The statistic that surprised me wasn’t the number of young adults living with their parents.
It was this:
70% of them already have jobs.
We’re talking about 25.2 million Americans between 18 and 34 years old living at home.
About one-third of that entire age group.
The easy explanation is that they’re unemployed.
Except most of them aren’t.
Most are working.
Some even have college degrees.
That’s what makes this story interesting.
For years, the formula was supposed to be pretty simple:
Get a job.
Save money.
Move out.
But housing costs have completely changed the math.
The median home listing price has jumped 34% since 2019 to about $430,000.
Median rent has climbed 18% to roughly $1,673 per month.
At the same time, more American families now have both parents working full-time than ever before.
So more people are working.
More households have two incomes.
Yet 25.2 million young adults are still living with their parents.
That’s the part I can’t stop thinking about.
Because this doesn’t look like a problem affecting only people without jobs.
It looks like a problem affecting people who did exactly what they were told to do.
And if that’s true, then this is bigger than a housing story.
It’s a story about whether work is still keeping up with the cost of building a life.
A historic inversion has taken place in the U.S. housing market.
For the first time in 40 years, home builders now have more than DOUBLE the inventory of existing homeowners.
Builder inventory is now above 9 months, comparable to 2008 crash levels.
However, existing owners… pic.twitter.com/5sJzf0W3lC
— Nick Gerli (@nickgerli1) June 18, 2026