Sunday, February 28th, 2021
I want to tell you about my friend named Tripp. Tripp is 35 years old and lives with his parents, Al and Sue. Al and Sue are perfectly nice people, and while they love their son, they are desperate for him get his act together and move out of the house. You may be nodding along at home thinking about people in your life who have gone through a similar experience. This narrative is so pervasive that we can all easily recognize the trope in movies and sitcoms of the hapless adult child living in their parent’s basement.
In fact, I have to come clean – the story about my friend Tripp is actually the plot of the movie Failure to Launch, a 2006 rom-com starring Matthew McConaughey as Tripp. Failure to Launch has a score of 24% on Rotten Tomatoes. I haven’t personally seen the movie, but I think it’s safe to say: it’s not very funny.
The fact that thousands of young adults are unable to move out of their parents’ house is an alarming trend that points to significant underlying economic distress. For many in my generation, graduation from high school or college coincided with the onset of the Great Recession, launching them into an unforgiving job market where they competed for jobs with people who had several years of job experience on their resume. On top of that, a significant number of young adults looking to strike out on their own are simultaneously saddled with student loan debt and a housing market full of homes they can’t afford, as demonstrated in the Pattern Matters Blog, Homeownership – Student Debt and a Mistmatch Between Supply and Demand.
According to 2019 data form the U.S. Census Bureau nearly half (49%) of adults in the Hudson Valley aged 18-35 live with their parents. The Hudson Valley has a higher percentage of young adults living with their parents than both New York State (38%) and the United States (34%). The pandemic is likely to further exacerbate this trend as thousands in the region have experienced job loss or reduced wages, all while the price of homes has gone up.
Millennials are an easy target for ridicule. Are some of us overly entitled? Sure, there are examples of that. Are some of us just lazy? Also yes. But if you take an honest look at the big picture, there’s more going on here than just our penchant for expensive avocado toast.
