Lives put on hold: Who are Ireland’s stay-at-home generation?

Let’s take a look behind the headline census figures published this week by the Central Statistics Office, showing 500,000 Irish adults living with their parents. What is clear is that the stay-at-home generation is growing. One figure is particularly striking. Since 2011, the proportion of 25- to 29-year-olds living with their parents has risen from a quarter to a third. More than six out of ten 20-24 year-olds are in the same position.

The usual first step out of the family home is being blocked by stratospheric rents. Plan B – to buy a place – is stymied by a lack of supply, particularly for one- and two-person households. On average, if you are in your 20s, there is a 50:50 chance that you still live at home. Almost 300,000 twenty-somethings have yet to fly the nest.

As the population has risen in recent years and the housing squeeze tightened, the numbers living in the family home have risen. Covid has complicated measurement. Recently reported EU-wide figures, including Irish data based on a separate CSO survey, showed more than 60 per cent of young adults living at home. But this appears to have been skewed by younger people moving home during the pandemic, with much of the data collected in 2021. The census, covering all households, is likely to be a better guide post-Covid lockdowns, though there still is a bit of an unexplained gap here.

Either way, a variety of indicators all point in the same direction – many more households would have been formed if the housing crisis had not hit. Estimating the number of homes needed to meet this unmet demand is a bit of a finger-in-the-air exercise – not all of the 500,000, which includes young students, people caring for parents and some without a job – will want to, or be realistically able to, move out of home. But many would. Back in 2019, Sharon Donnery, deputy governor of the Central Bank, estimated the pent-up demand at about 250,000 “missing” homes.

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Like Hemingway’s description of how you go bankrupt – “gradually, then suddenly” – the problem has been building over many years, but has now emerged as a crisis of unmet demand and lives put on hold. And whatever the quirks are in the data, it is clear that the situation has been getting worse in Ireland, while in Europe on average it has remained relatively unchanged. That said, the divergence in trends between the Scandinavians, kicked out of home early, and the stay-at-home southern European in Italy, Spain and Portugal is remarkable.

So who are the Irish stay-at-home generation? About 100,000 of those living with their parents are 18- to 19-year-olds, a significant number of whom are students. This is around eight out of ten of that total age group. A further 190,000 are aged 20 to 24 – six out of ten of that cohort. The next group is 100,000 people aged between 25 to 29, almost one third of the population total of that age. There are around 80,000 people in their 30s living at home, around 10 per cent of the total. The further we move up the age groups, the more the demand will be there to move out.

The remaining 50,000 stay-at-homers are older, and likely to be there for a variety of reasons including unemployment and acting as carers to elderly parents.

More than half of those living with their parents are in work – and so many would expect to have the means to move out. A significant number of the rest are students, at least some of whom would presumably move out to student accommodation if it was available at a reasonable cost. A relatively small number – 8 per cent of the men living at home and 4 per cent of the women – are unemployed.

[ Young Irish ‘failing to launch adult lives’: 68% of people in late 20s still living with parents ]

Pent-up demand from the stay-at home generation is one reason why tackling the housing crisis feels like running to stand still. Many in this group are competing for rental properties or smaller homes, both in short supply. The continued strength in the price of new rentals, up 9 per cent annually to €1,544 on average in the first quarter, is probably due in part to the Covid-returners seeking to move out and restart normal life.

So, we have a lot of catching-up to do before the housing market looks anything like normal. And other factors are increasing the shortage in big city markets, notably Dublin. As the economy – and job opportunities – move more and more into service sectors, including internationally traded services in areas such as finance and tech, people increasingly want to move to cities where these jobs tend to based. Meanwhile, people want to move here from other countries for those same jobs.

[ ‘We are at our wits’ end. Our adult daughter still lives with us and her boyfriend has started to settle here too’ ]

A vital factor is to plan for changed demand - particularly the need for more smaller homes, driven by a number of things. People are settling down later, planning smaller families and having children when they are older. They generally don’t buy a home until well into their 30s, underlining the centrality of the rental market in keeping people at home. Housing policy has for many years been made by a generation that moved out of home into a three-bed semidetached house as they got married, for a generation with entirely different ambitions.

New draft planning guidelines published this week by the Minister for Housing, Darragh O’Brien, wisely start to tease out what a future of smaller housing units might look like – moving beyond large apartment blocks as being the answer, to more mixed developments also including duplexes and smaller terraced houses with their own front door.

[ David McWilliams: Ireland’s ‘nepo-baby buyers’ are creating a two-tier housing system ]

This new way of living, involving smaller homes and much less private garden space – vital to meet climate goals by cutting the need for car travel – needs to be debated and understood. Then the challenge for a State flush with financial resources is to find a way to get it done, requiring it to address familiar blockages in areas such as planning. If the already-housed older generation can continue to stymie the desire of the younger one to move out of home by challenging development at every turn, we are never going to get anywhere.