> Or is it because rent growth outpaces wages?
I think this is incomplete by itself. Taking a couple of points from the article:
- Women are less likely than men to live at home with their parents.
- The increase in men living at home with their parents is primarily driven by those without college degrees (15->25% among those without college degrees over the last 25 years, 10->13% among those with college degrees).
Per [0], in 2019, there was a 8 point gender gap among young adults (25-29) for college degrees (associate's and above).
[0] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/pdf/coe_caa.pdf
A guess at a fuller explanation might then be that wage growth for jobs that don't require a college degree haven't kept up with rent growth, and the gender gap here is driven by the gender gap in educational attainment.
One other thing that I observed:
If you look at the labor force participation graph in the article, it slowly trended downwards from the 60s, and then suddenly jumped down around 2008-2011, and since then stayed mostly flat until last year.
Meanwhile, the fraction of young men living at home rose steadily from the 60s until the mid-90s, dropped for a few years, and then resumed climbing after 2000 (with no such jumps around 2009 or 2020).
On one hand, we have these economic shocks (Great Recession, pandemic) that force a bunch of men out of the labor market, but at the same time, more men are living at home even as labor force participation remained largely constant throughout most of the 2010s. That reads to me like it refutes the article's central claim of correlation between these two variables.