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).

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.

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

> 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".

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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-...

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

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.

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

What specifically do you think helped?

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, but if many people choose to live alone, that objectively affects housing situation in the society.

> 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

> 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%...

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.

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

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

> People's life choices are their own.

How do you know it's by choice?

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

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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.

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.

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.

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

Probably most of all the increase of the age of marriage

> too independent

individualistic

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