Have any of these adult children successfully moved out after saving up money while living with their parents?
Most people in my circle who bought a home in California before the age of 30 did exactly this.
They then would move out to a bigger more expensive city and feel more financially comfortable than they would have. This was in first generation immigrant families, which as the article notes, is where this practice is more common.
That used to be common arrangement.
Like, fun fact, Rosa Parks has such arrangement. On darker side, John Brown sons with families lived with him, were totally ruled by him.
Even if they do, it still means they failed to save up that money without having to live with their parents.
This is just the WSJ-reading "haves" justifying the increasing stratification of society by reframing a clear regression[0] as a "responsible individual choice" which that crowd LOVES.
(EDIT: it's also cope for the parents of those kids for the not-quite-THAT-elite WSJ reader crowd who doesn't want to believe either their kids are failing or their economy is faltering.)
[0] Even if you see the everyone-moves-out vs multigenerational-housing trend as a negative overall, the broadening loss of the ability to make that choice is a clear symptom of overall economic weakening.
So? This practice of moving out for no particular reason is very US-centric.
To me the "normal" obverved in most peer households of my youth is that people live with their parents until they get married, often late 20s.
The US is coming to resemble economically stagnant Europe more and more.
The WSJ has had a string of such apologetics lately. I know because family members keep sending them to me.
Another example:
https://www.wsj.com/us-news/european-soccer-fans-marvel-at-t...
You can’t fail sometimes, even if you thought it were failure
So what changed?
“To extract increasing returns from real estate, property prices and rent must be priced out of reach for people whose parents read the Wall Street Journal. Here’s an article you can quote to your friends at cocktail parties to feel good about yourself when your kid moves home.”
> Landlords do not create value. They merely charge others to use natural resources (like land) that were already there
and
> Landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed
Plot twist: these are actually Adam Smith quotes. Karl Marx quoted the second in particular.
There is a contemporary economist and former wealth manager by the name of Henry Fudge who describes the housing markets in Western countries as a "rentier asset black hole" [1] and has written a paper called "The Housing Theory of Everything" [2]. The idea is fairly straightforward: capital moves to housing instead of and at the expense of productive output (eg factories) because of tax advantages, inelastic demand, artificial constraints on supply and it being a political goal to make sure that housing prices always go up.
China had made this same mistake as well. Real estate was one of the few ways people could build wealth prior to Xi Jinping who came in and quietly popped a trillion dollar real estate bubble, famously saying in 2016 [3] "Houses are for living, not for speculation".
My personal view is that ever-increasing house prices are simply stealing from the next generation, a massive wealth transfer to the old and wealthy. It has so many negative effects on society too because it makes everything more expensive. It's an input to every cost (through commercial real estate, which either has to hafve a similar return to residential real estate or it gets replaced with such).
I say all this because the WSJ is defending this generational theft by arguing that people are being "financially savvy" when people seek independence ultimately and this is simply a product of the affordability crisis and declining real wages. It's asinine.
[1]: https://henryfudgeofficial.substack.com/p/the-rentier-asset-...
[2]: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6571818
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houses_are_for_living,_not_for...
Indeed. There's this common trope in modern journalim of pretending that these financial moves are pure results of personal choices and nothing else. So, tweens going back to their parents is them "being financially savvy". Americans spending more on groceries and rent rather than other goods and services is them "adopting new consumer preferences".
It's always chosen, never suffered. Once you start seeing it, you notice it everywhere.