Parents, local house prices, and leaving home in Britain

Sait Bayrakdar,Rory Coulter

doi:10.1002/psp.2087

Sait Bayrakdar, Rory Coulter

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1002/psp.2087

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Abstract

AbstractLeaving the parental home is a significant step in young adults' housing careers and pathways to independence. Although a large literature examines how life course trajectories influence leaving home, much less is known about how the “linked lives” of parents and the local cost of housing shape young people's departures from the family residence. By enriching the U.K. Household Longitudinal Study with house price data, this study investigates how parental attributes and the geography of local housing costs influence home leaving in contemporary Britain. The results show that higher local house prices are associated with delayed departure from the parental home, although the relative magnitude of this effect is modest. By contrast, the effects of parental factors are more nuanced. Parental characteristics have little impact on the odds of leaving home to form partnerships, whereas the likelihood of departing to live alone or in shared accommodation is reduced by parental homeownership or living with both biological parents. Taken together, these findings suggest that young adults' residential pathways are shaped by the complex patterns of choice and constraint that are generated by disparities in family circumstances and local opportunity structures.

Highlights

Leaving the parental home has traditionally been regarded as a significant and meaningful life event that helps mark the transition to adulthood
Changing preferences associated with long‐term cultural and economic trends partly explain the restructuring of young people's living arrangements (Kenyon & Heath, 2001), patterns of delayed home leaving and frequent returns to the parental residence are often thought to signal that families are providing more housing support during an increasingly uncertain transition to adulthood
As little is known about how socially and spatially uneven choices and constraints influence pathways out of the parental home, this study examined how parental background and local house prices have shaped young Britons' home‐leaving behaviour since 2009

Summary

| INTRODUCTION

Leaving the parental home has traditionally been regarded as a significant and meaningful life event that helps mark the transition to adulthood. Popular explanations of increased rates of parental coresidence often stress that structural constraints are increasingly restricting young people's ability to choose their residential arrangements (Redfern Review, 2016; Shelter, 2014) These discussions highlight how underemployment and unemployment, low pay, job insecurity, welfare retreat, and student debts are eroding young adults' ability to live independently at the same time as problems of housing access and affordability are making it harder to enter owner‐occupation and rental systems (Berrington & Stone, 2014). We assess whether local housing prices influence home‐leaving behaviour while taking into account other (un)observed characteristics of origin locales This multilevel approach extends recent cross‐ sectional research correlating the geography of national housing systems with living arrangements in young adulthood (Mandic, 2008)

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Findings

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