Why are more young men living with their parents?

The author of this article at the Washington Post makes a huge mystery out of a question that's pretty easy to answer:

According to the Census Bureau, fully one-third of young men ages 22 to 34 are still living at home with their parents -- a roughly 100 percent increase in the past 20 years. No such change has occurred with regard to young women. Why?

The obvious reason why young men are living at home is because the cost of housing has been increasing faster than starting salaries. More and more young men can't afford to live on their own.

The salaries of young women have been increasing relative to men. Here's an article I found on the web which has a chart showing the steady increase of women's wages, and this increase is probably even more pronounced for younger women. So while the cost of housing has increased relative to young men's salaries, it may not have increased relative to young women's salaries, or at the very least it has increased at a much slower rate.

Huge mystery solved! Too bad the bar for getting an article published in the Washington Post is so low.

UPDATE

Read my followup post, Median income for young men is declining. Also read my comment, below, which further explains my point.

Comments

[Bullwinkle]

You reasoning is more than a little off here. Interest rates and unemployment are both low now and have been that way for quite a while. High housing costs can't be the reason if women are leaving home but men aren't unless someone is running a special "ladies" pricing plan in the housing market that I'm not aware of. You haven't solved any mysteries. You may have re-created one, that being why some people seem determined to show how lacking they are in the common sense department.

[Mattias Caro]

But that still doesn't explain it since women haven't closed the wage gap with men . . .

[KJ]

I have to agree with Bullwinkle without the attitude. Your argument is misplaced. Women's salaries may be rising, but they are still on average lower than men's. So the rate of growth is really irrelevent to the question of why men are living at home. Their disposable cash may not be growing as fast as women's, but on absolute terms it is still as high or higher. If they have a job that is.

Try again.

[Half Sigma]

Neither of the three commenters above have carefully read what the article is talking about.

The article says that the percent of young men living at home has doubled to "one third," presumably from 16 and a half percent. The article says nothing about what percent of young women live at home, only that the percent has been stable and has not changed.

Now it costs money to live away from home, so one would expect that, as women's salaries increase relative to men's, the percent of women living on their own would increase relative to men, and this is exactly what has happened. Except that instead of the percent of men living at home remaining the same and the percent of women living at home decreasing, what actually happened is that the gap lowered by more men living at home.

Women's salaries have been rising faster than men's, and society now expects women to be more independent than was expected a generation ago, so it's actually kind of surprising that the percent of women living at home hasn't decreased significantly. But it's not surpising when one considers that the cost of renting one's own place has gone up relative to salaries.

[christy]

Young women can always move in with an older man.

[mercurior]

i wonder how many women, go out and find a richer man usually older man who owns his own house and then just screw them have kids then get a divorce and end up with their own home, plenty of money. can farm the kid out to a nanny or child minder.

A lot of the gals can live "on their own" because they spread their legs for a sugar daddy.