Multigenerational housing is coming back in a big way. 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.
That's a lot of words to say "The rent is too damn high."
20 people crammed into a single room technically counts as multigenerational open space concept living.
90s revival was yesterday, tomorrow the 19th century will come back!
Who needs ventilation and fire escapes!
Well, you have to have the windows open for ventilation anyway, so the fire escape is right there.
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).
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.
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.
I disagree that it’s more economically health for adults to be their children’s dependents than it is for adult children to be dependent on their parents. Those are both equally unhealthy situations.
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.
Don't forget about other rich ass-hats who buy houses above asking, just to tear them down and build another ungodly McMansion, taking away what affordable houses remain.
A beautiful 50 year old house sold on my block for $250,000k two years ago. At 1600 sqft, and some renovations from the previous owner, it was a wonderful starter home. A college buddy of mine tried to buy it at asking $230k and we joked that we'd be neighbors.
But instead, someone bought it, destroyed it, rebuilt it, and sold it for $900k.
Now, that same house just sits there with a "For Rent" sign. It's appalling.
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.
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
that's a shift in standard of living, abject poverty is an exaggeration. poverty is a symptom of the same underlying causes but one does not equal the other
If only my parents owned a fucking house lolol
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 "👎"
I lived in one for close to a decade. Yeah they are kinda shitty and major are in disrepair, but I think my sentiment about needing fast and cheap housing still holds. In Canada at least, our rate of population growth has outpaced our rate of new housing construction for years. We need a major course correction to fix this crisis.
I don't think it's that simple in a sense. You risk crashing the housing market which will leave a lot of people that "just barely made it" into the housing market far worse off if you just rapidly mass-build housing.
There also just aren't that many builders/contractors that do good work available so you run the risk of building a lot of housing that's in a state of disrepair soon after construction/never built properly. There are plenty of housing inspectors on youtube speaking out about housing developments and how ridiculously bad a lot of the modern builders are.
You also need to find the land to build on in a time when land conservation is increasingly recognized as important/there's little public land left. That means buying up even more (likely) good farm land.
You can start buying people out of their inner city neighborhoods in disrepair and start revitalizing them, but that's gentrification that often leaves the people that were living in those homes worse off. Where I am in Akron there are plenty of houses, just lots of them folks don't really want to live in them (they're in disrepair in "high" crime areas) or they're being rented for absurd prices. I think revitalizing these neighborhoods and forcing a cap on rental properties is the most promising, but it needs paired with a general economic support system for those already living in the neighborhood.
I don't think there's an easy fix here.
For your first point. Yeah we can't make affordable housing woth out making new homes cheaper. It will bring the price of other hones down. So pick your poison unaffordable houses or cheap homes for new buyers.
It would be nice to have both but with houses as investments well...
A lot of that housing was pretty bad for a lot of reasons. Cramped, badly designed, and incredibly energy inefficient. Yeah, sure…it was housing, but recreation of that style shouldn’t be a goal.
We should get china to ship over their unused buildings. I hear they’ve got a shitload.
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."
Look at boomers entering long term care, I think they hadn't realized the long term consequences of splitting up families like has become the norm... Or just loneliness increasingly becoming an issue for everyone...
I literally just came back from spending the weekend with my grandmother because of that. She's going nuts being all alone :(
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.
More like 75 years. It’s collapsed already and the baby boom was an early 50s/late 40s thing.
And those of us with poor parents, or who are estranged from our parents, or who otherwise have some barrier between us and our parents either have to bootstrap our ways to survival or die.
I wish I had married someone rich instead of the daughter of two school teachers. But I’m lucky she had generous rich extended family that gave us enough to buy the house I now own before we divorced.
Now I’m unemployed after being laid off 3 months ago with no safety net and no strong prospects for work that will keep me in the house, even with a roommate paying rent. I have nowhere to go and no one to support me if I lose the house.
My wife and I are very early in the planning stages for building a house. We're fairly young and have one 6 month old kid, but we're already planning for the strong possibility of having to have our children with us for far longer than they'd like.
It's going to suck for them to try affording rent and buying a home.
I expect my house will be full again in just a couple of years. My elderly father already moved in with us and when my Son is done with College I'm prepared for him too move back as well. It's why I haven't sold the 2800 square foot 5 Bedroom / 3 Bathroom silliness that I had built back in 2008.
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.
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.
Does anyone know how much the switch from "catch and release" to "stay and apply on your side" immigration policies increased the hourly pay of homebuilders? I feel like this housing shortage started with 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.
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.
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.
Exactly. Stop being.g a NIMBY and build some damn housing. I think we're gonna see polyamory really take off when more and pore people realize tehy can o ly be free if they can have several incomes under one roof and that being in a relationship makes that tolerable. We.re gonna eventually are people raising kids under those conditions and the partriarchial family start to dissolve by economic forces supported by it's greatest supporters
Yeah... I can't even get one girlfriend let alone be poly...
So many times with these conversations perpetually single people, and people without families are just completely ignored.
Guess I'll just sleep on a bench.
Oh... Right... This is America. Guess I'll die.
If multiple generations of my family were forced under one roof for an extended period of time, I genuinely think half of us would murder each other within months. Several generations of (largely untreated) mental illness does not a happy family make.
The last 3 generations of one side of my family joined the military to GET OUT.
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.
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.
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.
...and...
I like the idea at first glance, but I'm skeptical. There are towns across America that are in similar decline because the reason for their existence is an industry that has moved on or evaporated with time. Coal mining towns come to mind too. Crumbling infrastructure is really expensive to rebuild. Possibly more so than new "clean slate" builds. Further, even if the money (which would be massive) is spent once, it needs a tax base to sustain it or it will fall into disrepair again. If we're revitalizing homes in small towns and rural communities, is that the best use of limited resources to create more sustainable housing?
I'm a big proponent of Remote Work myself and I believe "return to office" is a waste of time and energy. I'm more on the path of taking those now empty office spaces and turning them into residences as a path forward. The infrastructure is already built, usually including well established light rail and public transportation, as well as a decent number of support businesses (shops and restaurants) already existing in former business districts where these office buildings would be. The transition of the office space itself won't be without challenges, but the existing high quality construction of the buildings and high density of resulting residences means a faster turn around and better potential in my mind for a sustainable solution.
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
This is so true. I’m already in an empty best situation with my older at college and the younger only two years behind. I miss seeing them every day and miss the bustle of a full house. However they’re “required” to live at college, I try to balance my expectations of them toward “find a city that’s best for you to support your life”, and I will never ever say out loud my true feelings of “please come back, and I’ll make you chocolate chip pancakes every Saturday”
This. The previous generation spread their wings. Left their/our families and all that support to make their mark. Now they all sit in their lounger, getting yelled at by their news man wondering why they are so mad and alone. The generation who created participation trophies is now made they exist. 0 accountability to the state of affairs. I was constantly reminded I was on the 18 and out plan...the rooster is roosting
As a GenX I am the previous generation so you must be talking about the Boomers. 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.
The Boomers were basically the only generation that could afford and eschewed multi-generational housing. The rest of us are just muddling along the best we can.
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.
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.
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.
That's part of it. The part where people bought into it. But I can't help thinking how much this single one-bedroom model resembles pigs or chicken in battery cages. Someone above said "Keeping the proletariat occupied with their day to day needs is one of the core goals of the capitalist system." It's by corporate design. If you're living alone it's harder to obtain those day-to-day needs and you're easier to control.
I see the opposite from your analogy.
In a battery cage the cage is JUST large enough to contain the animal. No room to move at all, possibly not even turn around. A 1BR apart is the opposite. Its hard boundaries other cannot intrude upon you giving you space that is your own. You're not shoulder to shoulder with other people/family members always having your space violated. You're free to leave your 1BR apartment and venture into the work at will, always having a place of privacy and solitude to return to at the end of the day that is no one but yours. If you put your book on the coffee table, no one else will touch it, take it, or harm it. It will be right there whenever you return for it. There is great comfort in that.
Access to housing and transport is necessary for independence though (actual access, not the access to healthcare or a megayacht type of access), how many people stay in abusive relationships because they depend on their abuser for housing?
I don't know why someone downvoted you. That's a huge problem when it comes to domestic abuse, especially if children are involved. Battered women fear leaving their children homeless.
A lot. And abusive relationships are a hidden but massive drag on Everything. Dense carfree housing isn't expensive it's just illegal
"necessary"
Yeah, so that word doesn't mean what you think it does when we look at human history and even the majority of households in the world at the moment.
You haven't met my dad. 🤣