It's a Saturday night at Patsy's Irish Pub in Mission Viejo, a wealthy suburb in south Orange County.
Patsy's looks like a lot of other California bars in 2019 - a young woman belting off-key Katy Perry karaoke, a crowd of patrons vaping outside in a strip mall parking lot.
And loads of people in their twenties and thirties who still live with their parents.
“I'm here right now getting drunk with my mom,” said Jacob Ostheimer, 24, who lives with his mother and step-father … and his wife. “The whole family's here.”
Ostheimer, who said he was co-founding a cannabis company with his stepfather, is not alone. Statewide, roughly 37% of Californians ages 18 to 34 live with their parents, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.
In this pricey part of Southern California, where the average home is valued at well over $700,000, about 55% of young adults shack up with mom and/or dad.
“(My wife and I) had an apartment here for two years,” said Ostheimer. “But I was spending like 30 grand a year in rent, and I could have had that in my savings right now.”
Despite a booming economy and sizzling job market, millennial, and now Generation Z, Californians are as likely to live at home as young Californians were a decade ago during the depths of the Great Recession.
“This has, I think, surprised many of us, including myself,” said Richard Fry, a senior researcher with the Pew Research Center, who says he expected multi-generational living arrangements to decline as the economy recovered.
“Clearly in certain areas rents have gone up, and the cost of living independently has increased.”
Here's everything you need to know about the roughly 3.6 million Californians living with mom and dad into their 20s and early 30s. Yes, including the sex stuff.
California is not the only state with a high rate of young adults living with mom and dad. The living arrangement is equally common in high-cost states such as New York and Massachusetts. In New Jersey, an astonishing 46% of 18- to 34-year-olds stay with at least one of their parents, according to Census Bureau data.
We mapped the number of young adults living at home for every county in the U.S.
Looking at where in California young adults are living with their parents explains a lot about the reasons why. Somewhat counterintuitively, expensive urban cores in places such as San Diego and San Francisco actually have relatively low rates of young adults living at home, owing to the large numbers of 20-somethings who shack up with roommates to defray housing costs.
A closer look at where young adults live at home in California. Search and click on your city.
Source: CalMatters analysis of 2013-2017 American Community Survey. Margin of error for all estimates within +-5%
Hotspots where stay-at-homers are most ubiquitous usually come in one of two flavors: affluent suburbs near the coast, or lower-income areas often farther inland and with a high concentration of Latino households.
Places like Mission Viejo, with a median household income of over $100,000, are a good example of that first flavor. So are expensive Southern California communities like Palos Verdes or Bay Area burbs like Cupertino and Saratoga, where more than half of young adults live at home.
Living at home vs. paying rent:
Click here for the full interactive version.
On the other end of the income spectrum are places like Imperial County, in the southeast tip of the state, or portions of Fresno and Merced counties in the Central Valley. Housing prices are relatively low, but poverty rates are high. Here, young adults are often providing essential financial support to their families.
Living at home vs. poverty:
“The degree of help that young people are giving their parents, particularly among Hispanics, is important to keep in mind,” said Jessica Hardie, professor of sociology at Hunter College, CUNY, who studies transitions to adulthood. “I think it's important to think about how it's benefiting the parents, not just the young adults.”
Not all of them are so young. About 1 of every 4 Californians between 25 and 34 live with their parents - around 1.5 million people, according to a CalMatters analysis of Census Bureau data.
Stay-at-homers are more likely to be male than female, are more likely to be a person of color than white, and are more likely to live in an immigrant household than their counterparts who have flown the coop.
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