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 fine man, I’m sorry I missed your previous comment. I’m not here to argue with you about it, because you’re clearly aware, and on a similar page. Cheers!
No worries! We’re in violent agreement that not only do many western homes create toxic environments for their kids growth and expression, but also other cultures (some of which are multi-generational) also do this and potentially even more extreme.
I’m also interested in your opinions on addressing this for western homes. I certainly don’t have the answers either. Even if we’re just discussing it, its important to call out as many challenges as we can envision, and perhaps find ways to protect the safety and autonomy all involved.
Well, as long as you’re interested, my take is that “Work From Home” is the future and we have tons of homes that sit empty in “undesirable” cities that are only undesirable because of the lack of jobs. If there is decent internet connectivity, these could become Tech boom-towns. We have way more empty housing than we have homeless. Some groups estimate upwards of 28 empty homes per homeless person. Some of those buildings are unlivable at this point, but they still have the bones of things like plumbing and foundation to be able to rebuild relatively cheaply.
I always think of Aberdeen, Washington as a prime example. It’s been a hollowed out shell for decades since the logging industry changed in the state. It’s where Kurt Cobain was from and the hard drug scene in the poor, broken town was a big part of why he ended up an addict himself.
The thing is, Aberdeen could be beautiful and revitalized, and all it really needs is people moving there, living there, and spending money locally there. That can be solved by escaping this bullshit “Return to Office” mandate driven by established companies who don’t want to lose money on their investment in commercial real estate. Those companies need to be allowed to fail. This too big to fail shit has gone on way, way, way too long. It’s artificially reducing competition and entrenching the largest as permanent fixtures in our economy, while the quality of services and products they offer quickly goes down the toilet (See: Boeing).
Creating remote work boom-towns won’t solve current homelessness issues, but it can alleviate housing pressure by giving people an avenue to purchase a home in affordable area. Of course, corporations don’t give a shit and want to pay you less because your cost of living is less, readily admitting that the value you produce has zero bearing on how much they are willing to pay you (another fucking reason for these god damned dinosaurs to fucking die). That in itself is tied to the exploitation of workers in other countries and how we were willing to pay them according to the “local economy” instead of saying “they deserve just as much pay as a US worker.” Every time we allow corporations to export fucking bullshit to other countries, it eventually finds its way home. So, laws would need to be passed about this, but we can really only expect those on the state level.
Further, there’s the whole zoning debacle. Japan definitely helped resolve a lot of their housing affordability issues by removing zoning and having nearly anywhere be acceptable for a business to exist. This led to lots of people running businesses out of their homes, etc, and giving them more control over how they could finance their home.
Anyway, there’s lots that could be done, but a lot of it comes down to lack of political willpower and corporations wanting to wring blood from stones.
Due to Republican fuckery only blue States work for this but WA is blue so no problem. Universal fiber to the home is a good idea. States need to pass state level zoning level reform and generally preempt local laws on urban planning but WA already has made some progress on this with HB 1110 last year