cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/13793832
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.
I agree that home prices are unsustainable, and that’s not a good thing.
I don’t know that the increase in multigenerational housing is all bad, either. It does help with housing supply, which should lead to lower prices and less interest in corporate ownership. It’s also a way to increase housing density without changing zoning laws, and I can’t imagine the NIMBYs are gonna have a good argument against allowing this. Multigenerational housing could have a positive impact on the loneliness epidemic…if we’re really lucky, it may even lead to a decrease in radicalization by decreasing social isolation.
I know there’s lots of people who can’t stay with family or wouldn’t want to. We definitely need to get housing supply under control and this isn’t a situation that I would want anyone forced into…but it being more normalized and less stigmatized is, I think, a good thing.