40M Americans Live Alone, 29% of households | Hacker News Reader

40M Americans Live Alone, 29% of households

apolloacademy.com

59 pointshelsinkiandrew103 comments

When I was a twentysomething, I had roommates. This saved money on rent and bulk purchases (which let me spend more time having fun and save money) and provided a starter-kit social circle in a new city. It also honed conflict-resolution skills and ability to be civil. And when I got a partner, it made moving in together smoother.

Something I’ve noticed recently is many college graduates living alone. That’s fine. But it’s a weird default for early in one’s career. If I had one general piece of advice for anyone starting their career, it would be to seek out a living situation with roommates.

Side question: are more college students staying in solo dorms?

oh man, you just gave me a flashback to my roommates a decade ago changing my WiFi router password since they thought I was working too much. That was not my finest moment as far as practicing conflict resolution goes :)

But that’s also the point. Low risk situation to practice things that later in life become much higher risk. Better to figure out how to cohabitate with a few random roommates than a SO down the road.

Living alone is awesome, but I also had roommates while in university, and despite our differences, that was awesome too, it would have sucked to be alone.

I guess living alone can be a sound decision, but it depends on context.

Exactly. “I love those **holes” is my fond sentiment. I rarely talk to them anymore but we all still consider each other best friends for life

There's a huge gamble with roommates that you might be stuck with someone terrible in a year (or longer) lease. Most people who can afford to live alone would prefer to have their own place. This is just a sign that people are getting richer (since this same trend is happening in all first-world countries).

> a huge gamble with roommates that you might be stuck with someone terrible in a year (or longer) lease

Life involves taking risks and measuring people. Getting stuck with a shitty roommate is pretty low stakes on that spectrum.

> just a sign that people are getting richer (since this same trend is happening in all first-world countries)

Valid hypothesis. I’d posit Covid and the increasingly prevalence of single-child households are the more-proximate cause.

You definitely havent had bad roommates if you say that.

> You definitely havent had bad roommates if you say that

I lived in New York in an illegally-subdivided loft. Yes, I’ve had bad roommates. Yes, it felt overwhelming at first. And yes, I got over it, constraining the problem where possible and addressing it directly where necessary, a suite of skills that were probably instrumental in my start-up later working.

Not accusing you of this directly, but this sounds like trying to get people to just accept lower living standards.

If living alone is "higher living standards" why are we even talking about this article?

Expect a lot more of this.

If the number of young people who can buy homes is going down and the number of young people that can afford to start families is also going down then how are people getting richer?

This is a sign of social isolation, not wealth.

People aren't getting richer in all first-world countries. In the UK the average salary is only up a few percentage points in real terms over 20 years

It's not a high number when compared to other first-world countries: https://statranker.org/population/top-10-countries-with-high...

Interesting that UK is not in the top 10 list. Because of more ethnic diversity, or because they cannot afford single households?

Rare to live alone in London, even amongst single thirtysomething professionals earning well above median income.

> https://statranker.org/population/top-10-countries-with-high...

It's not (just) about the absolute number, but the trend as well; see "Chart 2. Rise of single-person households, 1990–2025".

But it is one of the largest drivers for increased housing demand.

If more people lived together with friends, that’d make a dent in both the housing and loneliness crises.

The issue is the number of people who ‘surprise’ you with out of control behaviors that are a huge issue with room mates. And getting out of living situation with someone like that can be extremely difficult.

People can seem perfectly fine, until they seem to spontaneously turn into hoarders, or start eating all your food and lying about it, or start being aggressively in your face about a bunch of antagonistic culture bullshit, etc.

I think what we’re seeing is Americans increasingly fed up with (or even terrified of) other Americans.

I moved in with one of my closest friends a few years ago, someone I considered a brother. In less than a year, I got someone to sublet and have not spoken to him since. I had no idea someone could be such a tool.

There’s definitely some risk, but the alternative is not a panacea either (high rents, loneliness). You can also get closer to people and enrich your life, and it’s positive to practice tolerance for the behaviours of others (within reason).

It’s possible there are more unhinged people today, but I think that’s also a consequence of us spending so much time alone in the first place (and sycophantic bots are only going to make that worse).

I was also thinking of everyone, not just US Americans.

Except for a very, very small number of people, everyone I've ever known who can afford to not have room mates - doesn't have room mates. Young or old.

There is a reason for this, and it isn't because they hate their mental health.

The issue here is how hard it is to protect your own mental health when someone else refuses to respect yours, and how a co-living situation can make that hard - because you literally are all up in each others business.

> and it isn't because they hate their mental health.

No, of course not. But that doesn’t also mean it can’t have an effect. Social media is harmful to many of us who still partake. Sometimes what we do isn’t what’s best. Some of those people who live alone could benefit from living with someone else, others might not. It’s not an absolute, just worth considering.

> The issue here is how hard it is to protect your own mental health when someone else refuses to respect yours

Right, but I feel too many people are focusing on dipshit housemates. Good and understanding people do exist. Like, would you be one of those disrespectful people you describe? Probably not, which proves people like you do exist.

I gave up on roommates years ago, so I would not even be in the eval set.

It’s something europeans don’t yet understand, that “diversity” has utterly destroyed community, trust, and tranquility in the US; mostly because it has been forced upon people against their will in direct contradiction of the core tenets of the Constitution and founding principles of America.

I realize hearing that or seeing that others may read that, may anger people who are deeply invested in the fraud that diversity is good, but all the legitimate research into the topic all tells us the same thing; that “diversity” is detrimental to any and all human communities all around the world, even for the very group that pushes it on others while aggressively rejecting it for themselves and their own.

edit: No amount of downvoting will change reality, whether you shoot the messenger or not. It's a shame, because good does not actually prevail, especially with brainwashed fools who assist those seeking the demise of others. Support of "diversity" is no different than the support of the genocide the jewish state committed and is to this day still committing in Gaza... the support of evil without the intelligence to understand that.

What is this legitimate research you speak of? Will you please provide sources?

https://youtu.be/MLwKFGjE2zY?si=H9RwqKjTOAO6c8Ct

Living close to friends seems like a good idea as well.

Living in suburbia has definitely made me yearn for this: https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/should-more-of-us-...

Then again how many more people would live alone if they could afford to rent or buy on a single income?

Yeah in my country people leave their parents house in their early 20s. Independence and individuality are the foundational bedrock of my culture.

But it's getting harder because of the housing market.

> Independence and individuality

Neither are threatened by living with a friend or someone else near your age. Sure, move out of your parents’ home, but that doesn’t mean you have to live alone.

> Neither are threatened by living with a friend or someone else near your age

The difference between sharing a 2BR and living in an apartment building are more exercises in cultural than physical difference.

Living close to friends and having a community that knows/supports each other helps a lot but living with friends is a good way to end up with less friends. Someone you can stand being around all day is very different than someone you really enjoy spending a few hours a month with.

> Someone you can stand being around all day is very different than someone you really enjoy spending a few hours a month with

One is a friend. The other an acquaintance.

Nah, the differences that can make for a dynamic friendship can be the ones that prevent cohabitation. If you're friends you don't have to care that they like to play loud music at 2 am, but you do when you live together.

I have/had friends whose pickiness/slovenliness was fine until we tried to live together, and then all that became a personality clash. It's entirely possible to have strong friendships with people you couldn't live with.

I’m not saying someone isn’t a friend if you can’t live together long term. But if you can’t “stand being around” someone “all day,” they’re clearly less than a friend.

If my friends fell on hard times, they’d have a place to crash. I cannot say that of everyone I hang out with because not all of them are people whom I’d (a) enjoy being around and (b) trust to respect my boundaries (and trust myself to be tolerant of their incongruities with my preferences).

This isn't true at all and a pretty ridiculous statement. How someone lives in their own home has no impact on what their company is like in the outside world. Someone could be a bit of a hoarder, not do the dishes often enough, stay up to 3am listening to music none of that has anything to do with how good of a friend they are but it does matter if you live with them.

> Someone could be a bit of a hoarder, not do the dishes often enough, stay up to 3am listening to music

If someone is doing that while living with someone whom it’s bothering to the point of wanting to change living situations, there is a disconnect of empathy that betrays that it isn’t a friendship.

(Granted, my original comment was honing in on the “few hours a month” bit. That’s fine for maintaining a friendship. But not for building one. Again, it’s perfectly adequate for making acquaintances.)

I can attest to this. My best friend and I have known each other for almost 24 years, and we still talk/hang out regularly. We lived together for about a year in our early 20s and that did NOT go well. Luckily it didn't kill the friendship, but things were definitely tense for a while.

Part of the loneliness crisis is the difficulty of making friends.

This reminds me, yesterday I was walking down the hallway of my apartment building, and one of my neighbors passed by me but neglected to even acknowledge my existence, because their head was down staring at their smartphone.

> Part of the loneliness crisis is the difficulty of making friends.

Sharing a house is a good way to combat that. Sometimes you move in with people you tangentially know. Sometimes you won’t be huge friends with them but can still interact, or may even meet some of their friends and hit it off.

You know how you can tell if you have a really good friend? They will help you dispose of your roommate's body, 24 by 7, no questions asked.

They might have one question: “How much is the rent and when can I move in?”

If you just murdered your roommate, I'm not sure I'm in a rush to become your next roommate...

That just adds to the joke.

https://tapas.io/episode/3740756

Both directly, by providing a social circle, and indirectly, by training people to live with a partner.

Part of the "housing crisis" is older Americans aging-in-place and using way more home than they need too. A widow/er might occupy the same suburban single family home in retirement that could house 5 people.

For sure, but this is tied into the elder care crisis. My aunt is the sole occupant of a gigantic "2 family" [0]. Not even in the suburbs, but in what you'd describe as a small city downtown. She toys with the idea of assisted living, but the deal basically seems to be trading her house to buy in, and then a huge monthly ongoing fee. And we all know once you're in such a place, the rosy marketing about the care you're going to get never really pans out. Whereas she gets the full attention of the hired helper who comes by twice a week.

At this point I think she's well past assisted living, and relies on being in a familiar environment. So those concerns plus the non-winning finances, my advice is to stay there as long as she can. Because from what I've seen of nursing homes, they're basically grueling slow-motion assisted suicide.

[0] It's actually 3 units, one in a state of paused remodel. I haven't been able to tell if it started its life as 2 units each with an upstairs and downstairs and a shared stairway, or as 4 separate units even.

Great example. It's a shame the switching costs are so high, and the availability of appropriately-sized housing so low that she can't downsize in a financially advantageous way.

From the patterns I've seen there are roughly two buckets of people. Some get ahead of this when they're still quite young, embrace "retirement" and "downsizing", etc. This makes the switching costs worth it - they're paying to start a new deliberate life.

And others just want to stay in their same home they know and love even as they slow down and do less and less. I myself feel I'm going to be in this latter camp, and I don't know what I'd do differently to change that.

I wrote another comment elsewhere in this topic about the lack of multi-generation households, and I feel that is directly part of the problem here too. Of course it's a very tall ask to expect your kid(s) to stick around in the American individualist culture. Although the economics of this might change with where we're headed...

The shortage of decent retirement communities is a problem in of itself. It's perfectly possible to make senior care homes that aren't awful. My grandmother lives in one, it's basically university with more expensive food and decor and slightly fewer classes. I'd move in today if they'd let me (and I had the cash). But it's soooo much cheaper to just slap people into tiny cells and provide the bare necessities.

She better get her affairs in order because if not somebody will be taking that house and it won't be her heirs. Details vary by state.

lol. I'm well aware of those legal details - lookback period, intestate succession, etc. The situation is so far from properly planned, but I've made my peace with it. I've at least got a signed healthcare proxy though!

One piece of advice of my own that I will throw out is to act quickly after someone's spouse dies to get them to sign the appropriate papers and get those details in order. Otherwise as the depression settles in they tend to "clam up" shortly thereafter and become extremely negative on doing anything like that. If you're an honest person you might feel bad doing this, like you're picking the bones of the dead, but just get over it and do what's best for everyone - dishonest people will have no such reservations.

(thank you for throwing out the advice in case I didn't know, though!)

My mother is in this situation. All of the assisted living facilities in mher area are either owned by Private Equity or are way too expensive. She has no choice other than to age in place. It’s terrifying for both of us.

That in itself is a failure of society, that someone who has spent X amount of time in a home they love, have lived life in, raised their children in etc. is implicit expected to sacrifice all that so younger people can take the space.

We just need to get better at redistributing our economic activity instead of concentrating everything in the same place and then wondering why everyone wants to live in the same and its unfeasible to house them all

It’s a complete mis-use of needed space regardless of someone’s sentimental value attached to it.

The culprit is not the concentration of jobs to a geographic area, it’s NIMBYs and crap like California’s Prop 13 artificially constraining supply.

The best thing I ever did for my mental health was to start having children. Humans, like every other living creature, are hardwired by billions of years of evolution to reproduce.

What specifically do you think helped?

Why are people complaining about this? It's not even that high of an amount compared to several other developed nations. It's not a recent trend either. It's been going on for over 30 years.

No one here seems to care about the objective number (40 million) - they instead care about the relative amount (29%). If you look at the graph and track the percent, it's been at or over 25% since 1990. Having your share go from 25% to 29% in 35 years is not really that meaningful.

This isn't a new phenomenon in the US. The graph sucks because it hides the fact that the US population has been growing steadily.

It's weird to see people discussing this from a "we're richer so we live alone because roommates are risky" angle instead of the actual angle of this being an indicator of the slow death of society because it indicates the increasing number of people that never grew up, formed a pair bond and had kids (and also the failure of many of those pair bonds ending in divorce and one or both sides of the pair living alone depending on if they had kids or not.

Is it a bad thing? People's life choices are their own.

29% seems like a fairly neutral number.

If you own shares in e.g. Costco, a long-term sustained trend of shrinking household sizes might give you pause.

I own shares of Costco and am a member and I’m not concerned.

People's life choices are their own, but if many people choose to live alone, that objectively affects housing situation in the society.

if so many people can afford to live alone, perhaps it means that housing situation isn't that bad? in cities like NYC where rents are high, it's very common to have roommates for instance.

It's a bad thing if we want a cohesive society or if we wish to maximise well-being (both of which are challenged by people increasing their exposure to solitude and loneliness); and your claim about life choices is only partially true - we are all constrained/guided by genetic and environmental factors.

> People's life choices are their own.

How do you know it's by choice?

> Is it a bad thing? People's life choices are their own.

How much of a choice is it that they made willing? The number has doubled over the last few decades:

* https://www.self.inc/blog/adults-living-alone

* https://thesocietypages.org/graphicsociology/tag/living-alon...

There are health (and happiness) consequences to not being connected to other people:

* https://archive.is/https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loneliness_epidemic

Perhaps the number was artificially low before, and more people actually wanted to live on their own. Loneliness is not the same thing as a one-person household.

I'm not seeing evidence that 15% is the correct number and 29% is automatically bad.

It triggers conservatives and Christians who believe in the nuclear family and biblical lifestyle. They despise liberty and agency.

Western ideas of liberty and agency came out of 1500 years of Christian. Christians put limits on liberty and agency, but that's very different than despising it.

Even from an atheistic standpoint, current levels of liberty and agency are clearly evolutionarily unfit. The fertility rate of Christians (and other conservative religious people) are at or above replacement level, which means that the unlimited liberty and agency folks are substantially below replacement levels.

This is something people don't seem to understand when it comes to pairing up and forming families. If there is no reliable method to do so and you leave it up to chance, then what's gonna happen? Of course, people will stop forming families at the rate they used to.

In a society where people only have enough children to replace themselves, having people without children means that society will slowly fade away and disappear.

There are a bunch of modern ideologies that don't try to understand or even deny that having children is the most powerful kind of democracy in life. When you are having children, you're essentially saying "I want more people like myself in this world". Under this premise, the western world is saying "I don't want to be here anymore".

Oh please, Christianity is no source of liberty. And as of now, conservative Christians are all about restricting liberty, that is literally their project. Conservative christianity despises liberty, but is all about forcing women into births and relationships they dont want and that harm them.

Bible doesn't ban being single. So your statement is false.

According to bible you can be single or have family, be happy or miserable. The matters is to not commit sins.

> Is it a bad thing?

Considering there are both housing and loneliness crises going on, and that being lonely or socially isolated leads to an early death and radicalisation, I’d say it’s fair to categorise it as a bad thing, yes.

Sure, not every single one of those people living alone will be lonely, but I think it’s fair to deduce that many people who are lonely and isolated live alone.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/19/health/loneliness-social-isol...

https://www.parliament.nsw.gov.au/lcdocs/other/21402/Delany%...

I’d wager it also feeds into the fertility crisis. Roommates are a training ground for living with a partner and potentially family. If someone is living with a non-parent for the first time in their late twenties, there may already be habits or intolerances developed that make dating incredibly difficult.

The phrasing in your sources is absolutely horrible and brings back high school vibes of "lonely kids are bad because they are lonely, so they must be bullied to make them normal again". Just great.

It's utterly terrible regarding the issues of housing availability, settling down to start our own families, and elder care. The multi-generation pattern is that the grandparents watch the kids while the middle generation does useful work - the grandparents supervise the kids, while the kids keep the grandparents entertained. Then when the kids get old enough, they help supervise the grandparents.

I think we could naturally fall back into this pattern as housing, elder, and child care continue to get ever more expensive... but for the fact that the baseline suburban house is built with a single common living space, meant for a single family all constantly interacting with each other. You have to get into much more expensive houses with "in-law apartments" and whatnot before you regain the breathing room to have multiple generations living together. And now even houses with that extra space have become economic-grindstone legible due to short term rentals.

As mentioned elsewhere it isn't actually particularly high for a developed country.

Incidentally, that newsletter has a lot of interesting charts.

https://www.apolloacademy.com/the-daily-spark/

So what?

After living with parents, roommates, spouses and others for most of my life, I'm super happy to live alone.

Has anyone stopped to think that possibly people live alone because that's what they want to do?

I can only think of a quote from one of my favorite youtube videos of all time:

"The monkey's feel alone, all 6 billion of them..."

From: Ernest Cline's spoken word reading of Dance Monkey, Dance

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQOdNY-HdG0

Watch it, it's worth it...

Is this page just a single chart and a massive legal disclaimer?

Even as new homes are much bigger than decades past…

I'm building a house currently and I really wish there were more options to have the things I want without needing all the extra space in places I don't care about. The problem is, even if I was able to build such a house (I'm using a large builder, this is not a fully custom house) the resale prospects would be poor.

At least in my city, this is obviously the big reason behind the housing crisis.

Any causes? Is it that we are too independent and don’t like collectivism? A conspiracy might say it’s on purpose to have more people pay for things typically bought for a couple. Like everyone having their own house, cable bill, utility bill, water bill, …

> too independent

individualistic

The American tendency to move away from family earlier is probably involved.

After college, I intentionally lived with roommates. The three of us were doing well, having secured jobs at Microsoft and Amazon.

Even so, splitting rent, utilities, and furniture was a significant financial advantage and helped set us up for long-term success.

We had our disagreements, and eventually a falling out with one roommate, but I’d do it all again. The other roommate and I are life long friends and you learn lessons and form bonds in addition to the financial benefit.

Probably most of all the increase of the age of marriage

Which I think is a secondary effect of many other things happening; staying in school for longer, much higher cost of living, cultural shifts like being more aware of what is normal and acceptable in a relationship, etc. It's not unusual for people to be in their 30's before finally having some (financial, etc) breathing room to even consider things like marriage / kids.

Also, but I think that most of all there used to be pressure to get married early

The population is growing older. Young adults rarely live alone, while retirees often do. There are more old people than there used to be, and people often want to continue living in their own home after their spouse dies.

sad

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