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.
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.