As I’m recording this, I just got back from FreedomFest. We had a great time — lots of new sign-ups, new collaborations, media hits, and donors stepping up. I’m fired up!
One thing that stuck with me: we spent a lot of time talking to people about their housing stories. Older folks kept telling us the same thing — their kids and grandkids are still living at home well into their late twenties. When we talked to Gen Z directly, the ones who weren’t still in college were often living with their parents too. A lot of them wouldn’t say it on camera. They were embarrassed. And that’s a shame, because it’s not their fault.
I get the embarrassment. We still act like a young adult should be out on their own by now. That expectation was built on a reality that no longer exists. And they feel like they’re the only ones. They’re not. Twenty-five million American adults under thirty-five are living with their parents right now. That’s a record. That means one in three.
Realtor.com just ran the numbers. You can already hear the takes forming online. They’re lazy. They’re entitled. They spent it all on DoorDash — looking at you, Kevin O’Leary.
Here’s the problem with that story. Seventy percent of 25- to 34-year-olds living at home have jobs. That number hasn’t moved in twenty-five years. These people are working. Plenty of them are helping cover their parents’ groceries. These aren’t ex-cons or party kids. These are regular young people who did what they were told — go to school, get the job, save your money. Then they went looking for a place to rent, saw the prices, and made the only rational call left: staying home made more sense.
This didn’t happen by accident or by weather. Politicians wrote its death note into law, one ordinance at a time. Not greedy developers. Not bad landlords. Not corporations buying up all the homes. Yes, those are all real issues, but it was our government that killed the on-ramp to independence.
Let me explain how.
Young people who finally move out of their parents’ house or a college dorm usually start by renting. In big cities that often means big apartment complexes. But in mid-sized and smaller cities, a different kind of housing used to matter more. It’s called middle housing — duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes, small townhome courts. These buildings look like regular houses from the street but hold two, three, or four separate homes inside. They’re the scale that works in real towns. Big enough to add supply, small enough that local builders can still finance them — and actually find people who can afford to live there.
For a young person with a steady job, this is often the first realistic step out of their parents’ basement. Housing you can actually afford without needing five roommates or moving to a bigger city.
At least that’s the role it used to play in our society. Because they are largely gone today, the first person to really notice and coin the term “the missing middle” was a guy named Daniel Parolek, an architect and urban designer.
One of his stories really helps demonstrate the challenge of developing middle housing.
About twenty years ago, Dan Parolek was working on a master plan for Isla Vista, just outside Santa Barbara, California.
The local advisory group told him they didn’t want any new housing with more than 18 units per acre. Strange right? Why 18? Not 19? Not 20? Where does this number even come from?
So to persuade them he took them on a walking tour of nearby neighborhoods. At one point, they stopped in front of a beautiful two-story courtyard building. Everyone loved it. They said, “This is the kind of housing we’d actually support.”
Later, Parolek went back and did the math. That building they all loved? It was 52 units per acre — nearly three times what they had said was their limit.
This story shows how the permission system actually works. People say they want housing — the right kind, the kind that fits the neighborhood. But their mental picture of what “too much” looks like, has nothing to do with reality on the ground. A building they instinctively liked turned out to be three times what they claimed was too dense. A small group with veto power gets to decide what “neighborhood character” means — and they often get it wrong.
Really, opposition to more density is the lipstick on the pig that is other biases, some of them just aesthetic. What the local advisory group likely had in mind when they thought of destiny was a government project, or a giant steel building. Middle housing just makes sense for many communities that could benefit from other kinds of housing development that’s neither those things nor single-family. But crucially, it could help younger generations get out of their parents’ basement, shed their embarrassment, and gain the confidence that independence brings.
So if middle housing provides housing more efficiently than other kinds, and it’s more affordable, then why did it go missing?
You guessed it. The honest reality is that zoning codes prohibit it in most places. We’ve made anything but single-family houses on large lots illegal in huge swaths of the country.
These are really small multifamily buildings that look and feel closer to single-family homes than apartments. What Parolek and others call “gentle density” as opposed to skyscrapers full of apartments.
The opponents, like the folks on that walking tour, banned middle housing in the name of “neighborhood character.”
But what it actually did was erase the stepping stones between your parents’ house and full adulthood. Today, in most suburbs and many cities, if you’re not ready to buy a whole detached house, there’s almost nowhere legal to go that doesn’t cost a fortune.
Twenty-five million young adults did their part. They worked. They saved. They believed the deal America offered them: effort in, a life of your own out, with all of the freedom that implies. Then a permission system quietly repealed the deal, one zoning ordinance at a time.
But every one of those rules was written by somebody. Which means every one of them can be repealed by somebody. That’s the good news hiding in the grim headline. This is man-made scarcity. Men can unmake it.
The American Dream isn’t dead. It’s being blocked.
I’m David Rand from the Land Liberty Movement. This is Build the Dream. Let’s rebuild the American Dream together.
