Any causes? Is it that we are too independent and don’t like collectivism? A conspiracy might say it’s on purpose to have more people pay for things typically bought for a couple. Like everyone having their own house, cable bill, utility bill, water bill, …
It's utterly terrible regarding the issues of housing availability, settling down to start our own families, and elder care. The multi-generation pattern is that the grandparents watch the kids while the middle generation does useful work - the grandparents supervise the kids, while the kids keep the grandparents entertained. Then when the kids get old enough, they help supervise the grandparents.
I think we could naturally fall back into this pattern as housing, elder, and child care continue to get ever more expensive... but for the fact that the baseline suburban house is built with a single common living space, meant for a single family all constantly interacting with each other. You have to get into much more expensive houses with "in-law apartments" and whatnot before you regain the breathing room to have multiple generations living together. And now even houses with that extra space have become economic-grindstone legible due to short term rentals.
When I was a twentysomething, I had roommates. This saved money on rent and bulk purchases (which let me spend more time having fun and save money) and provided a starter-kit social circle in a new city. It also honed conflict-resolution skills and ability to be civil. And when I got a partner, it made moving in together smoother.
Something I’ve noticed recently is many college graduates living alone. That’s fine. But it’s a weird default for early in one’s career. If I had one general piece of advice for anyone starting their career, it would be to seek out a living situation with roommates.
Side question: are more college students staying in solo dorms?
Living alone is awesome, but I also had roommates while in university, and despite our differences, that was awesome too, it would have sucked to be alone.
I guess living alone can be a sound decision, but it depends on context.
There's a huge gamble with roommates that you might be stuck with someone terrible in a year (or longer) lease. Most people who can afford to live alone would prefer to have their own place. This is just a sign that people are getting richer (since this same trend is happening in all first-world countries).
If the number of young people who can buy homes is going down and the number of young people that can afford to start families is also going down then how are people getting richer?
Part of the "housing crisis" is older Americans aging-in-place and using way more home than they need too. A widow/er might occupy the same suburban single family home in retirement that could house 5 people.
For sure, but this is tied into the elder care crisis. My aunt is the sole occupant of a gigantic "2 family" [0]. Not even in the suburbs, but in what you'd describe as a small city downtown. She toys with the idea of assisted living, but the deal basically seems to be trading her house to buy in, and then a huge monthly ongoing fee. And we all know once you're in such a place, the rosy marketing about the care you're going to get never really pans out. Whereas she gets the full attention of the hired helper who comes by twice a week.
At this point I think she's well past assisted living, and relies on being in a familiar environment. So those concerns plus the non-winning finances, my advice is to stay there as long as she can. Because from what I've seen of nursing homes, they're basically grueling slow-motion assisted suicide.
[0] It's actually 3 units, one in a state of paused remodel. I haven't been able to tell if it started its life as 2 units each with an upstairs and downstairs and a shared stairway, or as 4 separate units even.
My mother is in this situation. All of the assisted living facilities in mher area are either owned by Private Equity or are way too expensive. She has no choice other than to age in place. It’s terrifying for both of us.
That in itself is a failure of society, that someone who has spent X amount of time in a home they love, have lived life in, raised their children in etc. is implicit expected to sacrifice all that so younger people can take the space.
We just need to get better at redistributing our economic activity instead of concentrating everything in the same place and then wondering why everyone wants to live in the same and its unfeasible to house them all
I'm building a house currently and I really wish there were more options to have the things I want without needing all the extra space in places I don't care about. The problem is, even if I was able to build such a house (I'm using a large builder, this is not a fully custom house) the resale prospects would be poor.
The best thing I ever did for my mental health was to start having children. Humans, like every other living creature, are hardwired by billions of years of evolution to reproduce.
Why are people complaining about this? It's not even that high of an amount compared to several other developed nations. It's not a recent trend either. It's been going on for over 30 years.
No one here seems to care about the objective number (40 million) - they instead care about the relative amount (29%). If you look at the graph and track the percent, it's been at or over 25% since 1990. Having your share go from 25% to 29% in 35 years is not really that meaningful.
This isn't a new phenomenon in the US. The graph sucks because it hides the fact that the US population has been growing steadily.
It's weird to see people discussing this from a "we're richer so we live alone because roommates are risky" angle instead of the actual angle of this being an indicator of the slow death of society because it indicates the increasing number of people that never grew up, formed a pair bond and had kids (and also the failure of many of those pair bonds ending in divorce and one or both sides of the pair living alone depending on if they had kids or not.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 60.7 ms ] thread29% seems like a fairly neutral number.
I think we could naturally fall back into this pattern as housing, elder, and child care continue to get ever more expensive... but for the fact that the baseline suburban house is built with a single common living space, meant for a single family all constantly interacting with each other. You have to get into much more expensive houses with "in-law apartments" and whatnot before you regain the breathing room to have multiple generations living together. And now even houses with that extra space have become economic-grindstone legible due to short term rentals.
https://www.apolloacademy.com/the-daily-spark/
Something I’ve noticed recently is many college graduates living alone. That’s fine. But it’s a weird default for early in one’s career. If I had one general piece of advice for anyone starting their career, it would be to seek out a living situation with roommates.
Side question: are more college students staying in solo dorms?
I guess living alone can be a sound decision, but it depends on context.
This is a sign of social isolation, not wealth.
At this point I think she's well past assisted living, and relies on being in a familiar environment. So those concerns plus the non-winning finances, my advice is to stay there as long as she can. Because from what I've seen of nursing homes, they're basically grueling slow-motion assisted suicide.
[0] It's actually 3 units, one in a state of paused remodel. I haven't been able to tell if it started its life as 2 units each with an upstairs and downstairs and a shared stairway, or as 4 separate units even.
We just need to get better at redistributing our economic activity instead of concentrating everything in the same place and then wondering why everyone wants to live in the same and its unfeasible to house them all
The culprit is not the concentration of jobs to a geographic area, it’s NIMBYs and crap like California’s Prop 13 artificially constraining supply.
After living with parents, roommates, spouses and others for most of my life, I'm super happy to live alone.
Has anyone stopped to think that possibly people live alone because that's what they want to do?
I can only think of a quote from one of my favorite youtube videos of all time:
"The monkey's feel alone, all 6 billion of them..."
From: Ernest Cline's spoken word reading of Dance Monkey, Dance
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQOdNY-HdG0
Watch it, it's worth it...
No one here seems to care about the objective number (40 million) - they instead care about the relative amount (29%). If you look at the graph and track the percent, it's been at or over 25% since 1990. Having your share go from 25% to 29% in 35 years is not really that meaningful.
This isn't a new phenomenon in the US. The graph sucks because it hides the fact that the US population has been growing steadily.