Source: Pew Research Center
What is a multi-generational household? It’s when Abuela lives upstairs and helps take care of the kids, or when your parents take your unemployed brother back in, or any combination involving two or more adult generations under one roof. Or sometimes it’s a skipped-generation household, with grandparents raising a grandchild.
And these households are on the rise, with Latinos and Asians topping the list of those most likely to do it. That in itself is not a bad thing, as generations living together is a tradition that many immigrant families are at least relatively comfortable with. The reasons behind the spike? Not so comfortable. According to a report from the Pew Research Center, the growth in the number of multi-generational U.S. households in recent years coincides with the Great Recession.
As people tightened their belts and coped with layoffs and foreclosures, the number of Americans living in multi-generational households grew more than five times as sharply as the overall population increased between 2007 to 2009, the years that spanned the Great Recession (which officially ended in 2009, though one wouldn’t know it). The biggest jump was among adults ages 25 to 34 who live with their parents, according to the report.
A record 51.4 million Americans lived in a multi-generational household in 2009. Of those, 23 percent were Latino, the group that saw the biggest jump in multi-generational living (up 17.6 percent in just two years), not surprising as Latinos were group the hardest hit by the recession. Another 26 percent were Asian. From the report:
From 2007 to 2009, the sharpest growth in the multi-generational household population was among Hispanics (17.6%) and Americans of two or more races (24.4%).
The black population in these households grew by 8.7% from 2007 to 2009, the non-Hispanic white population by 8.5% and the Asian population by 7.3%.
In all cases, this growth was more rapid than the overall population increase during this period, which was 6.5% for Hispanics, 14.7% for mixed-race Americans (that is, of two or more races), 1.5% for blacks, 0.4% for whites and 3.8% for Asians.
