Living with Mom

George Costanza’s prayers may have finally been answered; is it possible that living with your mom has become a cool thing? Every single year over the past decade, the number of working-age Millennials who are living at home with their mothers has risen, causing the total to climb from 13.1 percent in 2005 to 21.4 percent in 2014.

Okay, so maybe ‘cool’ is the wrong word to use, as staying at home was not a choice many Millennials made from desire, but necessity. A combination of the current rental affordability crisis, especially for lower-earning younger workers, and the weak economy that many Millennials graduated into has drastically limited the options for where Millennials can lice, Zillow reports.

Every one of the 35 largest metros in the country experienced an uptick in the number of Millennials living with their mothers over the past decade with Miami taking the top spot with 33.4 percent of its working-age Millennials living at home. Columbus, Ohio had the smallest share at 13.5 percent.

Additionally, men are more likely than women to live at home. In 2014, 55 percent of Millennials who were still living at homes were male, a gender ratio that has remained relatively constant from year-to-year over the past decade.

Nationally, the growth in working-age millennials who live at home has been stable across different races and ethnicities, but in some cities, such as Miami of Riverside, Calif. the numbers are a bit more skewed. Miami has seen a growing share of blacks and Hispanics living with mom while, in Riverside, the share of Hispanic working-age adults living at home has grown faster than any other group.