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.
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.”
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.