I felt as if I had hit the jackpot when I graduated, quickly got a job and found a small flat in Sheffield I could (just about) afford to rent with my partner. I’d got it “right”: I’d avoided moving back to my childhood bedroom, and at age 22 I felt like a proper grownup. But with each week that passed an uneasiness grew, as it became apparent I wouldn’t be celebrating these achievements with close friends. They had worked just as hard, applied for jobs every single day, and gained work experience and top grades – but many ended up moving back home with their parents.
In 2011, half of young people in England and Wales had moved out at age 21. In 2021, that age was 24, and I can only imagine that age will have gone up again the next time the stats are compiled. Staying with parents for a while in adulthood isn’t new, but the steadily increasing permanence of it is. At least 620,000 more adults were living with their parents as “grown-up children” in 2021 compared with a decade earlier, a rise of 13.6% – and 22,000 of that new cohort were 35 years old.
This is huge. Gen Z has gone through, and is still going through, a shift in housing behaviour that has left us divided and lonely. My friends say they feel like children who aren’t being allowed out. Meanwhile, I feel as if I’m playing house with no company. No one seems happy with this arrangement.
We manage the meet-ups, the weekend trips across the country, the video calls between shifts – but it’s not quite the roaring 20s we were promised. Especially when, like salt in a wound, you see the 10th thinkpiece of that month puzzling over why Gen Z has ditched clubbing or booze, and has picked up hobbies like crocheting. To save you some time: it’s because the nightclubs have all shut, we have no money and crocheting is quite fun, actually.
For people my age, in their early to mid-20s, starting a career and getting paid enough to move out was always bound to be a struggle. Graduate scheme places are thinning out every year, with demand going up and value seemingly going down. Meanwhile, more than a third of graduate jobs are based in the most expensive city in the country, London. Entry-level vacancies are snapped up by people with years of experience. Average house prices in the UK are 65 times higher than they were 50 years ago, while wages are only 36 times more, a picture so alarming that the recent news of steadying house prices is barely a reassurance.
I often think of older peers whose lives seem to have been far more glistening when they were my age. They all espoused the virtues of living in London when you’re young, muddling through those years of chaos amid the big-city lights.
I live in a small flat with my partner. We went to see tens of flats between us and ultimately landed on the one we could afford that got some sort of daylight. I’m grateful we live together and I know we are privileged to have been able to move out, but it’s not quite the same as what we were promised.
Staying at home isn’t a choice for most people, and I know my friends who live at home feel frustrated, like they’ve outgrown the space they’re in. And yet, a small part of me wishes I was in the same boat as them. When my friends cancel a call because their family needs something from them, I wish I could walk downstairs and complain to my mum. I wish I could get in from work at the same time as my dad and emptily tell him to “just quit” after a stressful day, the same way I would have as a kid. I wish I could walk to visit my friends, many of whom all live in the town we grew up in – hours away from me. I know I am looking at them through rose-coloured glasses. I could move home – whereas my friends can’t afford to move out. I’ve made this decision because it is beneficial to my career.
I’ll be the first to admit that my being jealous of grown adults who have to live with their parents is quite mad. What I actually want is for all of our situations to be better. Maybe, in the next five years, it will be. There will be more houses, restrictions on landlords charging crazy rents and we’ll be able to live a bit – really live. Personally, I’m hoping we find ourselves back in the club, crashing on each other’s bedroom floors, muddling through life together again – and the days of crocheting away our early 20s will feel like a simple, confused dream.
Chloe Aslett is a freelance journalist
