Updating this post with July data
Catherine Rampell tweeted a link to a Zillow analysis showing 2.2 million adults ages 18-25 moving in with their parents or grandparents in March and April. Zillow’s Treh Manhertz estimates these move-homers would cost the rental market the better part of a billion dollars, or 1.4% of total rent if they stay home for a year.
We now have the data through July from the Current Population Survey data to work with, so I extended this forward, and did it differently. CPS is the large, monthly survey that the Census Bureau conducts for the Bureau of Labor Statistics each month, principally to track labor market trends. It also includes basic demographics and living arrangement information. Here is what I came up with.*
Among people ages 18-29, there is a large spike of living in the home of a parent or grandparent (of themselves or their spouse), which I’ll call “living at home” for short. This is apparent in a figure that compares 2020 with the previous 5 years (click figures to enlarge):
From February to April, the percentage of young adults living at home jumped from 43% to 48%, and then up to 49.4% in June and 48.7% in July. Clearly, this is anomalous. (I ran it back to 2008 just to make sure there were no similar jumps around the time of the last recession; in earlier years the rates were lower and there were no similar spikes.) This is a very large disturbance in the Force of Family Demography.
To get a better sense of the magnitude of this event, I modeled it by age, sex, and race/ethnicity. Here are the estimated share of adults living at home by age and sex. For this I use just July of each year, and compare 2020 with the pooled set of 2017-2019. This controls for race/ethnicity.
The biggest increase is among 21-year-olds, and women under 22 generally. These may be people coming home from college, losing their jobs or apartments, canceling their weddings, or coming home to help.
I ran the same models but broke out race/ethnicity instead (not separately for gender White, Black, and Latino, as the samples get small).
This shows that the 2020 bounce is greatest for Black young adults (below age 26) and the levels are lowest for Latinos (remember that many Latinos are immigrants whose parents and grandparents don’t live in the US).
To show the total race/ethnic and gender pattern, here are the predicted levels of living at home, controlling for age:
The biggest 2020 bounce is among Black men who have the highest overall levels, 59%, and White women having the lowest at 45%.
In conclusion, millions of young adults are living with their parents and grandparents who would not be if 2020 were like previous years. The effect is most pronounced among Black young adults. Future research will have to determine which of the many possible disruptions to their lives is driving this event.
For scale, there are 51 million (non-institutionalized) adults ages 18-29 in the country. If 2020 was like the previous three years, I would expect there to be 22.2 million of them living with their parents. Instead there are 24.9 million living at home, an increase of 2.7 million from the expected number (numbers updated for July 2020). That is a lot of rent not being spent, but even with that cost savings I don’t think this is good news.
* The IPUMS codebook, Stata code, spreadsheet, and figures are in an Open Science Framework project under CC0 license here: osf.io/2xrhc.
Hi Phillip
Any chance I could get the raw data behind the first and last charts? Of course I would attribute the data to you. Thank you
LikeLike
Hi Alex, if by raw data you mean the data to make the figures, yes, I’ll paste it below. If you mean the CPS microdata, I’m not supposed to share that but I can help you get it. Please link to the post. Happy to chat if you like.
First figure:
year month with parents
2008 1 38.55665
2008 2 38.87914
2008 3 38.69946
2008 4 38.66726
2008 5 39.61969
2008 6 39.62636
2008 7 40.25215
2008 8 39.5493
2008 9 38.42844
2008 10 38.30681
2008 11 38.84722
2008 12 39.82227
2009 1 39.74659
2009 2 39.98518
2009 3 39.70016
2009 4 39.59893
2009 5 40.50216
2009 6 40.71937
2009 7 41.13106
2009 8 40.94006
2009 9 39.74147
2009 10 39.34261
2009 11 39.38538
2009 12 39.27766
2010 1 40.19937
2010 2 40.15211
2010 3 40.97244
2010 4 40.84019
2010 5 41.04207
2010 6 41.67889
2010 7 42.25612
2010 8 42.00253
2010 9 40.15858
2010 10 40.34335
2010 11 40.23833
2010 12 40.73026
2011 1 40.7027
2011 2 40.59685
2011 3 41.41482
2011 4 41.44543
2011 5 42.16846
2011 6 42.74885
2011 7 43.15535
2011 8 42.42809
2011 9 41.31924
2011 10 41.51589
2011 11 41.83724
2011 12 42.62847
2012 1 43.08289
2012 2 42.64241
2012 3 43.03194
2012 4 43.0605
2012 5 43.5802
2012 6 43.83187
2012 7 43.74673
2012 8 43.17284
2012 9 42.36815
2012 10 42.26324
2012 11 42.42387
2012 12 42.16727
2013 1 42.75641
2013 2 42.56127
2013 3 42.57597
2013 4 42.95881
2013 5 43.57063
2013 6 44.07897
2013 7 44.56165
2013 8 43.63096
2013 9 42.49306
2013 10 42.43233
2013 11 42.40975
2013 12 43.22675
2014 1 43.25664
2014 2 42.98183
2014 3 42.86612
2014 4 42.58364
2014 5 43.45578
2014 6 43.63179
2014 7 44.36956
2014 8 43.52089
2014 9 41.74788
2014 10 41.94676
2014 11 41.37336
2014 12 42.33097
2015 1 42.56209
2015 2 42.5211
2015 3 42.68177
2015 4 42.35693
2015 5 43.18686
2015 6 43.49438
2015 7 43.5111
2015 8 43.22837
2015 9 41.9293
2015 10 41.52843
2015 11 41.71131
2015 12 42.21806
2016 1 42.5613
2016 2 42.95105
2016 3 42.54842
2016 4 42.15552
2016 5 42.73203
2016 6 42.85725
2016 7 42.96103
2016 8 42.56576
2016 9 41.44548
2016 10 41.38429
2016 11 42.08328
2016 12 42.091
2017 1 42.23372
2017 2 41.89931
2017 3 41.89879
2017 4 41.98476
2017 5 42.44712
2017 6 43.23956
2017 7 43.37757
2017 8 43.69612
2017 9 42.53176
2017 10 42.40167
2017 11 43.29571
2017 12 43.04031
2018 1 42.60947
2018 2 42.14982
2018 3 41.35093
2018 4 41.60259
2018 5 42.26979
2018 6 43.22698
2018 7 43.55971
2018 8 42.69726
2018 9 42.05385
2018 10 42.3882
2018 11 43.07485
2018 12 43.07066
2019 1 42.7605
2019 2 42.18407
2019 3 42.47921
2019 4 42.88332
2019 5 43.3389
2019 6 43.4116
2019 7 43.5669
2019 8 42.54157
2019 9 42.18876
2019 10 42.22175
2019 11 42.87265
2019 12 42.98013
2020 1 42.41199
2020 2 42.88401
2020 3 45.17418
2020 4 47.9059
2020 5 48.27187
2020 6 49.35247
2020 7 48.74189
Last figure:
2017-2019 2020
White men 0.458 0.508
White women 0.395 0.449
Black men 0.516 0.593
Black women 0.427 0.485
Latino men 0.449 0.500
Latino women 0.419 0.470
LikeLike
Reblogged this on Project ENGAGE.
LikeLike
Idk if I represent a large enough demographic to count but within a few months of me living at home my parent started demanding rent. So I’m kind of participating in the rent economy by alternative means even though I’m “living at home”.
LikeLike