The Rise of the Roommate

In late March, when New York City went into lockdown, I had to make a choice: either I shelter in place with my roommate (who is at higher risk of illness from the virus) and my two cats in our shared Brooklyn apartment, or I relocate to my partner’s one-bedroom space, some fifteen minutes’ walk east, not to return for the indefinite duration of the pandemic. Neither option was ideal. Our apartment had a slightly more centralized location, marginally more space, a dishwasher, and on-site laundry; it also had all of my stuff and the aforementioned cats (to whom my partner is severely, and frustratingly, allergic). On the other hand, my partner’s apartment had, well, my partner. Intimate companionship. The promise of emotional support amid an unprecedented episode of collective crisis. The assurance of human touch amid mounting paranoia over contact and spread. In the simplest possible terms: I could choose home, or I could choose hugs.

I went with the former.

More than half a year later, I don’t regret my decision, though I struggled to explain my almost comically depressing “date night” Instagram photos to colleagues and friends, my partner’s surgical mask providing a pop of blue from some ten feet behind my shoulder. After all, I’m a member of the demographic sweep of city dwellers for whom home ownership has become a fable. The desperate calculus of suboptimal housing prospects is practically our rite. Like many of my peers, I’ve grown resigned to the reality that where I live—and, often, with whom—is subject to the whims of things beyond my control: boomers, feline immunotherapy advancements, and the market’s appraisal of my skill set in a given fiscal quarter. In 2019, I was one of the last of my journalist friends to experience the dreaded but inevitable media-company layoff—along with all of my coworkers. The growing scarcity of jobs in my field coexists with a generational landscape of underemployment and wage stagnation, of less in savings and more in debt.

For those of us born without the superpower of (other people’s) wealth, you might say that this very instability is our own inheritance. What it usually means is getting a roommate.

In the public imagination, the nuclear family still looms large as the de facto template for “home.” But the numbers tell a different story. In 2016, there were roughly 582,000 noncensus family households across Canada—homes of two or more people outside of parent-child or partnered relationships. South of the border, more than one-third of US adults lived in a shared household as of 2017. That figure marks a relatively slight increase over the estimated 28.8 percent of shared households in 1995, a time that boasted two beloved roommate-centric prime-time sitcoms, Living Single and Friends.

What’s different today is the length of time that shared housing factors into the lives of young(ish) adults. In the US, the 2008 recession propelled an adult-roommate boom that never ended—a trend prevalent in cities, where young (and youngish) adults flock for jobs. In Canada, urban co-living startups, like Roost and SoulRooms, echo the broader turn toward “adult dorm” housing setups seen in cities from Dublin to New York.

None of this should come as a surprise. Millennials like me comprise the largest living generation in North America, yet we are grossly underrepresented in the ranks of homeowners in the US and Canada alike. In both countries, a rising proportion of this demographic is delaying marriage or forgoing it completely. It follows, then, that more adults than ever are navigating their path-defining mid-twenties to late thirties untethered to the commitments—and securities—that shaped adulthood for previous generations.

To some extent, apartment sharing retains connotations of youthful impermanence. From this perspective, living with roommates is a blip on the postgraduate journey toward “real life,” wherein “real” is shorthand for stable housing and long-term domestic partnership. But, for many members of my generation, whose adulthoods have been shaped by precarity, “real life” is determined less by accruing legally sanctioned anchors, like property and kin, and more by a series of forced adaptations. Burnt-out and saddled with debt, we’ve neither the energy nor the ability to tether ourselves to home and hearth. Though our circumstances are far from ideal, they’re also poised to change the face of the household as we know it—in the long term and, perhaps surprisingly, for the better.

It may be tempting to see the increase in adult roommates as some harbinger of “The Decline of X,” with the implicitly righteous variable standing for “the family,” “home ownership,” “economic stability,” “the middle class,” “a culture of commitment,” or any host of factors to which we’ve arbitrarily ascribed moral value. Such conclusions wouldn’t be entirely wrong. Certainly, the prevalence of nonfamilial cohabitation reflects shifts in cultural expectations around marriage and child rearing that, in turn, partly stem from the economic realities of twenty-first century capitalism. It’s also fair to say that roommates are a by-product of the economic and geographic transience that confronts both young and not-so-young adults today.

But, while the rise of the roommate may be further evidence of our unlucky, market-driven fate, some of its potential outcomes also offer hope—a way back toward an experience of community that we lost with the nuclear-family model. Nonfamily cohabitation calls for a kind of learned care that’s honed through negotiating interpersonal boundaries without the presumption of common values. And shared space, by definition, shifts the individual’s relationship to place from “mine” to “ours.” 

by Kelli María Korducki, The Walrus | Read more:

Image: Hudson Christie