Multigenerational housing is coming back in a big way
www.vox.com
Americans used to live in multigenerational homes. We’re starting to, again.

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.

  • partial_accumen
    6•8 months ago

    My Wife and I lived with her Silent Generation parents for nearly 4 years after getting married. Even today many of the GenX and Millennial parents I know have had their adult children living with them well beyond High School and even College Graduation.

    GenX here too. I think the difference for us was that if you were going back to live with parents after becoming an adult (especially if you had a wife and perhaps a new child) was that it was always seen as temporary.

    • “We’ll stay with your mother for a year while we get back on our feet”
    • “Once you get your certification at the end of the year you’ll be able to get the raise and we’ll move out”
    • “Once we have 90 days of work we can get health insurance through your work and be able to move out”

    The impression I get now is that young people today don’t have the planned end date because opportunity is slim and costs are high. They can’t know when they’ll be able to leave. There’s no apparent path for them. So instead it becomes “live with parents” with no planned end date because they don’t see anything that can change the situation inside their control. This is just my guess though through observation. I could be radically wrong.

    • @[email protected]
      2•8 months ago

      That’s true. Although for many people it was never really temporary. We remember the people who moved away and built their own house by hand, but forget those who never left home. Many people had no real individualistic future because they died young or had to care for their aging relatives.

      Those people were all just trying to survive, like us now.