That’s really interesting that married, no kids has stayed pretty flat across the board.
Never-nesters, empty-nesters, and second marriages combined. It would be interesting to trace cohorts through time.
i wonder how much of "other" is multigenerational households.
Personally I've come to consider the dominant meta of suburbs full of single (nuclear) family homes has been utter trash and a total disaster for society on the scale of the entire economy. Sending kids off to go into debt for thirty fucking years the moment they turned 18 was a massive mistake and now they can't even get a HOUSE out of it because that debt now represents fucking student loans.
I believe we should return to the strategy where a family holds a piece of property generation to generation, continuously expanding and improving it to accommodate more and more people living cooperatively. Multiple sets of grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, all living in the same parcel if not under the same roof - the 'it takes a village' approach. Need more room? Fuckin BUILD some. Need to afford materials and labor? Pool the earning resources of all the working adults... And/Or opt for traditional construction methods that utilize the materials of the land itself, maybe conscript the cousins if necessary. Even if municipal ordinances are opposing the expansion, an extended family working together is stronger in challenging those power structures than any one or two parent(s) would be on their own.
And also we should stop building houses out of fucking paper.
I'd rather not live anywhere, penniless and in insurmountable debt, than live with my parents ever again.
You wouldn't have to live with your parents if the people who still have a good relationship with theirs stayed there.
I literally won't be able to live "with" my parents because my father was taken from us by covid in 2022 and my mother is on her last leg after a stroke, furthermore I don't plan on becoming a parent myself - BUT I do entirely plan to fill this house with found family.
If you're a loner who doesn't want to live with anyone, ever, then that's great for you. The majority of people are generally more socially connected to one another and naturally gravitate into tribal groups. If more people embraced that instinct, that'd mean more potential places to live opening up for loners like you.
It’s an interesting concept.
I’ve been mulling over an addition to my house. I do still really WANT a garage for all of the garage stuff that suburban with kids life really requires. I live in a zero lot-line burb, but my house is on the corner and I could convert my garage and add a separate out-building for the garage. I’ve been advised that nobody will want to own the most expensive house in the neighborhood tho, so just moving a mile or two is a better financial decision.
We are about to clean out my grandparents farmhouse. It’s probably 150+ years old and was added onto at least once. No way would I want to live in it. It’d probably stand for another 100 years, but the layout is HORRIBLE, there’s one cramped bathroom, no closets at ALL and the bedrooms are TINY (plus wired without ground cabling… there are every other problem in the world with OLD houses. It’s also a big challenge that my “family” plot of land is +1000 miles from my current job.
A lot of those MegaMcMansions are actually what you’re talking about. My parents aren’t too many years away from needing to move in with me. We’ve discussed the fact that even if it’s until they have to go to a real “assisted” living facility that they might rather pay me rent towards a nicer house that would work for all of us.
another force acting upon me is the sickening realization that just about anyone selling a house right now on the open market who isn't selective about who they're selling it to is, all too often, letting it fall into the hands of some foreign billionaire's real estate holdings firm where they will use it as a personal investment-speculation-based piggy bank and transform it into, at best, an airbnb where people are charged four figures per night OR at worst, nobody is allowed to live there just to drive up the value of their other properties through artificial scarcity.
I want to see people continuing to own property. Families continuing to own property. Not corporations asserting neofeudalism.
The fact more people living alone is a huge contributor to the housing crisis that no one seems to talk much about. Add on the fact people want larger and larger houses, and you get... What we have
I have two friends who live alone who would definitely prefer a smaller and cheaper apartment. Although this is anecdotal, my experiences has been it’s a cost problem first.
They don’t have the luxury to be concerned about the size of the unit. The basic standard of a place to live within driving distance already consumes their entire budget.
“Get a partner to solve the housing crisis” is funny but doesn’t check out. Living alone as a group grew much more significantly between 1960 and 1980 than it did since then.
Nah. Making people have to have roommates is not a solution to the housing crisis.
