Men are nearly twice as likely as women to be living with their parents, and a new study says it\u2019s particularly harmful for non-college educated men, who are less likely to hold jobs compared to their college-educated counterparts.<\/p>\n
As rents have surged across the country, more and more men are moving home, and once there, many stop working. In fact, one in six non-college men (16%) now live with their parents, compared to 8% of college-educated men. A new working paper from Gabrielle Penrose, a graduate student fellow at the American Institute for Boys and Men, follows six decades of U.S. Census data and draws a direct line between rising housing costs and the decline of male labor force participation.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are very real economic forces that are limiting the options for non-college-educated men in the United States,\u201d Penrose told\u00a0Fortune. \u201cSome of what we\u2019re seeing is simply rational responses to a system that\u2019s pricing them out.\u201d<\/p>\n
Since 1960, real rents in the United States have risen 150%. Over that same period, wages for men without college degrees have barely moved, thanks to automation, globalization, and the collapse of manufacturing. Penrose\u2019s paper details that when rents rise, more Americans are forced back into the parental home. Men move home at nearly twice the rate of women. And non-college-educated men who end up there, the data shows, are increasingly dropping out of the workforce altogether.<\/p>\n
For Scott Winship, a senior fellow and the director of the Center on Opportunity and Social Mobility at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the issue is doubly concerning because non-college-educated men may face more disadvantages today than what they would have experienced in the \u201960s when Penrose first started looking.<\/p>\n
\u201cToday, there are many fewer non-college men than there were a generation ago, and so we should absolutely be concerned about non-college-educated men today,\u201d Winship told Fortune. \u201cThey are a more disadvantaged group than they were in previous generations, just because the share of young adults with a bachelor\u2019s degree is up to 40% or so now, versus in the past, when it was much lower. And so that makes me worry.\u201d<\/p>\n
A 10% increase in local rents raises the likelihood that a non-college-educated man moves in with his parents by 1.1 percentage points. Penrose used geographic constraints like mountains, coastlines, and lakes as a research instrument in her paper and found that in areas where terrain limits construction and squeezes housing supply, costs are higher for reasons entirely unrelated to local wages or job prospects.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn some areas, housing costs are higher not because people are earning more and driving up prices, but because there are limits to supply, because of geography: lakes, coastlines,\u201d she said. \u201cHousing is just more expensive there simply because it\u2019s harder to build there.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt would be surprising if cities with higher housing costs didn\u2019t have more men living at home just because, almost by definition, they\u2019re less affordable,\u201d said Winship, who has studied men\u2019s earnings over time at the AEI.<\/p>\n
Simultaneously, the environment is almost enabling it, her paper says. Baby boomer parents, sitting on significant housing wealth, are better positioned than ever to absorb adult children. \u201cProviding for your adult children when they\u2019re priced out of the housing market is kind of a \u2018normal good,\u2019 as economists call it, something people spend more on as they get richer,\u201d Penrose said. \u201cParents are earning more and their sons are earning less.\u201d<\/p>\n
The data backs it up, according to Brandi Snowden, the National Association of REALTORS\u2019 Director of Member and Consumer Survey Research. \u201cBaby Boomers continued to make up the largest share of recent home buyers,\u201d she told Fortune while referring to NAR\u2019s 2026 Generation Trends report that showed a quarter of Boomers purchased multi-generational home recently. \u201cThis allowed them to care for aging parents or relatives, and accommodate adult children that may be moving back into their house, or who have never left.\u00a0\u201c<\/p>\n
The share of men between 25 and 45 living with their parents has nearly doubled since the 1960s, from 7% to 12% today. Women\u2019s rate has also risen, but remains flat at 7%. And the reason the effect falls harder on men than women comes down largely to children. When Penrose isolates women without college degrees who don\u2019t have children at home, their patterns begin to mirror men\u2019s almost exactly.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I look at women without a college degree who do not have children, their labor force participation and their rates of living with parents start to look much more like these men,\u201d she said. \u201cThe difference is young children.\u201d<\/p>\n
The most consequential finding in Penrose\u2019s paper is what happens after men move in. Men living with their parents are 20 percentage points less likely to be in the labor force than those living independently. That same 10% rent increase is associated with a 0.5 percentage point decline in labor force participation. Initial estimates suggest housing costs could explain roughly a third of the total employment decline among non-college men.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s not too surprising to me, just because if you\u2019re looking at adults in their 20s or even 30s who are living at home, you\u2019re looking at sort of the most disadvantaged guys in their cohort,\u201d said Winship of Penrose\u2019s findings. \u201cSo it makes sense that they\u2019ve got other barriers to finding work, to keeping work\u2014and that they\u2019d be more likely to permanently drop out of the workforce.\u201d<\/p>\n
One in five non-college men in their early 30s live with their parents, and the rate remains elevated into their 40s, with roughly 14% at age 40. Among non-working men at home, a quarter have never held a job at all, up from one in five in 1980.<\/p>\n
\u201cSome of the pushback I was getting is people saying, \u2018Maybe men are using it as a launchpad,’\u201d Penrose said. \u201cThat doesn\u2019t seem to be the case. These men who are living with their parents are completely detached from the labor market.\u201d<\/p>\n
Zoning restrictions and limits on construction don\u2019t just make cities expensive, they inadvertently suppress workforce participation among the men least equipped to absorb the cost.\u00a0\u201cPolicies that restrict housing construction inadvertently weaken labor force participation by raising the price of independence,\u201d Penrose wrote in the report.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen we think about housing policy, maybe we\u2019re just thinking about affordability, but it\u2019s also about getting people in the position where they\u2019re able to access the labor market,\u201d she said. \u201cPolicies that would make housing cheaper in cities like New York should increase participation for men, particularly men without college degrees.\u201d<\/p>\n
Winship agreed with Penrose\u2019s point, saying high cost of living cities like New York and San Francisco are often where people can find more job opportunities\u2014but it comes with the double-edged sword of higher rents.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt points to a real villain in the story, which is just these land use regulations and zoning that constrain how much housing can be built,\u201d Winship said. \u201cUnfortunately, it\u2019s often the cities that are most economically dynamic and have a lot of amenities, that are actually better at promoting upward mobility, that have these problems with zoning. So that\u2019s definitely an area where policymakers should take a look.\u201d<\/p>\n
Women, for the third time ever in history,<\/a> now outnumber men in the workforce. And as women earn more than their male counterparts<\/a>, they perform more labor at home. Winship echoed previous reports of a growing distancing from traditional values of marriage as a major reason for this phenomenon.<\/p>\n \u201cI think, sort of the sleeper issue, is the decline in marriage. In the past, a lot of these younger men and working class men would have been married, and therefore they could have tolerated higher housing costs without having to move back home,\u201d Winship said. \u201cBut because marriage has declined so much, you have a lot of single men, especially among young adults, and more so among working class adults. And when housing is expensive, they\u2019re much more likely to find that financially burdensome than in the past. I think that is kind of underlying a lot of the findings of the paper.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIf you\u2019re a young man looking at the situation, you don\u2019t see in the future that you\u2019re going to need to be responsible for a family,\u201d he concluded. \u201cAnd they don\u2019t really know what their role is in this new world where they\u2019re not going to be the primary breadwinner. And so that pushes towards working less and potentially living at home with their parents. I think marriage really is the sleeper issue here.\u201d<\/p>\n