Boomerangs and “doubling up”

Last updated on: August 29, 2013 at 12:51 pm by Jane the Actuary

Boomerangs and “doubling up” 2013-08-29T12:51:00-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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In the spring of 2007, 17% of all households were “doubled up.” In spring 2011, that percentage had climbed to 18.3%. That’s according to the census data, and is occasionally cited as further evidence of economic hardship and the inability of young adults to get a good start in life.

(Sometimes, the concept of being “doubled up” is also used as a definition of homelessness — if a family loses their apartment and stay with their parents temporarily, they’re “doubled up” and, consequently, homeless. According to the National Center for Homeless Education, the NCLB definition of a “homeless child” includes those “children and youths who are sharing the housing of other persons due to loss of housing, economic hardship, or a similar reason.” On the other hand, the official HUD definition of homeless includes those who are doubled-up only if they’re living in an unstable situation, in which the parent not only isn’t on the lease or title, but also has moved twice in 60 days.)

The conventional wisdom is that being “doubled up” is a Bad Thing. Young adults will end up like the young men of Italy, mama’s boys who live at home more-or-less indefinitely, are sapped of all motivation to find a home of their own, and are no longer marriage material, let alone father material, driving down the birth rate. (In their defense, the mama’s boys themselves would say that they live at home because they can’t find a job!)

So I was very interested to see Eve Tushnet’s defense of “doubled-up” arrangements in the Weekly Standard. She cites a recent Pew Research report on young adults living at home, whose overall percentage, in the age group of 18 – 31 year olds, has increased from 32% to 36% from 2007 to 2012, and cites some harm in our mentality criticizing the live-at-homes:

This is perhaps the biggest negative effect of living at home these days: It postpones marriage and, in many cases, childbearing. Today, young adults believe that they can’t get married—that it’s wrong to get married—before they’ve achieved economic independence. For reasons that can be crudely summarized as “terror of divorce,” young adults believe that it’s only morally acceptable to get married once you’ve undergone an extensive period of finding yourself and attaining financial stability.

The belief that young adults must be able to live independently before they can marry is new, and it’s damaging. At the pregnancy center where I volunteer, about half of the women intend to marry their children’s father eventually. What are they waiting for? A steady job, an escape from welfare and charity, a sense of financial solid ground. But if a woman names one specific goal she must attain before she can marry, 9 times out of 10 that goal is an apartment of her own: moving out from under Mom’s roof. So she puts her name on the years-long waiting list for Section 8 subsidized housing, and she applies for yet another part-time job, and she goes back to community college, and she hopes that her relationship with her baby’s father will survive. Without marriage, it usually doesn’t.

And the New Urbanism that yesterday’s End of the Suburbs book (attempted to) explore is connected to this: in older neighborhoods, homes were well-suited to multi-generation living arrangements, with granny flats, apartments above the garage, even three-flats in which the younger generation lived in one of the flats. My grandparents had such an apartment as a wing of their house, though they had a tenant instead of a family member living there. Now, suburbs have, with rare exceptions, thouroughly zoned away such multi-generational living except as an elderly parent or un-independent child living as a dependent, in a bedroom, without any semi-independent living space appropriate for people who are, well, semi-independent.

Of course, on the other hand, in a very dense urban area, semi-independent living spaces don’t exist either, when a family rents or owns a single flat in an apartment building, as is the case in a typical European city center. So this isn’t a matter of urbanism vs. suburbanism but of zoning restrictions. (And if above-garage apartments became common, you’d have complaints about excessive on-street partking that suburbs dislike — around here, overnight on-street parking isn’t even permitted except temporarily for guests.)

Fun fact: the Pew site above links to a report on European multi-generational housing. Here’s the actual PDF. And, yes, 48% of Italian men ages 25 – 34 live at their parents’ homes, as do 55% of Greek young men, and even higher levels of some former Communist bloc countries. The lowest rates? The Scandinavian countries, which are significantly lower than everywhere else.

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