‘We are going to start looking a lot more like Europe’: Millennials are living at home into their 30s, signaling a major shift

“Now since rates have been going up and affordability remains very stretched, we’re seeing [multi-generational living] increase,” Ivy Zelman, cofounder and executive vice president at housing research firm Zelman, a Walker & Dunlop Company, recently said during a roundtable discussion Fortune attended. “We assume that it’s going to stay fairly stable as we continue into the second half of the decade.”

The proportion of adults in their 20s and 30s living at home has continued to rise in recent years, and shows no sign of letting up. Back in 1980, only around 15% of these younger adults opted to live with their parents—now, around 22.4% of Gen Zers and millennials are bunkering down with their families, according to recent data from Zelman. And the real estate firm predicts that number won’t budge by 2030. Younger adults face a cost-of-living crisis and lackluster salary increases; only 44% of 20- to 39-year-olds could afford their median local rent, according to Zelman. Beyond affordability issues, Zelman notes that a cultural shift is underway. Now, Americans are taking a page from family playbooks across the pond. 

“We also believe that there’s a secular shift in how people are living,” Zelman continued, explaining that when you look “at young adults today that are happy or content living with their parents, the negative stigma is really no longer prevalent. We are going to start looking a lot more like Europe: multi-generational living.”

Young adults get the short end of the stick as America has housing ‘limitations’

Zelman predicts that because of America’s “limitations” in building denser housing—like high land prices—affordability will remain a major issue for younger Americans. 

Currently, baby boomers and Gen Xers hold a massive share of the country’s housing wealth. The older generations are up to 20 times more likely to own a second home compared to their 30-something counterparts, according to Zelman. Home equity currently accounts for a fifth of baby boomer wealth, which has also been snowballing over time. Americans aged 70 and up also boast an average net worth of nearly $1.4 million, and those aged 55 to 69 hold around $1.175 million, while Gen Zers and millennials under 40 only have $100,000 to their names.

Young adults are steeped in financial nihilism. While Gen Z has the biggest generational income gap since boomers—with the oldest Gen Z workers earning a median of $42,000 in constant dollars, 25% higher than Millennials at that age and 50% higher than boomers—their dollars can’t stretch as far. BCG Center for Macroeconomics said that buying a house now requires “a little fortune,” and “every article of furniture costs about three times as much as it did ten years ago.” 

“Gen Z and Millennials go through their own unique generational struggle to build careers, income, and wealth—and they are confronting unique challenges such as student debt and housing affordability,” the BCG authors wrote in the report, before concluding that “even so, they are making broad generational progress.”

Now, around 42% of Gen Z renters say they don’t even have any money to spend on “fun,” according to 2026 data from Ogilvy Consulting. And those who still send checks to their landlords are cutting back elsewhere; around 58% of renters ranked saving money as the top reason they stayed home this year, compared to 41% for homeowners.

That’s because even a group dinner has gotten more expensive at every step. Gasoline CPI in August 2026 is 198% of its January 2000 level, Zelman found, meaning gas costs nearly twice what they did two decades ago. Food CPI is also up 112% over the same period, as are education (193%), utilities (168%), and medical care (132%). Now, Americans are barely scraping by; the housing research firm found essential payments eat up 54.3% of income, while the savings rate (2.8%) in the second quarter of 2026 hit its lowest level since 2007.