Layla Ahmed is, by any measure, a responsible adult. She works at a nonprofit in Nashville helping refugees. Makes 50k a year. Saves money. Pays her bills on time.
But there’s another measure of adulthood that has so far eluded her. Ahmed, 23, moved back in with her parents after graduating college in 2022.
“There is a perception that those who live with their parents into their 20s are either bums or people who are not hard-working,” she told the Today, Explained podcast.
Being neither of those things, Ahmed and her situation actually point to a growing trend in America right now: More adults, especially younger adults, are either moving back in with family or never leaving at all.
According to the Pew Research Center, a quarter of all adults ages 25 to 34 now live in a multigenerational living situation (which it defines as a household with two or more adult generations).
It’s a number that’s been creeping upward since the early ‘70s but has swung up precipitously in the last 15 years. The decennial US Census measures multigenerational living slightly differently (three or more generations living together), but the trend still checks out. From 2010 to 2020, there was a nearly 18 percent increase in the number of multigenerational households.
That’s a lot of words to say “The rent is too damn high.”
20 people crammed into a single room technically counts as multigenerational open space concept living.
90s revival was yesterday, tomorrow the 19th century will come back!
Who needs ventilation and fire escapes!
Well, you have to have the windows open for ventilation anyway, so the fire escape is right there.
The righties just hear the left complaining about the Industrial Revolution being bad for the planet and decided that would be a good target to reach. Can’t wait to pack like sardines and lose all my worker rights!!
This is totally selfish of me, but I will be happy for my daughter to live with us as an adult, because empty nest syndrome is going to hit me super hard. I also want her to be independent and strike out on her own, so I would never tell her this. She knows she’s welcome to live with us whenever and for as long as she likes and I’ve left it at that.
On the other hand, I’ve spent a week (so far) in an AirBnB with my 82-year-old mother after being stuck with her during the 8 1/2 hour drive to get here and it has not been fun, so I hope we never have to move in with her, even though she has a ridiculously huge house she doesn’t need.
This is totally selfish of me, but I will be happy for my daughter to live with us as an adult
The real question is, would you be happy to live with your daughter in her house instead of yours? 'Cause that’s the economically-healthy way to do multigenerational housing.
Why? If you own your own home, then why shouldn’t your kids live with you?
Because the issue is the younger generation coming into it in a position of economic, not weakness. The elderly in-laws are done building wealth; it’s the working-age generation that need the equity.
To be clear, I’m not saying it’s wrong for the older people to also have the means to own their own home; it’s just that it shouldn’t be about them.
I disagree that it’s more economically health for adults to be their children’s dependents than it is for adult children to be dependent on their parents. Those are both equally unhealthy situations.
It’s poverty. I’ve got a friend sleeping over because she, in her 20’s needs to get away from her abusive mom for a day
Yep, every time I see an article that says ‘young people are choosing to do X instead of Y’ they present it as a conscious lifestyle choice, when it’s pretty much always due to economic factors (usually negative ones at that, see the billion ‘millennials are killing the X industry’ articles).
There is not enough housing in the US and shithead know nothings keep it that way with NIMBY and gentrification attitudes.
People who say that young adults who live in their parents basement are bums are bums themselves.
I build homes and the privileged loser fuck heads who got housing got it from inheritance or getting lucky with their jobs.
The housing market is so fucked up and it’s been under attack by not only the greedy shit head realtors but industry makers and policy makers, investors and Air BnB.
It’s almost as if rich people want the poor to always be on their toes so they can be manipulated.
Housing is a fucking RIGHT. We need to make sure the elites understand that.
MHM.
Don’t forget about other rich ass-hats who buy houses above asking, just to tear them down and build another ungodly McMansion, taking away what affordable houses remain.
A beautiful 50 year old house sold on my block for $250,000k two years ago. At 1600 sqft, and some renovations from the previous owner, it was a wonderful starter home. A college buddy of mine tried to buy it at asking $230k and we joked that we’d be neighbors.
But instead, someone bought it, destroyed it, rebuilt it, and sold it for $900k.
Now, that same house just sits there with a “For Rent” sign. It’s appalling.
Keeping the proletariat occupied with their day to day needs is one of the core goals of the capitalist system. If you are constantly treading water, with barely enough to not starve or become homeless, you have little capacity to think about why you have crumbs and your boss just posted pictures of his yacht on social media.
This “Jolie Myers” doesn’t know how to say “poverty”
What a heart-warming tale of abject poverty.
sharing a house with other people isn’t abject poverty
sharing a house with other people in an individualist society that until not too long ago, when it was still economically feasible, pushed everybody to get their own house as soon as they can is abject poverty
that’s a shift in standard of living, abject poverty is an exaggeration. poverty is a symptom of the same underlying causes but one does not equal the other
If only my parents owned a fucking house lolol
I think that we are doomed unless we undertake USSR levels of building housing. For all of its faults, housing was one of the ideas that the USSR did much better at than America. Millions and millions of units of housing built over less than a decade.
I don’t know about that. Have you ever been anywhere with soviet construction?
I felt much more comfortable in post and pre Soviet era buildings when I was in Prague a few years ago.
The Soviet era buildings also were quite ugly and uninspired. My Prague native cab driver also volunteered his opinion on Soviet construction which can be summarized as “👎”
I lived in one for close to a decade. Yeah they are kinda shitty and major are in disrepair, but I think my sentiment about needing fast and cheap housing still holds. In Canada at least, our rate of population growth has outpaced our rate of new housing construction for years. We need a major course correction to fix this crisis.
I don’t think it’s that simple in a sense. You risk crashing the housing market which will leave a lot of people that “just barely made it” into the housing market far worse off if you just rapidly mass-build housing.
There also just aren’t that many builders/contractors that do good work available so you run the risk of building a lot of housing that’s in a state of disrepair soon after construction/never built properly. There are plenty of housing inspectors on youtube speaking out about housing developments and how ridiculously bad a lot of the modern builders are.
You also need to find the land to build on in a time when land conservation is increasingly recognized as important/there’s little public land left. That means buying up even more (likely) good farm land.
You can start buying people out of their inner city neighborhoods in disrepair and start revitalizing them, but that’s gentrification that often leaves the people that were living in those homes worse off. Where I am in Akron there are plenty of houses, just lots of them folks don’t really want to live in them (they’re in disrepair in “high” crime areas) or they’re being rented for absurd prices. I think revitalizing these neighborhoods and forcing a cap on rental properties is the most promising, but it needs paired with a general economic support system for those already living in the neighborhood.
I don’t think there’s an easy fix here.
For your first point. Yeah we can’t make affordable housing woth out making new homes cheaper. It will bring the price of other hones down. So pick your poison unaffordable houses or cheap homes for new buyers.
It would be nice to have both but with houses as investments well…
A lot of that housing was pretty bad for a lot of reasons. Cramped, badly designed, and incredibly energy inefficient. Yeah, sure…it was housing, but recreation of that style shouldn’t be a goal.
We should get china to ship over their unused buildings. I hear they’ve got a shitload.
So things will just go back to normal and the “most people own their own house and spends decades living alone as a couple in it” thing will be seen as a North American trend that lasted for about 100 years until people realized it didn’t make sense.
You just need to have seen what long term/end of life care looks like to realize that we can’t keep that trend going.
It’s absolutely amazing how pretty much my entire adult life after highschool as an older millennial has been “Fuck you, the good times are over. Deal with it.”
Over and over and over and over and over… It’s always a new “fuck you.”
Look at boomers entering long term care, I think they hadn’t realized the long term consequences of splitting up families like has become the norm… Or just loneliness increasingly becoming an issue for everyone…
Or just loneliness increasingly becoming an issue for everyone…
I literally just came back from spending the weekend with my grandmother because of that. She’s going nuts being all alone :(
The only reason it’s failing is pure fucking greed, and treating housing as an investment instead of a basic human need. There is no valid reason houses should cost as much as they do.
It’s still not realistic to have everyone on earth living in a single family house though including social reasons…
Who said it had to be single family homes? People still deserve space to themselves and the ability to maintain physical boundaries, be it an apartment, townhouse, condo, or full-blown house. Houses are particularly inflated well beyond reason. Personally, the idea of long-term home ownership does not appeal at this stage of my life, and I would prefer to be able to travel more (not that I can realistically afford to tbh) and have more flexibility in my living arrangements.
Likely, by the time I will feel ready to settle down, I fully expect home ownership to have inflated exponentially from today’s prices.
Edit: a word.
More like 75 years. It’s collapsed already and the baby boom was an early 50s/late 40s thing.
And those of us with poor parents, or who are estranged from our parents, or who otherwise have some barrier between us and our parents either have to bootstrap our ways to survival or die.
I wish I had married someone rich instead of the daughter of two school teachers. But I’m lucky she had generous rich extended family that gave us enough to buy the house I now own before we divorced.
Now I’m unemployed after being laid off 3 months ago with no safety net and no strong prospects for work that will keep me in the house, even with a roommate paying rent. I have nowhere to go and no one to support me if I lose the house.
My wife and I are very early in the planning stages for building a house. We’re fairly young and have one 6 month old kid, but we’re already planning for the strong possibility of having to have our children with us for far longer than they’d like.
It’s going to suck for them to try affording rent and buying a home.
I expect my house will be full again in just a couple of years. My elderly father already moved in with us and when my Son is done with College I’m prepared for him too move back as well. It’s why I haven’t sold the 2800 square foot 5 Bedroom / 3 Bathroom silliness that I had built back in 2008.
I’m honestly ok with my kids or step kids or MIL or FIL moving in, saves money and is better in a lot of ways to have someone home all the time. But I absolutely couldn’t have lived with my mom. And I suspect at least some of my kids wouldn’t enjoy living with me. They all say they’d consider a family compound a perfect living situation though, like if we had a quad-plex or something like that.
Meanwhile my dad who kicked me out at 18 before I even started college and owned multiple houses, the other day told me to LLC myself and hire some cheap workers in India to train to do my job and pocket the extra income because I’m in tech and that’s what he would do.
We are so fucked and older generations than millennials really don’t fucking get it.
Does anyone know how much the switch from “catch and release” to “stay and apply on your side” immigration policies increased the hourly pay of homebuilders? I feel like this housing shortage started with that.
