
Report: Young adults more likely to live with parents than spouses - EndXA
https://www.apartmentlist.com/rentonomics/reconfiguring-the-american-household/
======
baked_ziti
Decades of stagnant wage growth combined with decades of the "charge what the
market will bear" mantra ensuring you're paying the absolute maximum you can
possibly tolerate have resulted in people earning less with which to buy
things that cost more. This setup is going to be difficult to navigate for a
lot of people.

The cost of housing and rent outpace inflation by a wide margin and cost
_considerably_ more than they did in the past. The age of the typical home
buyer has increased 10-20 years in the last 40 years. Living costs more now
than it did 40 years ago. It's not such a surprise then that fewer are able to
achieve, or are achieving later in life, what used to be very common life
milestones.

~~~
war1025
If you average things out over a longer period, we are still significantly
better off than we were say 100 or 150 years ago. Really I think a lot of the
"things aren't getting better" mindset is just a reaction to the fact that the
beginning of our current societal "working memory" is the post-WWII economic
boom. When your benchmark for prosperity is literally the best growth period
on record, you're bound to be disappointed.

~~~
Guvante
Please show an example of a 150 year gap where the average person wasn't
significantly better off in written history. Otherwise your statement is
tautological and thus worthless.

Also your growth contrast is so lacking in details I can't find a counterpoint
as you didn't really make a point. Especially when what you are replying to is
about inequality and you are talking about economic growth.

~~~
war1025
> Please show an example of a 150 year gap where the average person wasn't
> significantly better off.

I take this to mean where person living in year X was not better off than
person living in year (X - 150). In that case, literally any time in human
history before the industrial revolution. 150 years is an insignificant blip
on the timeline of history.

As to your other comment, inequality and economic growth are intrinsically
linked. The inequality people are complaining about is an unequal share in the
economic growth of the society.

~~~
refurb
Before the industrial revolution? You're going to have to back that up because
that sounds entirely untrue.

~~~
war1025
> You're going to have to back that up

Well, it's the internet, and I don't really have a horse in this race, so we
can just agree to disagree.

------
cannabis_sam
It’s a fucking crime how older generations are pulling up the ladder behind
them.

It works since these egotistical morons are democratically in a majority.

Gonna be interesting to see how this shit develops when it hits the fan.

If a democratic minority is demanding power based on land, how are we not
gonna be in a feudal society?

~~~
onlyrealcuzzo
I was at a party where the topic of discussion was that: You should only be
able to vote if you own land. It was a pool party, of all things, and I
contemplated slowly submerging into the water and just staying there until I
drowned.

~~~
NTDF9
This is the exact rules for voting when women and slaves were disenfranchised.

At its core, America has not changed one bit since.

~~~
skya
The most important point in this context is that non land-owning or poor
_white men_ were also disenfranchised.

~~~
NTDF9
Yep. I was not talking about racism. I'm talking fundamentally about systemic
disenfranchisement that hasn't changed even today.

------
davidw
I guess that's to be expected when those parents are the ones going to all the
planning commission and city council meetings to put a stop to the
construction of housing.

The US builds more 3 car garages than 1 bedroom apartments:
[https://www.curbed.com/2016/10/26/13423358/three-car-
garages...](https://www.curbed.com/2016/10/26/13423358/three-car-garages-us-
apartments)

~~~
seph-reed
What we really need is less people.

Seriously though, no matter how efficient we get with our space, eventually
we'll hit a wall and the solution is going to be exactly the same as it always
was and is: reproduce less quickly.

The only difference is how much nature will be left when we get to that point.

I've started to look at houses with yards as miniature nature preserves.

To Downvoters: I feel I've done a decent job outlining the futility of more
and more compact housing. I'd like to know what your logic if you disagree.

~~~
jdc
> What we really need is less people.

Okay, here's the thesis. Sounds like neo-Malthusianism.

> Seriously though, no matter how efficient we get with our space, eventually
> we'll hit a wall and the solution is going to be exactly the same as it
> always was and is: reproduce less quickly.

Yep, that's the Malthusian endgame. Unpacking this claim, it seems to be
claiming that the Earth is a closed-system that we can't escape. Now I'm
looking for evidence or supporting arguments that prove that.

> The only difference is how much nature will be left when we get to that
> point.

What _exactly_ does the phrase "how much nature will be left" mean to you?
This is too hand-wavy, especially for such a heavy-handed conclusion.

> I've started to look at houses with yards as miniature nature preserves.

Is a golf course a nature preserve? No. Of course not. It's an extremely
controlled environment. Any wildlife foolish enough to try to inhabit it that
doesn't fit in a coffee cup will almost certainly be chased off, trapped or
killed.

~~~
wolco
Backyards do provide a nature preserve for a city. They take heat away and
allows birds/raccoons/squirrels/butterflies a place to eat/rest. If they all
were converted to apartments the city would be worse off. A balance of both
makes sense.

~~~
UnFleshedOne
Actually your usual backyard lawns are not much better than concrete slabs as
far as biodiversity goes. [0]

[https://earther.gizmodo.com/lawns-are-an-ecological-
disaster...](https://earther.gizmodo.com/lawns-are-an-ecological-
disaster-1826070720)

------
TrackerFF
In my city a 400 sq.ft "starter" apartment will cost you around $300k, and
there's 15% down payment too - so young adults straight out of college need to
have $45k in cash, just to get a mortgage.

Rent for a similar apartment is around $1200-$1500 month. If you start at
zero, and have a regular paying professional job, you'll spend around 3-5
years saving up for the down payment - depending on how frugal you live.

But if you have resourceful parents, it's no problem to get your own place.
Banks will gladly re-mortgage their (paid down) house, or use it as
collateral.

In fact, there's quite a divide here, first-time house owners are getting
younger, because their parents will bankroll the mortgage / down payment, just
to get their kids in on the housing market. They know that if they have to
wait 5-10 years, the market will be much more expensive.

The big problem (IMO) with our housing market is that it takes too much time
to get projects started, especially big affordable apartment complexes,
because the established owners will engage in full-force NIMBY-ism warfare on
any developers that dare to steal their precious sunlight or "visual
pollution".

I don't live in the US, but I feel we share a lot of the similar problems when
it comes to the housing market.

~~~
ghaff
How many people straight out of school even _want_ to buy a place?

Young people in general tend to be more mobile even if it's often within a
general metro area. Buying a house (or even a condo) really limits your
ability to easily move and, depending upon the type of housing, often is a
significant time commitment as well.

~~~
TrackerFF
It's def. a cultural thing here in Norway.

People are very much entrenched in the "Renting is money out the window"
ideology, which gets repeated ad nauseam from you're old enough to move out.

Home ownership is also one of the big adulthood milestones here, because
there's so much responsibility involved.

But I think the main (current) driver is ever growing cities, along with the
ever growing housing prices. We've experienced a ton of centralization for the
past decades, but it is especially now that people are starting to feel the
heat of exploding rents and housing prices. FOMO is very real.

We also don't move that much around. Most people move away for college /
university, then to a city or two for work - usually settling down fairly
quick.

~~~
ghaff
I assume the US is relatively more mobile. Also, the bigger US metros are
quite large. Even if you limit yourself to individual metro areas like the Bay
Area, DC, etc. a change in job could easily add 90 minutes to a commute even
if you don't move to a new city.

To be clear, home ownership is often an adult milestone in the US as well.
But, anecdotally, it's not something a lot of people really pursue for the
first decade or so out of school--especially if they haven't gotten married.

------
distant_hat
The claim here is confounded by overall decline in marriage rates. If you look
at people living with a partner the numbers are not as stark though an
increase in living with parents is still there.

~~~
HarryHirsch
The decline of marriage rate may not be a confounder. Young people live with
their parents because of the lack of financial stability and they are not good
marriage prospects because of the lack of financial stability.

~~~
RocketSyntax
Eh, if you aren't married, why bother getting your own place? Especially after
living away at college for 4+ years, it's not so bad to come back home for a
while.

~~~
refurb
Having pride in being a self sufficient adult is one benefit of moving away
from home.

Going away to college is a halfway point. There is a whole infrastructure to
help you with the transition.

Moving out entirely on your own is a big step. You learn to take care of
yourself and at least for me, there was a lot of pride in being able to say
“This is my own life and I can take care of myself”.

~~~
Slippery_John
I reject the idea that moving away from home is a necessary step to becoming a
self sufficient adult. You don't have to move out to start taking care of
yourself - you just have to pull your own weight, to contribute equally to
bills and upkeep without having to be asked. Sure it's easy to fall into old
routines, but I would argue that if you can't be independent while living with
others then you really aren't independent.

I live away from my parents, but that was a choice of practicality - the
amount of money I make by doing so vastly outstrips the amount I would save by
living at home.

~~~
blub
Paying rent and cleaning the apartment are not really that impressive when
they're happening in the parents' home.

Of course you can reject the idea, but you'll find that you'll also be
rejected more often by potential romantic partners.

------
Dumblydorr
Intergenerational housing is the historical norm. It seems the 20th century
was a flash in the pan, if income and wealth inequality on top of social
changes have led us here. Do the wealthy care about this and declining birth
rates due to lower resources and strained youth? They control policy and
there's no policy promoting improvements on this front except from optimistic
primary candidates.

I just don't see this changing. I'm 30 and over half of my friends spent at
least 2 years at home in their 20s. Every single time the issue was finances,
they needed cheap digs as their debt and low income disallowed renting.

~~~
FreedomToCreate
Intergenerational housing doesn't work for people who end up living in a
different city than there parents or grandparents due to work. And a large
portion of the population is in that situation. I grew up in the rural mid-
west. Good luck working on robotics there. I had to move to a city to get the
resources I needed to do the work I want. However that city also happens to
have no housing and exorbitant rent. With rent eating up 30% of my income,
taxes the other 30%, the path to saving for a small home in the city puts me a
decade, if not decades behind where the previous generation began to set-up
there homes.

~~~
lotsofpulp
Hence it’s very important to be born to the right parents.

------
dang
Submitted URL was [https://www.apartmentlist.com/rentonomics/reconfiguring-
the-...](https://www.apartmentlist.com/rentonomics/reconfiguring-the-american-
household/) but is down. Cached copy:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?ei=MUSWXbr9Lpb6...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?ei=MUSWXbr9Lpb6-gTrxLP4AQ&q=cache%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.apartmentlist.com%2Frentonomics%2Freconfiguring-
the-american-
household%2F&oq=cache%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.apartmentlist.com%2Frentonomics%2Freconfiguring-
the-american-household%2F&gs_l=psy-
ab.3...2634.2634..2743...0.2..0.48.48.1......0....1..gws-
wiz.......0i71.D5T3oYYJTmw&ved=0ahUKEwj62cGQ4oDlAhUWvZ4KHWviDB8Q4dUDCAs&uact=5).

In the meantime we switched the URL above to a news article about the report.

Edit: site seems back up now, so switched back to the original from
[https://www.10news.com/news/local-news/report-young-
adults-m...](https://www.10news.com/news/local-news/report-young-adults-more-
likely-to-live-with-parents-than-spouses).

------
opportune
Even though the idea kind of disgusts me, I wish companies like Facebook,
Apple, Google, etc would experiment with building new campuses in the middle
of nowhere as “planned cities” complete with airports connecting to regional
hubs, housing, good public transportation, etc. Employees could take home more
of their salaries. The only thing disgusting me more is how expensive Bay Area
rent and property are, and how people who moved here long ago and didn’t
contribute to the tech boom get to cannibalize our incomes by restricting
housing supply.

This would also relieve housing pressure in the Bay Area, and let native kids
not in the tech industry maybe one day move into their own places without
waiting for their parents to die.

~~~
magduf
Sorry, your idea is lunacy, and here's why:

>Employees could take home more of their salaries.

That's not how it works. These companies would pay much lower salaries, with
the justification that "the cost of living is much lower". We already see this
whenever companies have multiple locations, with any of those locations in
low-CoL areas. They'll push employees to relocate to the cheap place, but the
employees don't get to keep those high salaries.

~~~
srj
Pay is not based on the cost of living but on the area job market. These can
have a relationship but are not the same. London is an example of an expensive
city where software engineering wages are relatively low. If there's robust
competition and a shortage of people, the salaries will be high.

~~~
magduf
>If there's robust competition and a shortage of people, the salaries will be
high.

Yes, but if some software corp builds a campus in the middle of nowhere, there
won't be robust competition, obviously. So the salaries are going to be
terrible. The only reason the corporation would do this is to save money, so
they're not going to offer salaries similar to the high-CoL location; doing so
would cost them _more_ money (paying for building the new campus, the huge
administrative cost of opening and staffing this location and getting it
productive, plus the lack of savings in salaries). The whole idea doesn't make
any sense at all. If you look at the way companies operate, they never do
this, except for manufacturing (where they're looking for low-skilled workers
they can train). For high-skilled knowledge workers, they always go where the
workers are.

------
zarro
Its because it doesn't make sense to move out, the real estate markets
stagnation makes taking out a huge loan almost feel like indentured servitude.

why? Because it feels like your always working to pay off the landlord or the
bank just so you can have somewhere to sleep. Even if you own it outright,
property and taxes are 10k/y, now your paying $1k/m just to have a place to
sleep before you can even spend money and work for the things that you want.
The worst of it, is as prices go up there should be a huge push to build more
to balance the market, but than you have all these huge artificial barriers to
entry to build preventing that from happening.

So it makes sense to try to live with parents, make enough money to buy your
house outright so at least than you have a chance to get out from indentured
servitude.

To be honest most of us are just hoping the real estate market collapses, or
these barriers to entry are overcome so that prices can drop because we are
not willing to pay these prices which amount to servitude. Our refusal for
this type of "life" is what causes a decreased in birth rates and growth in
general in the economy.

~~~
refurb
You don’t think that 40 years ago people did the same? I remember my father
buying a house for $30,000 (wow! So lucky) only to learn his home payment was
over 50% of his take-home pay (oh, not so lucky).

~~~
authoritarian
When my dad grew up (in Washington) he was able to pay his college tuition in
full and save for a downpayment on his home by working in the kitchen at the
university. Nowadays, if you went to University full time and then purchased a
house out of college with your only income being a minor kitchen job at
whatever school you attended you'd likely have $100k+ of debt

~~~
refurb
Desirability of housing in particular cities changes over time.

Post college I lived in a small town in Michigan and saved up a down payment
for a house in 2 years making less than $50k.

You can still do it, but not in the most desirable US cities.

------
fiftyfifty
Is this such a bad thing? In places like Japan and Hawaii this has been a
common practice for a long time. As long as the younger generation is
contributing to the household in someway (working, helping out around the
house or helping to provide care for younger or elderly family members etc)
and not living in the basement and playing video games 24-7, it seems like a
far better arrangement. Talk to almost any elderly people living alone and
you'll find they are terribly lonely, and that seems to be a complaint with a
lot of Millennials as well. If you have no plans to marry and start a family
of your own in the near future why not live with you parents?

~~~
chickenpotpie
There's a difference between living with your parents because it's more
practical and living with your parents because it's all you can afford. It's
fine to create a society that values taking care of parents as they age, but
not okay to create one where parents are taken care of because their children
have no other choice. I also have a hard time calling the parents of a
26-year-old "elderly." Young adults today don't hate their parents, they just
want the same opportunities they had.

~~~
fiftyfifty
I'm a recent empty-nester, my kids are all in their late teens/early twenties,
I wouldn't count myself as elderly either. I wouldn't mind at all if one or
more of my kids moved back in with us long term, provided that they helped
around the house and preferably were employed in some manner and could pay a
bit of rent. I think where people have problems is when adult children are
living at home and not working and are not really contributing members of the
household. Heck I'd even be willing to support an adult child financially for
quit a while if they were willing to really help with household tasks, like
cooking, cleaning, grocery shopping, yard work etc. I'm not interested in
supporting an adult child that just wants to do nothing all day and be taken
care of like they are 10 years old the rest of their life, and that seems to
be a common occurrence these days as well.

I do think it's sad that modern society has kind of dismantled the extended
family. That it's become such a faux pas to have multiple generations living
under the same roof. Instead it somehow makes sense to leave our small
children with complete strangers for most of the day and have our young adults
living alone in apartments scarcely bigger than a box a continent away in the
name of starting careers. I honestly think we are overdue for a reversal in
some of these trends.

------
buss
One of the myriad reasons I'm running for office here in San Francisco. We've
created a completely broken system that's akin to generational theft by
boomers from their own children. Time to build more housing. buss2020.org

~~~
refurb
Good luck! SFers aren’t interested in more housing. That’s painfully apparent
by who they re-elect each time.

------
andrepd
A bit misleading no? The percentage of people living "with spouse" has been
cannibalized by the people living "with partner".

------
ngngngng
The missing number here is how many married people live with their parents? In
my experience that seems to be rising. I live in an area with lots of people
married before 26 (Utah), but a significant amount of my married friends under
26 live with one of their parents.

------
SamuelAdams
Here's the reddit post, since the website seems to be crashing.

[https://old.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/dchx6y/in_...](https://old.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/dchx6y/in_america_young_adults_are_now_more_likely_to/)

Here's the author's source data:

[https://old.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/dchx6y/in_...](https://old.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/dchx6y/in_america_young_adults_are_now_more_likely_to/f28a459/)

------
nearbuy
Young adults are also more likely to have parents than spouses.

This doesn't seem so surprising. The chart shows in 1968, about 80% of 26 year
olds lived with a spouse. Today, even if every married 26 year old lived with
their spouse, we'd only hit about 32% of 26 year olds.

They don't group people living with their unmarried partner with people living
with a spouse.

Based on their chart, 23 is the age at which most people no longer live with
their parents.

~~~
big_chungus
> They don't group people living with their unmarried partner with people
> living with a spouse?

Isn't this number pretty insignificantly small? Also, not being married
severely complicates things like joint ownership and sharing an income,
precisely the sorts of things that make buying a house easier.

~~~
nearbuy
It's shown in the article and it's not small at all. It's the 3rd largest
group after parents and spouse. 24% live with a spouse and 17% with a partner.

~~~
big_chungus
Goodness gracious, I had no idea twenty-four percent of young people found it
acceptable to shack up and live in sin. It is no wonder we have such cultural
problems today, nor is it any wonder they are so rapidly increasing.

That said, see my above comments about why you cannot treat married people amd
those people the same.

~~~
nearbuy
I'm guessing this is a religious view (Christian or Muslim maybe?).

Where I'm from it's both common and normal for people to never marry their
lifelong partner and even raise a family together.

~~~
big_chungus
It is somewhat religious, but more in the sense that religion is important for
a society. Where are you from, if I might ask? I've never heard of this idea
of a "partner" until very recently (let alone fathering children out of
wedlock), and this has historically been the case in America. Dropping
religion from main-stream life and such a significant loss of public morality
cannot be good for a society.

~~~
nearbuy
Quebec. There are two main cultures here: francophone (the majority) and
anglophone. Among francophone couples, about 80% aren't married.

There's no real discernible difference here between an unmarried couple and a
married one. They act the same. You wouldn't be able to tell which they were
unless they told you.

Quebec used to be religiously catholic. However, the church kept the people
down and kept them poor and in the early 60s, the people rebelled against the
church and secularized. Quebec today isn't perfect (no place is), but things
are much better now than they were under the catholic church.

~~~
big_chungus
Interesting; thanks for the information. However, note that you mentioned
Quebec stayed mostly monogamous over the long term. In America, we're already
seeing that this is not the case. Society at large seems to be following the
trends best exhibited by dating sites: top 80% women competing for top 20%
men, and bottom 80% of men competing for bottom 20% of women. Combine this
with the fact that in a few years women will have 70% or so of the masters'
degrees, and this will further draw them to that 20-30% of men. Such a
situation leads to a lot of very angry incels, which is a recipe for societal
destabilization. The typical solution has been a war to kill of a bunch of
those, unless a plague did it first.

Personally, I think the government ought not to enforce religion or morality.
However, it can be very important for society to do so.

------
zaroth
Isn’t this mainly because young adults are much less likely to be _married_?

Hard to live with your spouse if you’re not even married.

What’s actually surprising to me is that 80% of 26 years olds were married 50
years ago!

------
opportune
The issue with a housing crunch and run away rents is that due to our economic
system, it’s kind of too big to fail.

If rents and mortgages are a certain price, people keep taking out mortgages
for that price with the assumption that prices won’t go down. So there is a
huge portion of people and loans whose economic situation is dependent on
rents and housing prices not going down. If enough people buy into a delusion
with high risk to ruin, it’s not longer a delusion

Let’s say over the course of 5 years rents decreased by half in the Bay Area.
The real estate market would also probably decrease by about half. Suddenly
tons of people are underwater on their loans, both regular homeowners and many
investors who are no longer able to cover their loans with the market rent.
That’s bad for banks and a huge portion of the populace, and could cause a
huge economic meltdown. So it’s politically untenable.

The only actual solutions I can think of are to never let housing supply
become an issue, let inflation take care of it (if people’s income increases
due to inflation, and housing prices stay the same, it prevents
homeowner/investor insolvency while effectively reducing rent), or just wait
for some big natural disaster. So hopefully the big one comes soon and gives
us a chance to rethink how we build

~~~
JMTQp8lwXL
Most people are long-term owners. While I don't disagree that some people
would experience a capital loss, you have to realize that only a small portion
of the housing supply turns over annually. The percentage of people underwater
may not be as high as you think. It prices fell by half, that would be all Bay
Area homes sold after 2012.
[https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SFXRSA](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SFXRSA)

------
binarymax
Multi-generational homes are what we should really be doing as a society
anyway. It's more efficient economically and environmentally. The benefits are
significant in so many ways.

~~~
zanny
You don't get to choose your parents. You choose your friends, your career,
etc. If economic pressure means you can't choose where you live, you can be
left miserable or abused with no way out. I'd rather see a diversity of
housing options ranging from very environmentally efficient dense apartments
to unsustainable mcmansions than trapping people in often terrible
circumstances.

------
gavanwoolery
There is something to be said for more tribal-esque living. If you live with
close relatives, you can probably drastically reduce the amount of bills,
mortgages, babysitters / caregivers, and cars that everyone pays for, at the
cost of having to buy a larger house potentially.

~~~
zanny
The problem is that, while there is now a large stock of massively oversized
residences to have large families occupy, said residences are built around an
expectation of extravagance that makes them far removed from commercial,
business, or even other residential areas. They are isolated by design and
extraordinarily expensive to maintain both publicly and privately.

If that square footage was simply placed somewhere with reasonable local
access to services it would be less concerning how disastrous the housing and
property markets are, but the McMansions are going to enter total obsolescence
and abandonment when their current residents want to downsize and nobody can
afford to live there.

------
eranima
The sorry state of the housing market is probably the most to blame. In
decades past people could get starter homes much closer to high-paying jobs.
Now you have to suffer through a very long commute.

------
WilTimSon
Well, the housing market is a mess in pretty much all first-world countries,
right? There's also the fact that less and less young people are getting
married, favoring long-term partnerships without any ceremonies instead. Top
it off with wages rising slowly, disproportionate to the speed at which
housing costs climb.

I don't have kids and likely never will but I won't be surprised if my mates'
children will have to live with them until they turn 30 at least. And those
are all reasonably steady families with good incomes.

------
durnygbur
At this point finding a job in any major EU city is easier than finding
housing which is not teporary housing paid per night. Taking a mental
shortcut, the housing market invalidates the EU free movement of workers. If
getting through the interview processes is tiring enough already, so many ways
one can get scammed, abused, cheated, exploited by all kind of dodgy landlords
makes he whole deal just not worth it.

~~~
zanny
Why are all western societies like this? East Asia doesn't hesitate to build
dense apartments from Jakarta to Seoul. I don't buy the "cultural homogeneity
peaceful society" argument because the amount of cultural diversity across the
half the human population living in that area is colossal.

But without fail almost everywhere in the Americas and Europe is structurally
against density in any form and systemically fights it.

~~~
TrackerFF
There's also this quirky thought many medium-sized cities in Europe have: They
want to upsides of being a "big city", but they don't want to identify as a
"big city".

This means: no big ugly blocks, skyscrapers, etc. People want to have spacious
homes and living areas, and beautiful neighborhoods.

They basically want to be suburbs, but 5 min walk from everything important,
and max 30 min drive from work.

~~~
ChuckNorris89
Which European medium-sized city are you referring to?

I also live in a one that's quite wealthy and constantly expanding by
engulfing nearby suburbs and you're right that people there want everything
from suburban lifestyle with city perks but the huge downside is the commute
times since the city got so wide and there's no underground, if you want to
get from on side to another you're in for some hour+ commutes which in a big
city would take 20 min by underground. Basically if you don't live close to
your job, you're kinda screwed.

Students love it since if you live in the city center you can commute by bike
or foot anywhere _important_ within minutes, but as a working adult, the work
commutes are killer since most tech companies can't afford inner city rents
which are mostly taken by cafes, fashion shops, architects, doctors, lawyers,
banks and real estate agencies.

------
JMTQp8lwXL
If birth rates decline and immigration is stymied, the United States is going
to find itself in an extremely difficult position with entitlement programs,
which largely depend on the working population being as large, or larger, than
the retired population, for adequate funding.

~~~
zanny
This thinking is counter to acknowledging the modern automation revolution.
Wealth and productivity are largely becoming detached from people, and as such
the sources of revenue western nations use to fund entitlements wouldn't be
going to go away as people age out of hard labor years if the tax burden was
on the corporate entities rather than individual income / social security /
etc taxes.

The money is still there and will likely not go anywhere except into fewer
hands and pockets. Its up to societies to actually adjust their tax model to
curtail it.

~~~
marcosdumay
Productivity gains are slowing down at the developed world (and the developing
one too). It's a widely discussed phenomenon on economics cycles, and mostly
people seem to have no idea why that is happening.

There's a nice US graph here: [https://tradingeconomics.com/united-
states/productivity#hist...](https://tradingeconomics.com/united-
states/productivity#historical)

An OECD study that goes up to 2005: [http://www.oecd.org/employment/labour-
stats/41354425.pdf](http://www.oecd.org/employment/labour-stats/41354425.pdf)

~~~
ChuckNorris89
_> Productivity gains are slowing down at the developed world (and the
developing one too). It's a widely discussed phenomenon on economics cycles,
and mostly people seem to have no idea why that is happening._

I moved to western Europe and realized why. Millennials there don't want to
take part in the competitive rat race to _be productive_ as their boomer
parents have bought plenty of properties when real estate was cheap and
salaries were high enough that even a factory worker in the 70's could afford
a large apartment. They will later inherit said properties so they feel no
pressure to get into high stress jobs since they are basically taken care of
for life. So why bother?

The only people I know who are constantly grinding and hustling here are
immigrants who don't own any real estate so they're constantly working to
afford to get on the property ladder.

~~~
marcosdumay
Ok... Do you realize that productivity has no relation with how hard one
works, don't you?

------
sgdpk
This fact is slightly misleadin, because the data shows that there are more
people living with a spouse _or_ a partner than with parents. So there seem to
be two reasons for these figures: a larger fraction of people living with
parents and less (or later) weddings.

------
vidanay
Although I agree that the primary causes identified in this thread are far
from ideal, I also think there is nothing wrong with multigenerational
housing.

------
dugokontov
There is an interesting map presentation of similar data from 2014:
[https://census.socialexplorer.com/young-
adults/#/](https://census.socialexplorer.com/young-adults/#/)

It's interesting to see different trends between young adults in different
decades.

New generations tend to living with parents more often, they are more
educated, but earn less in average.

------
scarface74
Objectively, I don’t see a problem with this. It makes perfect sense to pool
your resources and live with family until you get your own family. I’m not
sure how much longer I would have lived at home if I hadn’t moved out of town
for work the week after graduating from college.

------
bregma
My kids haven't come home, but they keep sending all their stuff to my house
every time they move.

At their age, I just didn't have the stuff they have. I couldn't afford things
like furniture, a TV, crates of dishes, or boxes of clothing. I had student
debt to pay off, enough clothes to last between laundries without going too
rank, and a set of pots and pans that were good enough to eat out of. When I
moved, I'd share a borrowed station wagon with a friend to move all out stuff
in one trip.

I only just earned my empty nest. If one of my kids comes back for a "long
term visit", they'll get tired of being questioned on when they're moving back
to their own place.

~~~
rocky1138
It's a fair point, but a lot of stuff these days is cheaper than it used to
be. Consider Dollarama or Dollar Tree. You can outfit a kitchen with a full
set of dishes and utensils and everything else for $50. TVs and other things
are super cheap and sometimes free, as well.

------
SubiculumCode
When housing prices are nearly untenable for middle age adults, is it a
surprise that young adults stay home longer?

------
AlexTWithBeard
For a modern person getting married has few questionable benefits and a lot of
obvious drawbacks.

Totally understandable.

------
fuguza
At least that our government wants!

------
notadoc
It's the economy, to point out the obvious.

------
faissaloo
As a young person it legitimately angers me that even despite being an
extremely fortunate person working a job that makes good money and with no
debt I still won't be able to own a house until I'm 24 which makes me wonder
'how can anyone hope to raise get married and raise a family under these
conditions?'

~~~
uwuhn
Same but until I'm 40

