Despite those results, the rate of young adults living independently has decreased to 67 percent in the first four months of 2015, down from 69 percent in 2010 and 71 percent in 2007.
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According to the study, 18-34-year-olds are less likely to be living apart from their family members than they were even during the worst depths of the recent recession.
One in three young adults is still living at home with their parents, despite years of economic recovery which have seen more of them bag jobs and bigger pay packets.
“We need the millennials to start leaving their parents’ homes and start out on their own for the housing market to normalize”, Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics told the Times.
Despite the fact that fewer young adults are buying homes, there are actually more 18- to 34-year-olds in the U.S. today than before the Great Recession. Median weekly earnings for the first third of 2015 are slightly lower, adjusted for inflation, while rent prices have increased. Women have been more likely to live independently, 72 percent compared to 63 percent of men. “This may have important consequences for the nation’s housing market recovery, as the growing young adult population has not fueled demand for housing units and the furnishings, telecom and cable installations and other ancillary purchases that accompany newly formed households”, says Richard Fry, the report’s author and a senior researcher focusing on economics and education at Pew Research Center.
“Millennials”, a demographic group defined by a slavish devotion to “keeping it real” by purchasing the correct consumer products, are now old enough to be “out there” in the world, “doing their thing”.
Between that, and high levels of student debt, living at home might just financially make sense for Americans entering the workforce. The study also showed that young people were hit the hardest by the last recession, which could be the reason for their apprehension… Almost 26 percent of millennials are still living in their parents’ homes while 24 percent did in 2010.
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Still, the majority of people 18 to 34 are living independently, although the tendency to be on their own has been shrinking.
