Happy Mothers Day America: 12 Million Millennials Still Live With Their Moms

Mother’s Day is tomorrow, and a new Zillow analysis finds 22.5 percent of millennials age 24-36 are living their moms or both parents, as this alarming trend is up more than 9 points since 2005.

Nearly 25 percent (12 million young adults) of all millennials will travel lightly this Sunday because most of them reside in their parents’ basement. On the bright side, that could translate into 12 million fewer drivers on the road; however, this is not good for a consumption-based economy.

Despite the Central-Bank-free-money-anything-goes-induced ‘economic recovery’, the total amount of millennials living with their parents had exponentially increased since 2005, when just 13.5 percent lived in their parents’ basement.

According to the Zillow analysis, the combination of inflated rents, housing affordability, and wage stagnation over the last decade have driven many millennials back to their parents’ basement, but the report notes the trend has increased even though the U.S. labor market improved. Nearly 12 percent of millennials living with their moms are unemployed, while “28 percent of recent college grads live with their parents, up from 19 percent in 2005,” said Zillow.

“As rents outpaced incomes over the past decade, young people turned to their families in large numbers to ease the housing cost crunch,” said Zillow senior economist Aaron Terrazas.

“But even as the labor market has improved, the family safety net has yet to unwind. Living with parents may allow young adults to pursue work or a passion that may not be especially lucrative, or save enough money for first and last month’s rent or a down payment on a home of their own. In booming Western markets, relatively few young adults live with parents, not because rents are cheap but because family is far away. There is also a small slice of this young adult population that has mom living with them instead. Perhaps mom needs extra care as she ages, or has moved in with an adult child to help raise her grandchildren,” he added.

“You would expect young adults living at home to return to historic norms,” said Terrazas, explaining how the economy has recovered from the housing crash. “But the trend has not decreased — if anything, it is increased.”

Terrazas said housing prices had outpaced wages, which is the primary reason why millennials are not buying homes.

According to the National Association of Realtors, student loans have become a significant obstacle in homeownership for millennials. About 80 percent of millennials age 22 to 35 with vast amounts of student debt have not yet bought a house, and blame their student debt on delaying crucial life decisions.

Here are the top cities in which millennials reside with mom.

Thanks to a decade of central planning and trillions in liquidity, one can only imagine how thrilled millennials will be when the next recession, or rather depression, hits. This lost generation of hopeless, heavily indebted souls could remain in their parents’ basement for an extended period of time, all thanks to the historic accumulation of debt, and unprecedented shifts in demographics and automation, which will only accelerate into the 2020s.