Millennials and adult Gen Zers who return to their hometowns to live with their parents after attending college or working elsewhere are proving to be a big boon to other Californians.
Perhaps they want to move back into their old bedrooms, perhaps by changing the posters on their walls or getting a better quality bed, as the number of homeless people in the state, more than 181,000, are currently homeless each night. That’s one of the big reasons why.
It’s also been a big factor in slowing the so-called “California exodus” in recent years, with about 750,000 Californians leaving the state in 2021 and 2022, resulting in a net population decline of about 300,000.
Additionally, many people are able to keep the homes they have lived in for more than a generation by allowing their parents to use part of their salaries to pay mortgages and other household expenses.
At the same time, refusing to find multiple roommates and not moving into the new apartments built in the current building boom is keeping California’s vacancy rates high in all but the most affordable buildings, which This could ultimately push down market prices. This will reduce the vacancy rate.
Statistics compiled by the website Rentcafe show that residential moves as large and dramatic as the back-to-the-womb movement are rare, with a significant proportion of Millennials, and especially adult Gen Z, staying with their families until later in the day. There was found. Adulthood.
First, some definitions. The usual birth years for people considered to be Millennials are from 1980 to 1996. This means that most of today she is 28 years old and he is 44 years old. Generation Z consists of people born between 1997 and 2012, the adult part of which is currently between 21 and 27 years old. There is some variation in these. Definition.
However, at least a quarter of all California Millennials live with their parents or other family members, or the Los Angeles metropolitan area has the largest number of movers, at 35% of all Millennials in the region. There is little doubt about that.
Although relocation rates are similar in the Riverside area, slightly fewer Millennials live in their homes in the San Francisco and San Jose areas at 23% and 24%. This trend holds true in the Central Valley as well, with 35% of millennials in Sacramento living with immediate family and 30% living in Stockton.
Homeward migration is much more pronounced among Gen Z. Many of them have just graduated from college and started working in various professions, but they don’t earn enough to live on their own in rented apartments that cost more than $3,000 a month.
A whopping 80% of Los Angeles area residents have a parent or someone like them. 89% of her in Oxnard live similarly. The numbers for Gen Z are only slightly lower in San Francisco (72%), Stockton (77%), San Diego (70%), and San Jose (74%).
This is really all about affordability for young people, who in most other states currently earn enough salaries to provide comfortable housing, but in many areas of California, this is not the case. .
The actual numbers are almost as staggering as the percentages. Approximately 3 million Millennials live in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, and approximately 1.3 million of them spent their childhood there. San Diego is almost the only region bucking this trend, with only about 18% of Millennials living in their childhood home.
One of the big questions is how long this will last. Will many millennials eventually get married and move to states like Texas, Idaho, and Florida where housing is much cheaper? Or will more people find roommates and start sharing the new housing enacted under California’s recent Density and Development Act?
No one can predict with certainty how this will play out over the next decade. However, in the case of multi-child families, there may be a limit to the number of returnees that the children’s home and the parents living there are willing to accept.
This suggests that the age at marriage may continue to get younger, leading to an associated increase in divorces, as marital separation is most common among those who marry at the youngest age. are doing. Bottom line: No one knows exactly where this trend will lead, but adult children living with their parents is not a formula for long-term stability.
Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com and read more of his columns online at californiafocus.net.
