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Comment by SpicyLemonZest | Hacker News Reader

I think "lots" is pretty load-bearing here. How many younger people, precisely, have moved back home? If half of them have, I agree that's a big paradigm shift; if 5% have, I'm not sure that adds up to something very far outside normal variability.

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I would say a significant amount, I don’t have the article link on hand but U-Haul prices out of California are 10 - 40x the price the opposite direction. I was hit by this since we had planned to move out of state prior to what is going on (roughly a year ago) and needed to price it out. We’re still moving, just getting the trailer instead of the full truck and I’ll haul the stuff while my girlfriend and son fly out instead.

The latest news that the majority of young adults in US live with parents.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/09/04/a-majority-...

Over half. 52%, actually.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/09/04/a-majority-...

That does not say that over half have moved back home since Covid. Read critically.

The relevant variable here isn't the headline 52%, but the fraction of young people who lived independently but have recently stopped, which is (52 - 47) / (100 - 47) = 9.4%. That's a big number, but I don't know that it's big enough to be the death of many cities - it seems plausible that those 9.4% could move back out over the next few years for the same reasons they moved out in the first place. (And remember that young people living independently are only a part of a city's population.)

Of course, it's likely that this impact isn't going to be uniform, so that doesn't mean individual neighborhoods (or even individual cities) have no cause for concern.

> How many younger people, precisely, have moved back home?

It appears like quite a few. I can see into a lot of different apartments from where I live in SF and many, many more are empty. This might also be due to AirBnBs.

The real estate rental prices have fallen, but they're still pretty sticky - I predict they are going to fall more.

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