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.”
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
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.
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”
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 “👎”
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.
If only my parents owned a fucking house lolol
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.
Good. I don’t know where the “everyone should have a 1br apartment to themselves” thing is coming from. It’s terribly inefficient for housing density, and probably contributes to the loneliness epidemic.
I don’t know where the “everyone should have a 1br apartment to themselves” thing is coming from.
My guess would be two ideas/statements of many modern parents:
“As long as you live in my house, you have to live by my rules”
…and…
“My version of society, as viewed through a religious conservative lens, is the only way I’ll allow you to live”
It’s not just parents though. On a personal note, It was extremely important for my development as a young adult to be out on my own and navigate the world. And I always had that support from parents, but it’s different when you have to manage budgets, do grocery shopping, navigate insurance, and handle loans by yourself.
I imagine it’s the same for many young adults. Independence is really important.
On a personal note, It was extremely important for my development as a young adult to be out on my own and navigate the world.
I had the same experience and agree with your conclusions, but this is a very Western version of growing up. Multi-generational households are common and socially acceptable (even expected) in many non-western cultures. That doesn’t mean that young people starting out in those cultures are any less developed. They simply have different ways of obtaining that same development. My guess is that with multi-generational households becoming more commonplace in some Western societies we’ll learn some of those ways too. If we’re smart, we’ll look at the other cultures to see how it works there for some guidance so we don’t have to try to learn from scratch.
Other cultures also ritualistically murder their kids for being queer.
For a lot of people, getting out of their parents homes is the difference between a lifetime of abuse and hiding your true self or being able to be free to be who you are, irrespective of your parents bullshit religion.
This “western” mode is what allowed LGBTQ+ and atheist communities to flourish. They built their own support communities instead of relying on abusive family. Maybe that’s not such a fucking bad thing.
Further, the number of women I have known who are stuck in abusive relationships with men because they need that mans income to keep themselves and their kids off the street is too damn high.
What you are proposing literally enables abuse. In the US, LGBTQ+ kids are some of the most at-risk for teen homelessness because parents will kick them out.
For a lot of people, getting out of their parents homes is the difference between a lifetime of abuse and hiding your true self or being able to be free to be who you are, irrespective of your parents bullshit religion.
Hang on before go off half cocked. Did you not read my first post which addresses your whole argument against the post you’re responding to? Read that one to catch up with the conversation, please.
What you are proposing literally enables abuse.
Please don’t put words in my mouth. I didn’t propose this at all.
The reality that this article is discussing is that young adults are continuing to live at home in some western countries. It would be great if all the economic and societal factors causing this would be corrected overnight (such as housing shortage, income inequality, health care costs, cost of secondary education, etc), but that’s not going to happen.
So with that in mind, we deal with the situation we have, and that may mean multi-generational households. I said look to other cultures to see how it works there for guidance on how we make our own path. I did not say “make a carbon copy of them”.
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.
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.
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.
