Rachel Fox is a 25-year-old living with her parents in Olney — but she’s definitely not the only young adult in the Washington region still living under her parents’ roof.
“It’s amazing to me how I’ll go out and there are so many people I graduated high school with — I’m always shocked to see them around,” said Fox, who is putting herself through graduate school at George Washington University.
New census data show more young adults are living with their parents in Washington’s suburbs, a trend experts say stems from the recession, poor housing choices in the counties and a relaxing of what was once a cultural stigma.
| So much for the empty nest | |||
| Adult kids | 10-year | 10-year total | |
| at home | change | population change | |
| Montgomery | 74,860 | 35.8% | 11.3% |
| Prince George’s | 87,920 | 29.7% | 7.7% |
| Prince William | 31,628 | 81.6% | 43.2% |
| Loudoun | 17,150 | 123.8% | 84.1% |
| Fairfax | 76,000 | 32.7% | 11.5% |
| Alexandria | 5,526 | 8.5% | 9.1% |
| Arlington | 7,586 | 1.3% | 9.6% |
| District of Columbia | 40,854 | 1.6% | 5.2% |
| Source: U.S. Census | |||
“There is a growing acceptance for young adults to move back home or to remain home for prolonged periods of time,” said economist Anirban Basu, chief executive officer of Sage Policy Group in Baltimore.
That’s partly because the recession made well-paying jobs harder to come by. It’s also a product of the expensive housing in this region and a small apartment supply in the suburbs.
“They can’t afford to live here,” said Rollin Stanley, Montgomery County’s planning director. “If they’re not doubling up and getting a mortgage or leasing with three friends, they’re living with their parents.”
In Fairfax, Montgomery and Prince George’s counties, the number of young adults living at home grew by roughly one-third over the last decade — three times the average rate of population growth in those jurisdictions. In rapidly growing Loudoun County, the population of young adults living at home more than doubled. In Prince William, the population grew at twice the rate of the overall county’s growth.
Stanley said the suburbs’ changing population is the impetus behind the push to build a better variety of housing in areas that are undergoing urban renewal such as White Flint and Wheaton. Young adults also are waiting longer to buy houses and are more transient than in previous generations, he said. So the county needs more apartments — at a range of prices — to accommodate them.
In fact, the only jurisdictions where the population of adults living with their parents stayed roughly the same over the last decade were the District and Arlington — home to plenty of housing options from studio apartments to single-family homes and where family households claim a smaller share of the population.
Still, many young adults in the Washington area are priced out of the city. Fox, who has lived with her parents for the last three years, got a full-time job at George Washington last year. But she said after an extensive search for a studio apartment last summer she still couldn’t find anything affordable in the District.
“Even with a full-time salary it just didn’t make sense at all,” Fox said. “I didn’t [decide to] live at home for that long and save my whole life to at that point just spend it on rent.”
The recession also had the two-fold effect of lowering salaries while making the job market so unappealing that many young adults simply chose to wait it out by going back to school, experts said. That also is prompting more young adults to return home than in previous generations.
Basu said those trends and a de-emphasis on homeownership is leading to a removal of the stigma formerly attached to the notion of a young adult moving back in with mom and dad.
“It used to be the case that keeping up with the Joneses was largely about one’s abode, how many bedrooms and the location,” he said. “Today’s young people do not seem that interested in competing along the dimension of real estate status.”
