That’s really interesting that married, no kids has stayed pretty flat across the board.
Never-nesters, empty-nesters, and second marriages combined. It would be interesting to trace cohorts through time.
i wonder how much of “other” is multigenerational households.
Personally I’ve come to consider the dominant meta of suburbs full of single (nuclear) family homes has been utter trash and a total disaster for society on the scale of the entire economy. Sending kids off to go into debt for thirty fucking years the moment they turned 18 was a massive mistake and now they can’t even get a HOUSE out of it because that debt now represents fucking student loans.
I believe we should return to the strategy where a family holds a piece of property generation to generation, continuously expanding and improving it to accommodate more and more people living cooperatively. Multiple sets of grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, all living in the same parcel if not under the same roof - the ‘it takes a village’ approach. Need more room? Fuckin BUILD some. Need to afford materials and labor? Pool the earning resources of all the working adults… And/Or opt for traditional construction methods that utilize the materials of the land itself, maybe conscript the cousins if necessary. Even if municipal ordinances are opposing the expansion, an extended family working together is stronger in challenging those power structures than any one or two parent(s) would be on their own.
And also we should stop building houses out of fucking paper.
I’d rather not live anywhere, penniless and in insurmountable debt, than live with my parents ever again.
You wouldn’t have to live with your parents if the people who still have a good relationship with theirs stayed there.
I literally won’t be able to live “with” my parents because my father was taken from us by covid in 2022 and my mother is on her last leg after a stroke, furthermore I don’t plan on becoming a parent myself - BUT I do entirely plan to fill this house with found family.
If you’re a loner who doesn’t want to live with anyone, ever, then that’s great for you. The majority of people are generally more socially connected to one another and naturally gravitate into tribal groups. If more people embraced that instinct, that’d mean more potential places to live opening up for loners like you.
TIL not wanting to live with my parents makes me a loner.
Re-reading, it sounds like you want to live on shared land with some sort of multigenerational found family.
That’s … that sounds like a cult. I’m not knocking cults, I think starting a cult would be cool as hell. Pool resources, buy land, build a compound, and start doing cult shit? Fuck yes.
But, like … most people don’t want that shit. They want to live with the people they love and can cohabitate with.
But, like … most people don’t want that shit. They want to live with the people they love and can cohabitate with.
What do you think a found family is if not people you love and can cohabitate with? I don’t have to be related to people to care about them and want to be around them.
It’s an interesting concept.
I’ve been mulling over an addition to my house. I do still really WANT a garage for all of the garage stuff that suburban with kids life really requires. I live in a zero lot-line burb, but my house is on the corner and I could convert my garage and add a separate out-building for the garage. I’ve been advised that nobody will want to own the most expensive house in the neighborhood tho, so just moving a mile or two is a better financial decision.
We are about to clean out my grandparents farmhouse. It’s probably 150+ years old and was added onto at least once. No way would I want to live in it. It’d probably stand for another 100 years, but the layout is HORRIBLE, there’s one cramped bathroom, no closets at ALL and the bedrooms are TINY (plus wired without ground cabling… there are every other problem in the world with OLD houses. It’s also a big challenge that my “family” plot of land is +1000 miles from my current job.
A lot of those MegaMcMansions are actually what you’re talking about. My parents aren’t too many years away from needing to move in with me. We’ve discussed the fact that even if it’s until they have to go to a real “assisted” living facility that they might rather pay me rent towards a nicer house that would work for all of us.
another force acting upon me is the sickening realization that just about anyone selling a house right now on the open market who isn’t selective about who they’re selling it to is, all too often, letting it fall into the hands of some foreign billionaire’s real estate holdings firm where they will use it as a personal investment-speculation-based piggy bank and transform it into, at best, an airbnb where people are charged four figures per night OR at worst, nobody is allowed to live there just to drive up the value of their other properties through artificial scarcity.
I want to see people continuing to own property. Families continuing to own property. Not corporations asserting neofeudalism.
One of the municipalities not too far from me has put some onerous regulations on short term rentals and I’m SUPER hopeful that it catches on everywhere.
Fuck that Imma be by myself
if we let all the land fall into the hands of real estate holdings firms controlled by foreign billionaires you’ll be freezing to death under a bridge.
Better not let that happen then
The fact more people living alone is a huge contributor to the housing crisis that no one seems to talk much about. Add on the fact people want larger and larger houses, and you get… What we have
The housing crisis is bring caused by investors. Full stop.
There’s clearly a lot of factors that contribute to it, the number of people able/allowed to live in denser housing arrangements being one of them. That doesn’t discount the role of capital and wealth inequality.
There’s really not. Exotic mortgages are being hidden by private equity offer DSCRs. As well as AirBnBs deregulating the hotel industry. The number of people in the US didn’t increase. And yes COVID caused building to stop for a year but that doesn’t explain a 40% price jump 4 years later.
None of this seems like an argument that there is one and only one reason and I don’t see what any of it it has to do with grouped together use of housing in particular. I feel like people are just dogmatic about their pet cause being the one true one because they believe in the political implications of the narrative and not letting the ‘other side’ influence it.
I have two friends who live alone who would definitely prefer a smaller and cheaper apartment. Although this is anecdotal, my experiences has been it’s a cost problem first.
They don’t have the luxury to be concerned about the size of the unit. The basic standard of a place to live within driving distance already consumes their entire budget.
“Get a partner to solve the housing crisis” is funny but doesn’t check out. Living alone as a group grew much more significantly between 1960 and 1980 than it did since then.
Nah. Making people have to have roommates is not a solution to the housing crisis.
