31 percent of SF millennials live with their parents

Bay Area is mecca for people ages 18-34, and a plurality of them live with their parents

According to the real estate site Realtor.com, San Francisco and San Jose are the ninth and tenth most popular city for Millennials. (Here defined as those between 25 and 34.)

And according to the rental site Abodo, a potentially alarming number of those Millennials—nearly one third across both cities—are still living with their parents.

The Realtor and Abodo studies, released one day apart, create a stark image of being young in the Bay Area.

On the one hand, 20- and 30-somethings here are higher paid and have better career options and more peers than almost anywhere in the country. On the other hand, many of them can barely get by.


Between August 2016 and February 2017, Realtor clocked the number of page views from young adults on their listing site Realtor.com and tallied up the results.

Salt Lake City, Miami, and Orlando took the top three spots, with San Francisco and San Jose scoring slightly more modest showings in the nine and ten spot.

This makes sense with the most recent census survey, which showed that in a single year (between summer 2014 and 2015) the median age in San Francisco declined three and a half months.

(That may not sound like a lot, but in statistical terms it’s a significant shift.)


In the SF-Oakland-Hayward area, people ages 34 and under make up 43.8 percent of the population, and those 40 and under are a majority.

Realtor credits “San Francisco’s tech fueled job market” and the “opportunity to work in some of the most innovative companies in the U.S.” for the youth movement.

But it’s not all boom times. Abodo’s report, titled “Not-So Empty Nests,” quantified “the percentage of 18- to 34-year-olds living with their parents [...] in each Metropolitan Statistical Area with a population of at least 1 million.”

According to that same census survey, in the SF-East Bay region that number is 31.5 percent. In San Jose it’s 33.3 percent.

Believe it or not, that’s below the national average in both cases. In places like Riverside and Miami the same statistic approached 45 percent. “This generation of 18- to 34-year-olds is more likely to be living with their parents than to be in any other living situation,” Abodo writes.

But young people in San Francisco and San Jose are the highest paid across any of the surveyed cities, so the fact that so many evidently have trouble getting out on their own is alarming, if not exactly surprising in this day and age.

Millennial unemployment nationwide was 10.1 percent in 2015, almost double that of the nation at large. In San Francisco and Oakland the rate was 9.2 percent and in the South Bay 8.6. But of course, median rent was nearly twice that national average too.

VIA [sf.curbed]