Culture / Newsy

Texas Millennials Living With Their Parents in All-Time Record Numbers

Who Needs to Ever Leave Home?

BY // 05.15.18

They say you can’t go home again. But it looks like no one told Texas millennials. Call it an extreme case of homesickness or just a new American reality, but roughly one in five young adults in Houston are crashing with their parents. That’s considerably up from 2005, when just one in eight Space City millennials were all set up in their childhood bedrooms.

In Dallas-Fort Worth, 19.7 percent of all millennials live at home.

In San Antonio, as many as 29.2 percent of millennials live with their mothers, considerably up from 14.3 percent in 2005. Yet only 7.7 percent of these homebodies are unemployed.

Among the major Texas cities, Austin has the smallest share of millennials living at home — in fact it has the smallest rate in the entire country. Austin has just 13.9 percent of  millennials living at home, which is still up from 8 percent in 2005. The unemployment rate among this group is 8.1 percent.

The new stats come from an extensive report by Zillow, a real estate listing and data firm based out of Seattle. “More millennials age 24-36 live with their mom than at any time in the past decade,” the report notes. Nationwide, that’s nearly a quarter of all millennials. Back in 2005, just 13.5 percent of young adults lived with their moms across the United States.

In the Houston area, a whopping 22.3 percent of young adults live at home. Just 12 percent of that group is currently unemployed.

So, what’s the draw? Is it really just home-cooked meals and free laundry? Not according to the latest analysis. You see, even as the U.S. labor market has improved, there’s been sluggish income growth and rapidly rising rents.

Over the last decade, these financial reasons have either kept millennials at home or inspired them to move back in with the roommates they’ve known their whole lives.

“As rents outpaced incomes over the past decade, young people turned to their families in large numbers to ease the housing crunch,” Zillow senior economist Aaron Terrazas says in the report. In Houston, the median apartment rent is $1,558 per month. Nationally, it’s only $1,447. On average, Houstonians spend a whopping 29.4 percent of their monthly income on their rent.

In New York City, where rents go from high to stratostophic, a whopping 30.3 percent of young adults still live with their parents.

But financial necessity isn’t the only appeal of living at home, even with the potential threat of curfews and chores. “The family safety net is yet to unwind. Living with parents may allow young adults to pursue work or a passion that may not be especially lucrative, or save enough money for first and last month’s rent or a down payment on a home of their own,” Terrazas notes.

If you’ve been anywhere near Twitter, you’ll have seen at least a hundred memes back and forth making fun of Baby Boomers or sharing that generation’s taunts about millennials. You’ve got to wonder how the generational battle goes over dinner tables nightly.

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