Dispatches from the 99%

[Content Note: Class warfare.]

The LA Times has a piece today by Walter Hamilton about how the "number of Californians 50 to 64 who live in their parents' homes has surged in recent years" as a result of the recession, long-term unemployment, and raising housing costs.

For seven years through 2012, the number of Californians aged 50 to 64 who live in their parents' homes swelled 67.6% to about 194,000, according to the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research and the Insight Center for Community Economic Development.

The jump is almost exclusively the result of financial hardship caused by the recession rather than for other reasons, such as the need to care for aging parents, said Steven P. Wallace, a UCLA professor of public health who crunched the data.

"The numbers are pretty amazing," Wallace said. "It's an age group that you normally think of as pretty financially stable. They're mid-career. They may be thinking ahead toward retirement. They've got a nest egg going. And then all of a sudden you see this huge push back into their parents' homes."

Many more young adults live with their parents than those in their 50s and early 60s live with theirs. Among 18- to 29-year-olds, 1.6 million Californians have taken up residence in their childhood bedrooms, according to the data.

Though that's a 33% jump from 2006, the pace is half that of the 50 to 64 age group.

The surge in middle-aged people moving in with parents reflects the grim economic reality that has taken hold in the aftermath of the Great Recession.

I just don't know (I mean, I know intellectually; I just don't know emotionally) how the wealthiest and most influential USians look at stories like these and continue to disgorge epic amounts of horseshit about bootstraps from their filthy mouths. This is not about individual people making bad choices. This is about a system that is catastrophically broken.