[T]he Federal Reserve Bank of New York reports today that in 2013, student debtors between the ages of 27 and 30 were less likely to own a home—or, specifically, to have a mortgage—than their peers who were student-debt free. Homeownership rates have fallen fast among all young adults since the recession. But, as shown below, they’ve dropped most precipitously among those who borrowed for school.
Federal Reserve Bank of New York
There’s one key detail this graph leaves out, however, which the Fed shared in a separate report from early last year (and which I’ve written on before). It turns out that, at the end of 2012, borrowers who were current on their student loan payments were actually more likely to take out a mortgage than other young adults. Borrowers who were delinquent on their student loans, however, took out barely any mortgages at all. In other words, young people who already couldn’t handle their debt simply weren’t in the market for houses.
Federal Reserve Bank of New York
A key point: having college debt doesn’t completely stop mortgage originations. So, reducing college debt (and look at the median, not the average) could help free up the housing market but it isn’t the only problem.
I wonder if there isn’t another way to think about this: more young Americans are willing to trade a college degree for homeownership before they are 30. This could be due to a variety of reasons including earning potential due to a college degree but also a decreased interest in owning a home as opposed to accomplishing other goals like living in an exciting place or establishing themselves in a career. In other words, this issue may not really be about college debt holding people back but rather about the relative interest young adults have in owning a house.
Plenty of things are unrealistic about television: No iconic moment in my life has ever been accompanied by Ellie Goulding’s “Anything Can Happen,” despite how much I wish it were. But the perpetual tiny-but-annoying quirk that most shows are guilty of is the unemployed twentysomething with a fabulous apartment. I’m onto you, Girls: No matter how much junk you throw around in Marnie and Hannah’s onetime-shared living space, it doesn’t hide the fact that they’ve got a ton of room. I live in New York City; I know you’re lying to me.
This isn’t anything new, of course. The go-to example is usually Carrie Bradshaw and her ridiculous Manhattan apartment with its gorgeous walk-in closet full on Manolos when her only source of explained income was a weekly newspaper column. But while everyone loves some good 1998 nostalgia (the Friends’ West Village apartments are another egregious example), the trend of the unbelievably large home isn’t fading away.
I’m not simply talking about gorgeous, jealousy-inspiring apartments; I totally get and buy into the fact that say, Dr. Lahiri from The Mindy Project would have an awe-worthy living space to bring all of her meet-cute boyfriends. What I can’t get behind is recent shows like dearly-departed Happy Endings (perpetually unemployed Max’s “gross loft” in Chicago is gorgeous) or 2 Broke Girls‘ Williamsburg, Brooklyn, apartment (They’re supposed to actually be broke, not heiresses!) where the characters ostensibly “have no money,” yet are somehow chilling around complaining about said fact in an abode that would retail for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Sure, this is a minor issue. None of this is getting in the way of my enjoyment of all of these shows. But there is some point during each of these programs’ respective runs — often more than once — where I’ll laugh out loud at the sheer ridiculousness of it. It’s all I can do; I can’t change the channel: basically all shows with twenty-something characters are guilty of this. Weirdly enough, the most realistic living set-up on television right now might be the Big Brother house, with all 16 of its residents fighting in a Hunger Games of sorts for limited bed space.
Several quick thoughts:
1. If Big Brother is perceived to be more realistic, these other shows may have some problems.
2. Of the examples cited above, most of the urban apartments are in New York City with one in Chicago (Happy Endings). Manhattan and some of the surroundings areas are some of the most expensive areas in the country so the housing situation as portrayed on TV is really unrealistic. At the same time, TV shows with young adults in places like Atlanta or Houston or Dallas or some other cheaper markets could feature bigger apartments without losing all realism.
3. This is not a new phenomenon on TV. In The Overspent American, sociologist Juliet Schor talks about the expanding middle-class lifestyle on television in the later decades of the 20th century. As the years went by, middle-class people on TV had more and more material goods, larger houses, and had fewer concerns about work and money. Schor then argues that TV contributed to changing perceptions among Americans in what they needed to own to have “the good life.”
4. Shows on channels like HGTV don’t help. It seems like every show features a person looking for the most-updated features. Granted, their price range varies quite a bit but the homes tend to be on the larger side. This is simply unrealistic for many emerging adults.
5. There is potential here for some TV shows to work with more size-appropriate dwellings. How about a show about young people revolving around micro-apartments? How about bringing back the starter home on TV?
“We were interested in this idea that this stage of the life-course could be a potentially really important juncture for breaking down these kinds of very long-established patterns of residential segregation and all of the inequalities that go with them,” says Marcus Britton, a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee who has studied the question. “Unfortunately, our results are not tremendously encouraging on that score.”
Britton and Pat Goldsmith, a sociologist at Texas A&M, examined records from the National Education Longitudinal Study of more than 7,000 students who were eighth-graders in 1988. That study followed these students through 2000, when most of them were 26. Britton and Goldsmith, in research published in the journal Urban Studies, compared their home zip codes and other characteristics at various points along this timeline with census data collected in 1990 and 2000 about the racial makeup of those neighborhoods.
Blacks and Hispanics who migrated to new metropolitan areas were, in fact, more likely to live in zip codes with greater exposure to whites, unlike minorities who moved within their own city. But few minorities actually made such long-distance moves. This means that segregation persists in part because many minorities have limited exposure to integrated neighborhoods as children, but also because they have limited mobility as they age to relocate somewhere entirely new.
Britton has conducted other research that suggests that minorities are also much more likely to live at home as young adults than whites are. And given patterns that we’ve seen more recently during the recession – when young twentysomethings of all races have been stuck at home – these trends bode particularly poorly for integration.
This is a clever research design: emerging adults, who may be more interested in diversity compared to older generations and who are also in a period of transition where they can try out some new kinds of places, might break out of patterns of residential segregation. But, this description of the research findings suggests it is difficult to move beyond past residential segregation patterns. This sounds like a basic sociological finding, people are strongly influenced by past conditions, but also adds the element that even a younger generation who has heard more about diversity and may be more interested in living in urban areas is also not willing or able to move in large numbers to more diverse places.
This would be something interesting to keep track of in the future: could we envision a United States in several decades where most people support diversity and fighting inequality based on race/ethnicity, class, and gender but few people are willing to actually change where they or others live?
This study examines how religiousness influences social network site (SNS) membership and frequency of use for emerging adults between 18 and 23 years old utilizing Wave 3 survey data from the National Study of Youth and Religion (NSYR). Independent of religion promoting a prosocial orientation, organizational involvement, and civic engagement, Catholics and Evangelical Protestants are more likely than the “not religious” to be SNS members, and more Bible reading is associated with lower levels of SNS membership and use. We argue there are both sacred and secular influences on SNS involvement, and social behaviors, such as being in school and participating in more non-religious organizations, generally positively influence becoming a SNS member, yet certain more private behaviors, such as Bible reading, donating money, and helping the needy, lessen SNS participation. We also suggest four areas for future research to help untangle the influence of religiousness on SNS use and vice versa.
Micro-unit apartments range from 300-square-foot studios being built in San Francisco, where studios average 510 square feet, to New York’s pilot for a building with studios of 275 to 300 square feet, vs. an average studio size of 517 square feet. In Boston, the units are as small as 354 square feet, vs. an average studio size of 492 square feet, says real estate research firm Reis.
These small spaces, McIlwain says, are particularly well suited for the influx of young professionals moving to high-rent cities like New York and San Francisco. If they’re priced right, the tiny apartments make it more affordable for members of the younger crowd to have their own space, vs. roommates…
Kennedy expects his studios to go for $1,500 to $2,000 a month. That would be somewhat less than the $2,075 a month average rent for a San Francisco studio — an average of 493 square feet, according to SFGate.com, citing data from real estate service RealFacts.
Tiny typically means cheaper — but just to a certain extent, McIlwain notes. Total construction cost for an apartment drops as you make it smaller, he adds, but cost per square foot rises.
It will be interesting to see how many of these units are built. There may be demand but I wonder if these are long-term units, meaning young people may not stay here long (housing more for a particular stage of life) or the economy could improve.
Portland may not be “a city where young people go to retire,” but it’s the place they go to be underemployed, a new study found.
A famous quip by Fred Armisen on the television show “Portlandia” led Portland State University researchers to investigate the reality behind the comment. The quirky IFC network series pokes fun at the Oregon city’s many eccentricities.
The researchers’ review found that Portland is a magnet for the young and college educated from across the country, even though a disproportionate share of them are working part-time or holding jobs that don’t require a degree.
In short, young college grads are moving here, and staying, because they like the city’s amenities and culture, not because they’re chasing jobs. Their participation in the labor force tracks with other cities, but they make 84 cents on the dollar when compared to the average of the 50 largest metropolitan areas, the research found.
Not exactly a shining place for the “creative class.” I don’t remember Richard Florida talking much about the employment or economic struggles of the creative class; rather, such cities are often depicted as tech hubs with lots of exciting companies and opportunities. A city may be a cultural magnet but it also has to have enough jobs so that people can stay.
What is most interesting to me about this is that it appears the migration of young adults to Portland has continued in the last few decades even when there are not enough full-time jobs. Is there a threshold point when people will stop going to Portland? At what point do economic realities trump the cultural vibrancy of Portland?
Driving the resurgence are young adults, who are delaying careers, marriage and having children amid persistently high unemployment. Burdened with college debt or toiling in temporary, lower-wage positions, they are spurning homeownership in the suburbs for shorter-term, no-strings-attached apartment living, public transit and proximity to potential jobs in larger cities.
While economists tend to believe the city boom is temporary, that is not stopping many city planning agencies and apartment developers from seeking to boost their appeal to the sizable demographic of 18-to-29-year olds. They make up roughly 1 in 6 Americans, and some sociologists are calling them “generation rent.” The planners and developers are betting on young Americans’ continued interest in urban living, sensing that some longer-term changes such as decreased reliance on cars may be afoot…
Primary cities in large metropolitan areas with populations of more than 1 million grew by 1.1 percent last year, compared with 0.9 percent in surrounding suburbs. While the definitions of city and suburb have changed over the decades, it’s the first time that growth of large core cities outpaced that of suburbs since the early 1900s…
In all, city growth in 2011 surpassed or equaled that of suburbs in roughly 33 of the nation’s 51 large metro areas, compared to just five in the last decade.
Note: this is from one year of data, 2010 to 2011, it is hard to know whether this is a big trend or not. The different in population growth was 0.2%, not inconsequential but not exactly a big shift either. We’re not exactly at the end of the suburban era just yet.
Let’s say these numbers hold for a few years. It would be interesting to see how suburbs respond. It would also be helpful to see if the people who are moving to the city are doing so from inner-ring suburbs, exurbs, or somewhere in between as these different types of suburban communities would likely respond in different ways. I could imagine scenarios where built-out larger suburbs, places like Naperville, push for denser and taller developments in order to try to attract residents.
The topic intrigued the 41-year-old associate professor of sociology at Florida State’s Pepper Institute on Aging and Public Policy (who views herself as middle-age, by the way) because “there are so few clear markers of its boundaries, unlike adulthood or old age.” Few studies have examined people’s views of middle age compared to young adulthood or old age.
So Barrett and graduate student Erica Toothman combed through two waves of nationally representative data collected in the United States in 1995-1996 and 2004-2006 that examined how various factors influence people’s views of the timing of middle age…
Here are some key findings:
• Both women and men view the start and end of middle age as occurring earlier for women than for men, consistent with the argument that a “double standard of aging” exists that disadvantages women.
• Younger adults tend to see middle age as occurring at younger ages than do older adults. In other words, as people grow older, they tend to see this life stage as occurring later.
• People who are more socioeconomically disadvantaged or belong to racial or ethnic minority groups tend to view this stage as occurring earlier than do their peers.
• Others likely to view middle age as occurring earlier include those in poor health, those who began families young, those who are divorced, and those without living parents…
According to Barrett’s research, most people think of middle age as beginning at 44 and ending at 60.
This seems particularly interesting in a youth-obsessed culture. Acknowledging that one might be in midlife means that one also has to acknowledge that their youth is over. Does this bring along ideas about not being as important in society and needing to step aside or to help the younger generation? A range from 44 to 60 is quite narrow – this means that only roughly 16 out of the 80 expected years of life are in the middle.
While Barrett there are few markers that signify midlife, I can think of at least two common markers of midlife in American culture today.
1. Having children. This often signifies something about responsibility and now needing to take care of another person.
2. Reaching milestone birthdays like a 30th or 40th. Just go check out the “humorous” cards available for these milestones to see what popular perceptions are about these days.
Overall, this research seems to be part of a larger push among sociologists to look for the cultural markers of certain life periods. For example, there has been a lot of discussion and research about the boundaries between being a teenager and adult, giving rise to talk of a new liminal period called “emerging adulthood.” These markers and life periods will certainly change as society changes.
The Financial Times cite some interesting statistics about the rise in the number of teenagers and young adults who are not getting their driver’s licenses. While a number of explanatory factors are cited such as economic conditions, not needing cars as much because of social media, and young adults rejecting direct advertising from car makers, I’m more interested in another issue: what does this say about driving as a rite of passage as part of the transition from being a teenager to becoming an adult? This is well ingrained in American culture and lore but if fewer young adults see it as worthwhile, it could practically wipe the genre of cliched high school movies by itself. Forget about emerging adults delaying marriage; some don’t even want to be able to drive!
There is no mention of this in the article but I would be interested to know the spatial distribution of 16-34 year olds in the United States. It is much easier to go without a car in a denser, more urban setting. Does this mean that compared to the general population, a higher percentage of this age group lives in such denser settings?
The global economic recession is a big driver of this phenomenon but hardly the only one. Cultural attitudes about “boomerang kids’’ vary widely. In Japan, which has been in recession for two decades, both parents and their adult children are filled with shame, and turn inward. For the Japanese, writes Newman, “personal character takes center stage,’’ not abstract explanations about diminishing economic opportunity. The Japanese “retain a strong normative sense of what is appropriate and what is deviant in the evolution from youth to adult,’’ Newman writes, and boomerang kids represent deviance (the Japanese often refer to boomerangs as “parasites’’), bringing social stigma on the entire family.
Italy is a completely different story. Italians, especially Italian men, have for centuries remained in the family home until they get married, which may find them there into their 30s or beyond. Newman interviews various 30-something Italian men living at home who quite simply don’t see a problem. The parents Newman interviews also don’t consider it dysfunctional, generally enjoying the company of their adult children. There is no social stigma attached, writes Newman, since “37 percent of [Italian] men age thirty have never lived away from home.’’
In the United States, we are somewhere in between Japanese-level stigma and Italian-style acceptance. “American attitudes are more conditional than other cultures,’’ explains Newman. Parents will support a boomerang adult child who has a plan, a way forward to improve life (e.g., through additional education, training, or an internship), but will object if their adult child is using the family home as an escape from the world.
These are some interesting contrasts across these countries. The American case in the middle here has me thinking about moral symbolic boundaries. The idea here would be that young adults living at home are fine as long as they can justify this move and reassure their parents that this is a step toward their eventual success and moving out. If they can’t make this case, this is seen as mooching. This fits with a larger American idea that we are willing to help people who also seem willing to help themselves.
I wonder if Newman also tracks these attitudes over time as perhaps these are relatively recent developments to adjust to a changing industrialized, globalized world. What aspects of a society or culture directly lead to these rules about who can live at home?
Another note from this review. Here is a paragraph that sums up the work:
Newman interviewed hundreds of boomerang adults and their parents for this accessible book, which effectively, even entertainingly, combines rigorous, statistics-driven social science with personal accounts to provide a vivid portrait of what’s happening globally.
Here is my translation of this paragraph: “It is an academic book that doesn’t read like one, meaning that you will be convinced by the data (hundreds of interviews!) but it has plenty of personal accounts to keep you entertained.” Perhaps that is too cynical. But this does offer some insights into how the general public tends to read social science research. Data, numbers in particular, can’t be too overwhelming. The book still has to be entertaining in the end, even if it is making an important point. Stories, whether they are personal accounts or good examples, are very helpful. None of these things are necessarily bad things to do yet one wonders whether the larger point of the work is muted by having to meet these requirements.
Federal Reserve Bank of New York
Legally Sociable 