    - 7y ago
faissaloo 7y ago
As a young person it legitimately angers me that even despite being an extremely fortunate person working a job that makes good money and with no debt I still won't be able to own a house until I'm 24 which makes me wonder 'how can anyone hope to raise get married and raise a family under these conditions?'
- uwuhn 7y ago
  Same but until I'm 40
dugokontov 7y ago
There is an interesting map presentation of similar data from 2014: https://census.socialexplorer.com/young-adults/#/ https://census.socialexplorer.com/young-adults/#/ It's interesting to see different trends between young adults in different decades. New generations tend to living with parents more often, they are more educated, but earn less in average.
WilTimSon 7y ago
Well, the housing market is a mess in pretty much all first-world countries, right? There's also the fact that less and less young people are getting married, favoring long-term partnerships without any ceremonies instead. Top it off with wages rising slowly, disproportionate to the speed at which housing costs climb. I don't have kids and likely never will but I won't be surprised if my mates' children will have to live with them until they turn 30 at least. And those are all reasonably steady families with good incomes.
vidanay 7y ago
Although I agree that the primary causes identified in this thread are far from ideal, I also think there is nothing wrong with multigenerational housing.
fuguza 7y ago
At least that our government wants!
AlexTWithBeard 7y ago
For a modern person getting married has few questionable benefits and a lot of obvious drawbacks. Totally understandable.
nearbuy 7y ago
Young adults are also more likely to have parents than spouses. This doesn't seem so surprising. The chart shows in 1968, about 80% of 26 year olds lived with a spouse. Today, even if every married 26 year old lived with their spouse, we'd only hit about 32% of 26 year olds. They don't group people living with their unmarried partner with people living with a spouse. Based on their chart, 23 is the age at which most people no longer live with their parents.
- big_chungus 7y ago
  > They don't group people living with their unmarried partner with people living with a spouse? Isn't this number pretty insignificantly small? Also, not being married severely complicates things like joint ownership and sharing an income, precisely the sorts of things that make buying a house easier.
  - nearbuy 7y ago
    It's shown in the article and it's not small at all. It's the 3rd largest group after parents and spouse. 24% live with a spouse and 17% with a partner.
    - big_chungus 7y ago
      Goodness gracious, I had no idea twenty-four percent of young people found it acceptable to shack up and live in sin. It is no wonder we have such cultural problems today, nor is it any wonder they are so rapidly increasing. That said, see my above comments about why you cannot treat married people amd those people the same.
      - nearbuy 7y ago
        I'm guessing this is a religious view (Christian or Muslim maybe?). Where I'm from it's both common and normal for people to never marry their lifelong partner and even raise a family together.
scarface74 7y ago
Objectively, I don’t see a problem with this. It makes perfect sense to pool your resources and live with family until you get your own family. I’m not sure how much longer I would have lived at home if I hadn’t moved out of town for work the week after graduating from college.

254 points by EndXA 7y ago

Its because it doesn't make sense to move out, the real estate markets stagnation makes taking out a huge loan almost feel like indentured servitude. why? Because it feels like your always working to pay off the landlord or the bank just so you can have somewhere to sleep. Even if you own it outright, property and taxes are 10k/y, now your paying $1k/m just to have a place to sleep before you can even spend money and work for the things that you want. The worst of it, is as prices go up there should be a huge push to build more to balance the market, but than you have all these huge artificial barriers to entry to build preventing that from happening. So it makes sense to try to live with parents, make enough money to buy your house outright so at least than you have a chance to get out from indentured servitude. To be honest most of us are just hoping the real estate market collapses, or these barriers to entry are overcome so that prices can drop because we are not willing to pay these prices which amount to servitude. Our refusal for this type of "life" is what causes a decreased in birth rates and growth in general in the economy.

refurb 7y ago
You don’t think that 40 years ago people did the same? I remember my father buying a house for $30,000 (wow! So lucky) only to learn his home payment was over 50% of his take-home pay (oh, not so lucky).
- whymsicalburito 7y ago
  I would be super stoked if I could find a house to buy in SoCal and only have to spend 50% of my income!
- authoritarian 7y ago
  When my dad grew up (in Washington) he was able to pay his college tuition in full and save for a downpayment on his home by working in the kitchen at the university. Nowadays, if you went to University full time and then purchased a house out of college with your only income being a minor kitchen job at whatever school you attended you'd likely have $100k+ of debt
  - refurb 7y ago
    Desirability of housing in particular cities changes over time. Post college I lived in a small town in Michigan and saved up a down payment for a house in 2 years making less than $50k. You can still do it, but not in the most desirable US cities.
- faissaloo 7y ago
  If I could buy a house for 30k I would be over the moon.
- srj 7y ago
  The mortgage price as a ratio to median income has gone up since then (nearly doubled iirc).

gavanwoolery 7y ago

There is something to be said for more tribal-esque living. If you live with close relatives, you can probably drastically reduce the amount of bills, mortgages, babysitters / caregivers, and cars that everyone pays for, at the cost of having to buy a larger house potentially.

zanny 7y ago
The problem is that, while there is now a large stock of massively oversized residences to have large families occupy, said residences are built around an expectation of extravagance that makes them far removed from commercial, business, or even other residential areas. They are isolated by design and extraordinarily expensive to maintain both publicly and privately. If that square footage was simply placed somewhere with reasonable local access to services it would be less concerning how disastrous the housing and property markets are, but the McMansions are going to enter total obsolescence and abandonment when their current residents want to downsize and nobody can afford to live there.

binarymax 7y ago

Multi-generational homes are what we should really be doing as a society anyway. It's more efficient economically and environmentally. The benefits are significant in so many ways.

SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
It's also career limiting and traps your kids into a life they may not want.
zanny 7y ago
You don't get to choose your parents. You choose your friends, your career, etc. If economic pressure means you can't choose where you live, you can be left miserable or abused with no way out. I'd rather see a diversity of housing options ranging from very environmentally efficient dense apartments to unsustainable mcmansions than trapping people in often terrible circumstances.

opportune 7y ago

The issue with a housing crunch and run away rents is that due to our economic system, it’s kind of too big to fail. If rents and mortgages are a certain price, people keep taking out mortgages for that price with the assumption that prices won’t go down. So there is a huge portion of people and loans whose economic situation is dependent on rents and housing prices not going down. If enough people buy into a delusion with high risk to ruin, it’s not longer a delusion Let’s say over the course of 5 years rents decreased by half in the Bay Area. The real estate market would also probably decrease by about half. Suddenly tons of people are underwater on their loans, both regular homeowners and many investors who are no longer able to cover their loans with the market rent. That’s bad for banks and a huge portion of the populace, and could cause a huge economic meltdown. So it’s politically untenable. The only actual solutions I can think of are to never let housing supply become an issue, let inflation take care of it (if people’s income increases due to inflation, and housing prices stay the same, it prevents homeowner/investor insolvency while effectively reducing rent), or just wait for some big natural disaster. So hopefully the big one comes soon and gives us a chance to rethink how we build

JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
Most people are long-term owners. While I don't disagree that some people would experience a capital loss, you have to realize that only a small portion of the housing supply turns over annually. The percentage of people underwater may not be as high as you think. It prices fell by half, that would be all Bay Area homes sold after 2012. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SFXRSA https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SFXRSA

dang 7y ago

Submitted URL was https://www.apartmentlist.com/rentonomics/reconfiguring-the-american-household/ https://www.apartmentlist.com/rentonomics/reconfiguring-the-... but is down. Cached copy: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?ei=MUSWXbr9Lpb6-gTrxLP4AQ&q=cache%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.apartmentlist.com%2Frentonomics%2Freconfiguring-the-american-household%2F&oq=cache%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.apartmentlist.com%2Frentonomics%2Freconfiguring-the-american-household%2F&gs_l=psy-ab.3...2634.2634..2743...0.2..0.48.48.1......0....1..gws-wiz.......0i71.D5T3oYYJTmw&ved=0ahUKEwj62cGQ4oDlAhUWvZ4KHWviDB8Q4dUDCAs&uact=5 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?ei=MUSWXbr9Lpb6.... In the meantime we switched the URL above to a news article about the report. Edit: site seems back up now, so switched back to the original from https://www.10news.com/news/local-news/report-young-adults-more-likely-to-live-with-parents-than-spouses https://www.10news.com/news/local-news/report-young-adults-m....

bregma 7y ago

My kids haven't come home, but they keep sending all their stuff to my house every time they move. At their age, I just didn't have the stuff they have. I couldn't afford things like furniture, a TV, crates of dishes, or boxes of clothing. I had student debt to pay off, enough clothes to last between laundries without going too rank, and a set of pots and pans that were good enough to eat out of. When I moved, I'd share a borrowed station wagon with a friend to move all out stuff in one trip. I only just earned my empty nest. If one of my kids comes back for a "long term visit", they'll get tired of being questioned on when they're moving back to their own place.

rocky1138 7y ago
It's a fair point, but a lot of stuff these days is cheaper than it used to be. Consider Dollarama or Dollar Tree. You can outfit a kitchen with a full set of dishes and utensils and everything else for $50. TVs and other things are super cheap and sometimes free, as well.

notadoc 7y ago

It's the economy, to point out the obvious.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

fiftyfifty 7y ago

Is this such a bad thing? In places like Japan and Hawaii this has been a common practice for a long time. As long as the younger generation is contributing to the household in someway (working, helping out around the house or helping to provide care for younger or elderly family members etc) and not living in the basement and playing video games 24-7, it seems like a far better arrangement. Talk to almost any elderly people living alone and you'll find they are terribly lonely, and that seems to be a complaint with a lot of Millennials as well. If you have no plans to marry and start a family of your own in the near future why not live with you parents?

war1025 7y ago
My interpretation (which could be completely wrong) is that people perceive a difference between "living with your parents" and "your parents living with you". I think it's a matter of who is the head of the household (i.e. the person who is pulling the most weight regarding the financial stability of the household). So "young adults living with their parents" is interpreted as "young adults not becoming functioning members of society" That said, I agree pretty much entirely with your comment.
chickenpotpie 7y ago
There's a difference between living with your parents because it's more practical and living with your parents because it's all you can afford. It's fine to create a society that values taking care of parents as they age, but not okay to create one where parents are taken care of because their children have no other choice. I also have a hard time calling the parents of a 26-year-old "elderly." Young adults today don't hate their parents, they just want the same opportunities they had.
- fiftyfifty 7y ago
  I'm a recent empty-nester, my kids are all in their late teens/early twenties, I wouldn't count myself as elderly either. I wouldn't mind at all if one or more of my kids moved back in with us long term, provided that they helped around the house and preferably were employed in some manner and could pay a bit of rent. I think where people have problems is when adult children are living at home and not working and are not really contributing members of the household. Heck I'd even be willing to support an adult child financially for quit a while if they were willing to really help with household tasks, like cooking, cleaning, grocery shopping, yard work etc. I'm not interested in supporting an adult child that just wants to do nothing all day and be taken care of like they are 10 years old the rest of their life, and that seems to be a common occurrence these days as well. I do think it's sad that modern society has kind of dismantled the extended family. That it's become such a faux pas to have multiple generations living under the same roof. Instead it somehow makes sense to leave our small children with complete strangers for most of the day and have our young adults living alone in apartments scarcely bigger than a box a continent away in the name of starting careers. I honestly think we are overdue for a reversal in some of these trends.

SubiculumCode 7y ago

When housing prices are nearly untenable for middle age adults, is it a surprise that young adults stay home longer?

cannabis_sam 7y ago

It’s a fucking crime how older generations are pulling up the ladder behind them. It works since these egotistical morons are democratically in a majority. Gonna be interesting to see how this shit develops when it hits the fan. If a democratic minority is demanding power based on land, how are we not gonna be in a feudal society?

onlyrealcuzzo 7y ago
I was at a party where the topic of discussion was that: You should only be able to vote if you own land. It was a pool party, of all things, and I contemplated slowly submerging into the water and just staying there until I drowned.
- NTDF9 7y ago
  This is the exact rules for voting when women and slaves were disenfranchised. At its core, America has not changed one bit since.
  - skya 7y ago
    The most important point in this context is that non land-owning or poor white men were also disenfranchised.
    - NTDF9 7y ago
      Yep. I was not talking about racism. I'm talking fundamentally about systemic disenfranchisement that hasn't changed even today.
john_moscow 7y ago
The problem is that the alternative isn't sustainable. Sure, we can solve the problem for one generation by building enough small apartments to accommodate the current demand. Except once the demand picks up due to the population growth and immigration, the problem will return. So what do we do next? Communal apartments with one room per family? Some sort of dormitories with "hotbedding" for everyone? Given the massive inequality in the population density and cost of living, looking into remote work or starting your own business in a lower CoL area could be a much better alternative to demanding someone else to drastically lower their living standard.

zaroth 7y ago

Isn’t this mainly because young adults are much less likely to be married? Hard to live with your spouse if you’re not even married. What’s actually surprising to me is that 80% of 26 years olds were married 50 years ago!

davidw 7y ago

I guess that's to be expected when those parents are the ones going to all the planning commission and city council meetings to put a stop to the construction of housing. The US builds more 3 car garages than 1 bedroom apartments: https://www.curbed.com/2016/10/26/13423358/three-car-garages-us-apartments https://www.curbed.com/2016/10/26/13423358/three-car-garages...

bjornjaja 7y ago
They also build—knowingly—on flood planes without concern for buyers. They also use shitty materials. Compare a modern house with century-or-more home which are often timeless art pieces.
- claudiulodro 7y ago
  I think this is selection bias, because all of the junk old homes have fallen apart or been torn down by now. I get what you're saying though: older houses tend to use more real wood and bricks and other materials which are now done with cheaper, modern equivalents like drywall and plywood.
beams_of_light 7y ago
The problem old people have with apartments is that they attract perceived ne'er-do-wells with little financial resources. Harold the Retiree does not want to hear your Subaru with the fart cannon on the back going up and down the road while he's trying to watch the sun set on his back porch, doesn't want your drug dealer causing trouble on his block, and certainly doesn't care to see your piercings and tattoos in the grocery store.
- non-entity 7y ago
  > doesn't care to see your piercings and tattoos in the grocery store. Harold can fuck right off then because that's not his business. The other two, could potentially be an issue, however, but in my experience, most apartments like that are not filled with retirees, but working class individuals and to an extent working class families.

SamuelAdams 7y ago

Here's the reddit post, since the website seems to be crashing. https://old.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/dchx6y/in_america_young_adults_are_now_more_likely_to/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/dchx6y/in_... Here's the author's source data: https://old.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/dchx6y/in_america_young_adults_are_now_more_likely_to/f28a459/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/dchx6y/in_...

deevolution 7y ago

The_rent_is_too_damn_high.gif

seph-reed 7y ago
NEEERRRRRDSS.gif

distant_hat 7y ago

The claim here is confounded by overall decline in marriage rates. If you look at people living with a partner the numbers are not as stark though an increase in living with parents is still there.

HarryHirsch 7y ago
The decline of marriage rate may not be a confounder. Young people live with their parents because of the lack of financial stability and they are not good marriage prospects because of the lack of financial stability.
- castlecrasher2 7y ago
  Does marriage increase financial stability? My personal bias says yes but I may be incorrect on that.
  - JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
    It doesn't increase financial stability, it's a sign that you've achieved it. Though, a married man may seem more hirable to a company, since they can presume he needs the income to support not only himself, but his family.
    - chickenpotpie 7y ago
      I don't see why marriage doesn't increase financial stability. Marriage is basically getting an incredibly efficient roommate. A spouse is a roommate that is fine with sharing a bedroom, a bathroom, can give you insurance, lower your taxes, etc.
      - abledon 7y ago
        and each day a RNG fires off from 1->10000 and if it hits in the target range, you lose half your assets lol

zxcvvcxz 7y ago

This is what happens with feminism and modern loose moral culture: you have a constant dating roulette optimizing for novelty and fun.

ngngngng 7y ago

The missing number here is how many married people live with their parents? In my experience that seems to be rising. I live in an area with lots of people married before 26 (Utah), but a significant amount of my married friends under 26 live with one of their parents.

durnygbur 7y ago

At this point finding a job in any major EU city is easier than finding housing which is not teporary housing paid per night. Taking a mental shortcut, the housing market invalidates the EU free movement of workers. If getting through the interview processes is tiring enough already, so many ways one can get scammed, abused, cheated, exploited by all kind of dodgy landlords makes he whole deal just not worth it.

zanny 7y ago
Why are all western societies like this? East Asia doesn't hesitate to build dense apartments from Jakarta to Seoul. I don't buy the "cultural homogeneity peaceful society" argument because the amount of cultural diversity across the half the human population living in that area is colossal. But without fail almost everywhere in the Americas and Europe is structurally against density in any form and systemically fights it.
- UnFleshedOne 7y ago
  It might be because west can (or could) afford to prefer low density (for a portion of people significant enough to affect laws and zoning). All those other places never could afford suburbs.
- ChuckNorris89 7y ago
  Easy, I live in Western Europe and they absolutely hate high density living as it's seen as eye-sore sardine housing for the poor and lower class and nobody wants to live in or around such buildings/neighborhoods as it'll turn into slums so it's a real hot potato.
- TrackerFF 7y ago
  There's also this quirky thought many medium-sized cities in Europe have: They want to upsides of being a "big city", but they don't want to identify as a "big city". This means: no big ugly blocks, skyscrapers, etc. People want to have spacious homes and living areas, and beautiful neighborhoods. They basically want to be suburbs, but 5 min walk from everything important, and max 30 min drive from work.

andrepd 7y ago

A bit misleading no? The percentage of people living "with spouse" has been cannibalized by the people living "with partner".

JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago

If birth rates decline and immigration is stymied, the United States is going to find itself in an extremely difficult position with entitlement programs, which largely depend on the working population being as large, or larger, than the retired population, for adequate funding.

ModernMech 7y ago
If? "The United States’ birthrate fell for a fourth consecutive year in 2018, bringing the number of people born in the country to its lowest level in 32 years" https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/17/us/us-birthrate-decrease.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/17/us/us-birthrate-decrease.... I don't think I need a citation to support the claim that the US is also currently trying to stymie immigration.
- greatestdana 7y ago
  No citation? No citation! The US is the most welcoming, does the best and greatest job at welcoming all immigrants from non-sh*thole countries! Countries like Norway, Sweden, Denmark. All the great countries! No collusion no collusion. China should really investigate the Biden crooks btw.
  - dang 7y ago
    Please don't do this here.
standardUser 7y ago
Up until now, the US has largely bucked this trend due to our above average immigration rates. The worst hit developed nation? Japan, which happens to have the most restrictive immigration policies. We limit immigration at our own peril.
zanny 7y ago
This thinking is counter to acknowledging the modern automation revolution. Wealth and productivity are largely becoming detached from people, and as such the sources of revenue western nations use to fund entitlements wouldn't be going to go away as people age out of hard labor years if the tax burden was on the corporate entities rather than individual income / social security / etc taxes. The money is still there and will likely not go anywhere except into fewer hands and pockets. Its up to societies to actually adjust their tax model to curtail it.

Dumblydorr 7y ago

Intergenerational housing is the historical norm. It seems the 20th century was a flash in the pan, if income and wealth inequality on top of social changes have led us here. Do the wealthy care about this and declining birth rates due to lower resources and strained youth? They control policy and there's no policy promoting improvements on this front except from optimistic primary candidates. I just don't see this changing. I'm 30 and over half of my friends spent at least 2 years at home in their 20s. Every single time the issue was finances, they needed cheap digs as their debt and low income disallowed renting.

FreedomToCreate 7y ago
Intergenerational housing doesn't work for people who end up living in a different city than there parents or grandparents due to work. And a large portion of the population is in that situation. I grew up in the rural mid-west. Good luck working on robotics there. I had to move to a city to get the resources I needed to do the work I want. However that city also happens to have no housing and exorbitant rent. With rent eating up 30% of my income, taxes the other 30%, the path to saving for a small home in the city puts me a decade, if not decades behind where the previous generation began to set-up there homes.
- lotsofpulp 7y ago
  Hence it’s very important to be born to the right parents.

sproketboy 7y ago

FAIL

buss 7y ago

One of the myriad reasons I'm running for office here in San Francisco. We've created a completely broken system that's akin to generational theft by boomers from their own children. Time to build more housing. buss2020.org

refurb 7y ago
Good luck! SFers aren’t interested in more housing. That’s painfully apparent by who they re-elect each time.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

sgdpk 7y ago

This fact is slightly misleadin, because the data shows that there are more people living with a spouse _or_ a partner than with parents. So there seem to be two reasons for these figures: a larger fraction of people living with parents and less (or later) weddings.

eranima 7y ago

The sorry state of the housing market is probably the most to blame. In decades past people could get starter homes much closer to high-paying jobs. Now you have to suffer through a very long commute.

TrackerFF 7y ago

In my city a 400 sq.ft "starter" apartment will cost you around $300k, and there's 15% down payment too - so young adults straight out of college need to have $45k in cash, just to get a mortgage. Rent for a similar apartment is around $1200-$1500 month. If you start at zero, and have a regular paying professional job, you'll spend around 3-5 years saving up for the down payment - depending on how frugal you live. But if you have resourceful parents, it's no problem to get your own place. Banks will gladly re-mortgage their (paid down) house, or use it as collateral. In fact, there's quite a divide here, first-time house owners are getting younger, because their parents will bankroll the mortgage / down payment, just to get their kids in on the housing market. They know that if they have to wait 5-10 years, the market will be much more expensive. The big problem (IMO) with our housing market is that it takes too much time to get projects started, especially big affordable apartment complexes, because the established owners will engage in full-force NIMBY-ism warfare on any developers that dare to steal their precious sunlight or "visual pollution". I don't live in the US, but I feel we share a lot of the similar problems when it comes to the housing market.

ghaff 7y ago
How many people straight out of school even want to buy a place? Young people in general tend to be more mobile even if it's often within a general metro area. Buying a house (or even a condo) really limits your ability to easily move and, depending upon the type of housing, often is a significant time commitment as well.
- vonmoltke 7y ago
  I wanted to, and did, buy as soon as I was able after graduating college. I admit to being an oddball, though. I hate moving and value the ability modify my living space without restriction (building codes notwithstanding) over location flexibility.
- CountSessine 7y ago
  In most housing markets, the cost of housing is at least somewhat similar to the dividend-discounted future net cost of rent. High rents and high home listing prices are usually connected. So if you don't want to buy a house, you probably want to rent and that's going to be seriously over-priced too.

baked_ziti 7y ago

Decades of stagnant wage growth combined with decades of the "charge what the market will bear" mantra ensuring you're paying the absolute maximum you can possibly tolerate have resulted in people earning less with which to buy things that cost more. This setup is going to be difficult to navigate for a lot of people. The cost of housing and rent outpace inflation by a wide margin and cost considerably more than they did in the past. The age of the typical home buyer has increased 10-20 years in the last 40 years. Living costs more now than it did 40 years ago. It's not such a surprise then that fewer are able to achieve, or are achieving later in life, what used to be very common life milestones.

war1025 7y ago
If you average things out over a longer period, we are still significantly better off than we were say 100 or 150 years ago. Really I think a lot of the "things aren't getting better" mindset is just a reaction to the fact that the beginning of our current societal "working memory" is the post-WWII economic boom. When your benchmark for prosperity is literally the best growth period on record, you're bound to be disappointed.
- Guvante 7y ago
  Please show an example of a 150 year gap where the average person wasn't significantly better off in written history. Otherwise your statement is tautological and thus worthless. Also your growth contrast is so lacking in details I can't find a counterpoint as you didn't really make a point. Especially when what you are replying to is about inequality and you are talking about economic growth.
  - war1025 7y ago
    > Please show an example of a 150 year gap where the average person wasn't significantly better off. I take this to mean where person living in year X was not better off than person living in year (X - 150). In that case, literally any time in human history before the industrial revolution. 150 years is an insignificant blip on the timeline of history. As to your other comment, inequality and economic growth are intrinsically linked. The inequality people are complaining about is an unequal share in the economic growth of the society.

opportune 7y ago

Even though the idea kind of disgusts me, I wish companies like Facebook, Apple, Google, etc would experiment with building new campuses in the middle of nowhere as “planned cities” complete with airports connecting to regional hubs, housing, good public transportation, etc. Employees could take home more of their salaries. The only thing disgusting me more is how expensive Bay Area rent and property are, and how people who moved here long ago and didn’t contribute to the tech boom get to cannibalize our incomes by restricting housing supply. This would also relieve housing pressure in the Bay Area, and let native kids not in the tech industry maybe one day move into their own places without waiting for their parents to die.

magduf 7y ago
Sorry, your idea is lunacy, and here's why: >Employees could take home more of their salaries. That's not how it works. These companies would pay much lower salaries, with the justification that "the cost of living is much lower". We already see this whenever companies have multiple locations, with any of those locations in low-CoL areas. They'll push employees to relocate to the cheap place, but the employees don't get to keep those high salaries.
- opportune 7y ago
  We’ll see, since these employers are near the top of the pay scale usually they are pretty competitive with pay to attract employees. I know for a lot of them, they don’t pay that much lower (maybe 10%) even for offices in low CoL areas For businesses in general, I agree. But there’s a reason I listed these particular ones
- srj 7y ago
  Pay is not based on the cost of living but on the area job market. These can have a relationship but are not the same. London is an example of an expensive city where software engineering wages are relatively low. If there's robust competition and a shortage of people, the salaries will be high.
  - 7y ago

faissaloo 7y ago

As a young person it legitimately angers me that even despite being an extremely fortunate person working a job that makes good money and with no debt I still won't be able to own a house until I'm 24 which makes me wonder 'how can anyone hope to raise get married and raise a family under these conditions?'

uwuhn 7y ago
Same but until I'm 40

dugokontov 7y ago

There is an interesting map presentation of similar data from 2014: https://census.socialexplorer.com/young-adults/#/ https://census.socialexplorer.com/young-adults/#/ It's interesting to see different trends between young adults in different decades. New generations tend to living with parents more often, they are more educated, but earn less in average.

WilTimSon 7y ago

Well, the housing market is a mess in pretty much all first-world countries, right? There's also the fact that less and less young people are getting married, favoring long-term partnerships without any ceremonies instead. Top it off with wages rising slowly, disproportionate to the speed at which housing costs climb. I don't have kids and likely never will but I won't be surprised if my mates' children will have to live with them until they turn 30 at least. And those are all reasonably steady families with good incomes.

vidanay 7y ago

Although I agree that the primary causes identified in this thread are far from ideal, I also think there is nothing wrong with multigenerational housing.

fuguza 7y ago

At least that our government wants!

AlexTWithBeard 7y ago

For a modern person getting married has few questionable benefits and a lot of obvious drawbacks. Totally understandable.

nearbuy 7y ago

Young adults are also more likely to have parents than spouses. This doesn't seem so surprising. The chart shows in 1968, about 80% of 26 year olds lived with a spouse. Today, even if every married 26 year old lived with their spouse, we'd only hit about 32% of 26 year olds. They don't group people living with their unmarried partner with people living with a spouse. Based on their chart, 23 is the age at which most people no longer live with their parents.

big_chungus 7y ago
> They don't group people living with their unmarried partner with people living with a spouse? Isn't this number pretty insignificantly small? Also, not being married severely complicates things like joint ownership and sharing an income, precisely the sorts of things that make buying a house easier.
- nearbuy 7y ago
  It's shown in the article and it's not small at all. It's the 3rd largest group after parents and spouse. 24% live with a spouse and 17% with a partner.
  - big_chungus 7y ago
    Goodness gracious, I had no idea twenty-four percent of young people found it acceptable to shack up and live in sin. It is no wonder we have such cultural problems today, nor is it any wonder they are so rapidly increasing. That said, see my above comments about why you cannot treat married people amd those people the same.
    - nearbuy 7y ago
      I'm guessing this is a religious view (Christian or Muslim maybe?). Where I'm from it's both common and normal for people to never marry their lifelong partner and even raise a family together.

scarface74 7y ago

Objectively, I don’t see a problem with this. It makes perfect sense to pool your resources and live with family until you get your own family. I’m not sure how much longer I would have lived at home if I hadn’t moved out of town for work the week after graduating from college.