It’s a topic impacting more and more families each year: young adults choosing to continue living at home with their parents/guardians. A recent eye-opening report from the Urban Institute revealed that since 2000, that number has nearly doubled in America.

In 2000, only 12-percent of people between the ages of 25 and 34 lived with their parents, but by 2017, that number had jumped to 22-percent. That’s 5.6 million more young adults still living with their parents. According to the report, “Today’s young adults are less likely to move out and form independent households than those of the same age in previous generations. The headship rate of young adults ages 25 to 34 decreased from 47.0 percent in 2000 to 41.2 percent in 2017.”

The Urban Institute attributes this staggering statistic to several causes, including the fact that people are now getting married later in life, that many millennials struggled to find their first job just after the financial crisis of 2007, and it is likely also related to the titanic issue of student loan debt in America.

What does this data mean for Virginia REALTORS^®? Our Chief Economist Dr. Lisa Sturtevant dives into this question in our latest episode of the REAL Politics podcast. One variable she addresses is that there is a geographic variance to this data. In the more expensive regions of the state, more millennials tend to live at home to save for a down payment; however, data suggests that these basement dwellers are not actually putting forth larger down payments than their peers who have been living independently.

Learn more about the significance of this growing trend by checking out REAL Politics on SoundCloud, iTunes, or Google Play.