‘We have to rethink everything’

and the family decided to buy another car because “everyone’s going to be here for a long time,” she said.

“We have to rethink everything,” she said. “What we’ve worked really hard to get to — our independence, their independence — is just gone.”

For many people who have returned home, career momentum is also at risk, especially for those who were just starting out in industries that have been pummeled by the pandemic.

But younger workers are “notoriously poor savers,” Piegza said, and many were caught without rainy-day funds during a devastating economic storm. A multigenerational quarantine was often the only viable option, albeit a potentially dangerous one given the risk of the virus spreading in close quarters.

And even before the pandemic, many city residents were reconsidering the high prices and cramped quarters of urban life. Suburban populations have surged in recent years.

After being furloughed from her bartending and digital marketing job in Chicago, Cara Fattori, 24, moved home to the suburb of Crystal Lake. Her room there had been repurposed three years ago into a space that serves as a yoga studio, craft room and storage for her 17-year-old brother’s hockey gear.

Also sharing the 1,950square-foot home are her mother, a flight attendant who has been on paid leave since February; her stepfather, a retired Navy veteran with a pension; and her brother. Fattori has offered to pay for groceries but said her mother would only allow her to help with household chores. She continues to split rent with her roommates in Chicago but no longer has to pay for utilities, groceries or $1.25per-load laundry.

Fattori said that going home, accompanied by her cat, had been “a weird adjustment.” Her mother and stepfather’s cat has a tendency to play in the toilets, so bathroom doors in the house are supposed to remain closed — a rule that Fattori occasionally forgets because her own cat does not have a lavatory fixation.

She does not expect to return to Chicago, where the population per square mile is roughly six times that of Crystal Lake, until possibly July. Nearly half of her high school friends have also returned home, she said.

“It’s a lot safer in the suburbs; I can ride my bike through the neighborhood and not worry about getting infected,” she said.

“But it was an economic decision.”

Multigenerational households have been on the rise since 1980, according to a 2018 Pew Research Center report. In 2016, a record 64 million people, or 20% of the U.S. population, lived with two or more adult generations.

In the chaos of the pandemic, some of those included parents like Julie Kogen, who sought out their adult children.

Kogen moved in March from Boca Raton, Florida, to Chillicothe, Ohio, where her 26-year-old daughter had a spare room.

Kogen knew she could run her home-design business remotely. Her mortgage was paid off. She wanted her daughter, an emergency room doctor who Kogen feared was subsisting on fistfuls of cereal, to have homecooked food. Besides, it felt safer to hunker down in the rural Appalachian foothills, where her daughter’s two roommates are also hospital workers.

“It’s a Catch-22: I can’t go near any of them, but if I got the virus, God forbid, I would’ve gotten excellent care,” she said.

“Our relationship is definitely still motherdaughter: She would never ask me for money, and I would never ask her for money,” she said. “We’re all one big pot.”