When signing a lease in Houston, young adults are going it alone
City stands out nationwide as a hub for millennials who live by themselves
Joshua Zinn’s apartment is quiet, save the sound of a cat purring as it nuzzles into Zinn’s side, and the soundtrack of a Play Station game whispering out of the massive TV on the far wall. It’s a drizzly Tuesday, just after 6 p.m., and Zinn has already eaten his leftovers for dinner and settled in for a quiet evening in the one-bedroom apartment where he lives sans roommates — unless you count Felix the tabby cat.
“I mean, this is pretty much how I spend a night. It’s not that exciting,” Zinn said, laughing. “Just a normal Tuesday night.”
Normal for him and a growing group of young professionals who’ve turned Houston into a hub for those who live alone.
Back in 1940, when most Americans followed the traditional model of marrying young and staying married “till death do you part,” the total number of households made up of just one person was only 8 percent.
Now, as the number of
living arrangements younger generations can choose to follow in their lives increases, so does the national share of households with just one resident — up to 28 percent, according to the Census Bureau’s 2016 American Community Survey. Here in Houston, it’s even higher: 32 percent.
Houston rises above the national tide for a long list of reasons.
To start, the share of millennials living by themselves is increasing more rapidly than other cohorts, said Bill Fulton, director of the Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice University.
Houston has more than its fair share of millennials: 38 percent of the city is between the ages of 18 and 24, compared with 30 percent nationally, according to the Census Bureau. This means fluctuations in millennial trends will affect the local market here more than in other places. As such, while those younger than 35 make up 16 percent of adults who live by themselves, they account for 27 percent of people who live on their own in Houston.
Since millennials are more likely to rent, so are Houstonians as a whole. Nationally, 37 percent of housing units are occupied by renters. Here, it’s 57 percent.
“This affects the housing choices in a city like Houston,” Fulton said. “The units are being built for people who live alone.”
Just look at the city’s apartment stock: One-bedrooms are the most common floor plan for apartment dwellers. Across the city, more than half of the apartments are one-bedrooms, according to data from Apartment Data Services.
And Zinn loves his onebedroom.
“I think if I had my choice, I would have lived alone from the start,” said the 27-year-old, who spent a few years living with roommates after graduate school. “I just kind of like having my own space — not having to worry about other people’s messes, or having people over when I don’t want people over. I can kind of control the environment more.”
Still, roommates were a must-have for much of his early and mid-20s.
“Really, what enabled me to get my own place was when I got hired full time. I now had a stable job and a good salary. So I had enough that I could afford to live by myself,” said Zinn, a producer at Houston Public Media.
It helps that he overlooked the rows of glossy, granite-infused apartment complexes rising up around the city for an older spot well within his budget. His focus on affordability shines a light on another Houston-specific factor that boosts the city’s stats for solo dwellers.
“Houston’s rents are fairly low compared to other large cities like, L.A., New York or San Francisco,” said Dowell Myers, a demography professor at the University of Southern California. “In those cities, you have to double-up with roommates.”
While rents are even cheaper in the suburbs around Houston, there aren’t as many people living alone there.
“It’s an urban thing,” Fulton said. “I think people who live alone are drawn to urban areas, where they have the freedom to take advantage of lots of activities outside their home.”
In Sugar Land, only 16 percent of households belong to people who live on their own. And the rate remains below the national average in most other nearby suburbs.
That makes sense at a fundamental level when considering the very qualities that differentiate urban and suburban areas, according to Myers and Fulton.
Without the built-in social structure of roommates and live-in family, those who live alone often have to leave the comfort of their living room to socialize with friends and meet new people, so people who live by themselves cluster around parts of the city that cater to a vibrant social life. Just ask Alli Keithan. The 28-year-old has been living on her own in Montrose for about three years now. And she doesn’t feel like she’s missing a thing.
“I didn’t think I was going to love it. I thought I was going to be lonely,” said Keithan, a designer at a local architecture firm. “When I was looking for apartments, I wanted to be able to be close to things I love to do, without having to drive to it. So my main thing was, I wanted to be near Buffalo Bayou.”
When her car broke down, Keithan waited two weeks to repair it, relying on Uber and her feet.
“My living situation is super convenient,” she said. “My brother keeps trying to tell me to buy a house, and honestly, I don’t want to. I like being able to do whatever I want.”
She’s part of a larger cohort of young adults enjoying dense urban living. And their tastes are being noted.
“I think this has shifted the physical makeup of cities,” Fulton said. For decades, Houston has been known as an auto-oriented city. But that trend is being bucked in certain neighborhoods.
“Now there are more dense living options, especially for young professionals,” he said. “And I think you see a desire to concentrate activities, so you want housing opportunities not necessarily closer to jobs, but close to other urban amenities like parks, bars, restaurants and theaters.”
Inside Loop 610, the neighborhood with the greatest concentration of solo dwellers is GreenwayUpper Kirby’s 77046 ZIP Code, where 71 percent of occupied units are home to just one person. It’s also one of the most walkable parts of the city: About 8 percent of residents here walk to work, compared to a city average of about 2 percent.
"It used to be that people had nowhere to eat," Myers said. "If you lived on your own, you had to be attached to a kitchen. You were a boarder or a lodger. But now we have microwaves, and cities are full of restaurants. So we’ve made it possible for people to live without an attachment to anyone else."
In, neighborhoods like Upper Kirby or Midtown, where complexes stacked full of one-bedroom apartments have popped up hand in hand with more dining and drinking options, the two trends have helped each other grow.
"There’s a long-standing theory from the 1940s called the ‘Bright Lights’ theory," Myers said. "It says young people will leave the rural areas and come to the city, attracted by the bright lights. And then they’d meet a partner for life and gradually move out toward a nest in the suburbs. And that’s been a long-standing pattern: You don’t move back out until you have a partner."
So true, said Megan Ray, a Realtor who says about 60 percent of her clients are just like her: young women looking for their own bachelorette pad.
“Houston is very business-driven. And Houstonians are hustlers,” she said. “People don’t come here for the weather or the beautiful beaches, so I think the percentage of people living on their own here is possibly due to people who are relocating to the city.”
When people first move to Houston — as 64,735 millennials did in 2016, according to the Census Bureau — they often don’t have friends or family with whom to bunk.
“That’s why Houston is high,” Myers said. “It’s a pump that imports young people.”
Still, young people don’t stay young forever.
Zinn’s not quite sure where he’ll end up. Born and raised in Texas, he has always harbored the idea that he might try getting out for a while and living on one of the coasts for a couple of years before settling down and getting a mortgage in some to-be-determined location. And he isn’t alone in taking his time to figure it out.
His generation — the largest generation in America — is delaying just about every major life step when compared to their parents and grandparents. Some of that is easy to explain: As the rate of young Americans earning college degrees rises, so does the average age of marriage, to accommodate for those extra years in school.
Paying for school chips away at young adults’ ability to save for a down payment on a home of their own. Just ask Zinn.
“I think most millennials would agree, like, buying a house is kind of a long shot. I mean, it’s just not really that viable,” he said.
“It’s also the fact that college is more expensive than it ever used to be. My mother didn’t have to take out a bunch of student loans,” he added, noting that he pays a few hundred dollars every month toward his student debt. “For me, all my friends have student loans. Like, anyone I talk to that’s my age, we definitely, absolutely, without question have student loans. It’s a fact of life for usthat we have them for at least a few years. And then — maybe — when I pay those off, and maybe get a better salary, maybe I can think about getting a house.”
So while a decade or so ago, demographers may have expected Zinn to move onto his next life stage in the near future and clear a spot for a new, bright-eyed 20-something to lease his apartment, today’s young adults are stuck in a bottleneck.
“Do people still want to get married and have families, or are they abandoning that? No they’re not,” Myers said. “It’s just a prolonged stage in the 20s. And it’s totally normal now, across all classes. Is that a permanent state? No. But it can go on for a decade.”
Zinn’s about ready for his next step. Later this year, he and his girlfriend of four years will move in together. They’ve already bought the couches and have begun touring apartment complexes in search of a reasonably priced twobedroom with relatively short commutes to her office in Clear Lake and his near the University of Houston.
It means he’ll give up a bit of his autonomy, and Felix will have to share attention with Zinn’s girlfriend’s cat. But it’s a welcome change.
“I’m looking forward to it,” Zinn said. “I would love to save some extra money ... and honestly, I think one of the big things I’m looking forward to is just that experience of living together. We’ve been together for four years, and we’re at the point where it seems like that’s what we need to be doing. So it’s good to take that step, I think.”
They’ll start by signing a 12-month lease. And from there, the future is a big question mark — for both Zinn and the demographers trying to pin down a massive, vibrant generation.