The economy may have largely recovered from the depths of the downturn, but there’s a record number of grown children living with their folks. And with soaring housing prices, aging parents, and the changing ethnic makeup of the nation, the trend of multigenerational living looks like it’s just getting started.
About 19% of all Americans, roughly 60.6 million people, lived in multigenerational homes in 2014, in households typically made up of parents, their adult children, and often their grandkids, according to a recent Pew Research Center report that looked at U.S. Census data. That’s practically a throwback to the 1950s, when about 21% of Americans shared a roof with their grown children or parents. Déjà vu, anyone?
As nuclear families became the norm, that percentage dropped to just 12% in 1980. But then the economy tanked in the mid-2000s. And as times became tough, the number of adult children living with their parents started rising again—hitting 17% in 2009 and 18% in 2012, according to the report.