Mom and Dad’s basement looking pretty good

It’s true: Kids today are more dependent on their parents than kids yesterday. At least when it comes to housing.

Nearly a third of Americans age 18 to 34 were living with their parents in 2014, according to an analysis from the Pew Research Center. That’s the highest share since the Great Depression.

It was also the first time since at least 1880 that young adults were more likely to live in their parents’ homes than in their own households with a spouse or other romantic partner.

Crusty old pundits will surely declare this a sign of millennials’ failure to launch. They will bemoan young people’s insistence on mooching off of beleaguered boomer parents rather than going into the real world and getting their own grown-up jobs, spouses and mortgages. Millennial basement-dwelling — along with millennial musical tastes, millennial slang and millennial fashions — is thus clear evidence of a generation-wide crisis of character.

But there are a few reasons all this re-nesting may not be such a bad thing.

For one, consider the macroeconomic and social conditions that today’s young adults face. Their unemployment (and underemployment) rates remain relatively high, as do their student debt burdens. Their wages have stagnated.

Young adults want to live on their own and aspire to purchase homes. But homeownership remains out of their reach. National home prices today are not so far below their pre-recession peaks, with some metro areas even reaching all-time highs. Meanwhile, rents, too, have skyrocketed, outpacing inflation.

Young people are also living with their parents in higher numbers in part because they’re delaying marriage. This is a consequence of precarious job prospects and a perception that financial security is a prerequisite to tying the knot — which the vast majority of singles say they still very much want to do.

In this context, swallowing their pride and living with parents rather than frittering away money on rent looks financially prudent.

Second, the growth of intergenerational households shouldn’t be so alarming given how common this living arrangement is everywhere else in the developed world.

According to a recent census survey, 42 percent of Canadian adults age 20 to 29 live in their parents’ homes. Across the European Union, it’s nearly half of young adults age 18 to 34. In Japan, about half of unmarried 20to 34-year-olds live with their parents, too.

But, you cry: American exceptionalism! We don’t want to be like everyone else!

It’s not clear, though, why a society in which young singles live on their own is more desirable than one in which the same demographic errs on the side of doubling up with relatives. This norm is especially puzzling in the United States, where for decades the tax code has incentivized home buyers to purchase as much house as possible.

Perhaps it makes sense to use the housing stock we have more efficiently, rather than insisting that young people move out as part of an adulthood milestone.

Of course, boomers may object to bunking up with their boomeranging offspring, even when they have ample space. Well, boohoo.

Today’s boomers have benefited from huge public intergenerational transfers of wealth. Is it really so much to ask that they make some much smaller private intergenerational transfers to their own children?

As boomers increasingly age into Medicare eligibility, those intergenerational transfers will further balloon.

In this light, the return home of young adults should be seen less as an act of morally bankrupt mooching and more as a step toward balancing the intergenerational ledger.