July data show 2.7 million extra young adults living at home

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.

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* The IPUMS codebook, Stata code, spreadsheet, and figures are in an Open Science Framework project under CC0 license here: osf.io/2xrhc.