Medium · https://medium.com/iipp-blog/is-it-time-to-end-our-obsession-with-home-ownership-1b68c7aaf1c2
Seven in ten of the 25 million young adults living with parents have jobs. What used to make someone an adult now costs more than it pays.
For this cause a man shall leave his father and mother, and shall join to his wife; and the two shall become one flesh.
Matthew 19:5
On July 11, 2026, USA Today reported that more than 25 million Americans under 35 lived with their parents in 2025, a record that beats even the pandemic peak. One in three adults aged 18 to 34 is currently at home. Seven in ten of them have jobs.
Economists keep saying the same thing about this data: it isn't a story about ambition. Realtor.com economist Hannah Jones put it plainly: "This feels like a housing issue, not an employment issue." The typical inflation-adjusted mortgage payment climbed from $1,408 to $2,207 between 2020 and 2024. The median home now lists at $430,000, a third above 2019 prices. The median first-time buyer is 40, the oldest on record.
Pharisees push Jesus on divorce, and he reaches back to Genesis to define what marriage was built on: a man leaving his father and mother to found a household with his wife. The line assumes leaving is achievable on ordinary wages. Demographer Krista Westrick-Payne says the math has broken on the marriage side too. A single income now falls 40 to 60 percent short of what buying a home requires, and with marriage delayed into the mid-thirties, the second income that used to close the gap hasn't arrived yet.
None of this is a verdict on the people still in their childhood bedrooms. A 33-year-old in Detroit called moving back home a blessing in disguise. Analyst Mark Hamrick, reading the same numbers, called family strength something worth celebrating out loud.
The line was never written as a test of willpower. It assumed a functioning world underneath it, wages that could carry a household and prices a paycheck could meet. Right now those two things have stopped agreeing with each other, and a generation is waiting, employed and stuck, for the disagreement to end.