‘We should absolutely be concerned about non-college-educated men today’: higher rents, living at home, falling out of the labor market

As rents have surged across the country, more and more men are moving home, and once there, many stop working. In fact, one in six non-college men (16%) now live with their parents, compared to 8% of college-educated men. A new working paper from Gabrielle Penrose, a graduate student fellow at the American Institute for Boys and Men, follows six decades of U.S. Census data and draws a direct line between rising housing costs and the decline of male labor force participation.

“There are very real economic forces that are limiting the options for non-college-educated men in the United States,” Penrose told Fortune. “Some of what we’re seeing is simply rational responses to a system that’s pricing them out.”

Since 1960, real rents in the United States have risen 150%. Over that same period, wages for men without college degrees have barely moved, thanks to automation, globalization, and the collapse of manufacturing. Penrose’s paper details that when rents rise, more Americans are forced back into the parental home. Men move home at nearly twice the rate of women. And non-college-educated men who end up there, the data shows, are increasingly dropping out of the workforce altogether.

For Scott Winship, a senior fellow and the director of the Center on Opportunity and Social Mobility at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the issue is doubly concerning because non-college-educated men may face more disadvantages today than what they would have experienced in the ’60s when Penrose first started looking.

“Today, there are many fewer non-college men than there were a generation ago, and so we should absolutely be concerned about non-college-educated men today,” Winship told Fortune. “They are a more disadvantaged group than they were in previous generations, just because the share of young adults with a bachelor’s degree is up to 40% or so now, versus in the past, when it was much lower. And so that makes me worry.”

Higher rents are forcing people back home

A 10% increase in local rents raises the likelihood that a non-college-educated man moves in with his parents by 1.1 percentage points. Penrose used geographic constraints like mountains, coastlines, and lakes as a research instrument in her paper and found that in areas where terrain limits construction and squeezes housing supply, costs are higher for reasons entirely unrelated to local wages or job prospects.

“In some areas, housing costs are higher not because people are earning more and driving up prices, but because there are limits to supply, because of geography: lakes, coastlines,” she said. “Housing is just more expensive there simply because it’s harder to build there.”

“It would be surprising if cities with higher housing costs didn’t have more men living at home just because, almost by definition, they’re less affordable,” said Winship, who has studied men’s earnings over time at the AEI.

Simultaneously, the environment is almost enabling it, her paper says. Baby boomer parents, sitting on significant housing wealth, are better positioned than ever to absorb adult children. “Providing for your adult children when they’re priced out of the housing market is kind of a ‘normal good,’ as economists call it, something people spend more on as they get richer,” Penrose said. “Parents are earning more and their sons are earning less.”

The data backs it up, according to Brandi Snowden, the National Association of REALTORS’ Director of Member and Consumer Survey Research. “Baby Boomers continued to make up the largest share of recent home buyers,” she told Fortune while referring to NAR’s 2026 Generation Trends report that showed a quarter of Boomers purchased multi-generational home recently. “This allowed them to care for aging parents or relatives, and accommodate adult children that may be moving back into their house, or who have never left. “

The share of men between 25 and 45 living with their parents has nearly doubled since the 1960s, from 7% to 12% today. Women’s rate has also risen, but remains flat at 7%. And the reason the effect falls harder on men than women comes down largely to children. When Penrose isolates women without college degrees who don’t have children at home, their patterns begin to mirror men’s almost exactly.

“When I look at women without a college degree who do not have children, their labor force participation and their rates of living with parents start to look much more like these men,” she said. “The difference is young children.”

Non-college men at home aren’t working

The most consequential finding in Penrose’s paper is what happens after men move in. Men living with their parents are 20 percentage points less likely to be in the labor force than those living independently. That same 10% rent increase is associated with a 0.5 percentage point decline in labor force participation. Initial estimates suggest housing costs could explain roughly a third of the total employment decline among non-college men.

“That’s not too surprising to me, just because if you’re looking at adults in their 20s or even 30s who are living at home, you’re looking at sort of the most disadvantaged guys in their cohort,” said Winship of Penrose’s findings. “So it makes sense that they’ve got other barriers to finding work, to keeping work—and that they’d be more likely to permanently drop out of the workforce.”

One in five non-college men in their early 30s live with their parents, and the rate remains elevated into their 40s, with roughly 14% at age 40. Among non-working men at home, a quarter have never held a job at all, up from one in five in 1980.

“Some of the pushback I was getting is people saying, ‘Maybe men are using it as a launchpad,'” Penrose said. “That doesn’t seem to be the case. These men who are living with their parents are completely detached from the labor market.”

Zoning restrictions and limits on construction don’t just make cities expensive, they inadvertently suppress workforce participation among the men least equipped to absorb the cost. “Policies that restrict housing construction inadvertently weaken labor force participation by raising the price of independence,” Penrose wrote in the report.

“When we think about housing policy, maybe we’re just thinking about affordability, but it’s also about getting people in the position where they’re able to access the labor market,” she said. “Policies that would make housing cheaper in cities like New York should increase participation for men, particularly men without college degrees.”

Winship agreed with Penrose’s point, saying high cost of living cities like New York and San Francisco are often where people can find more job opportunities—but it comes with the double-edged sword of higher rents.

“It points to a real villain in the story, which is just these land use regulations and zoning that constrain how much housing can be built,” Winship said. “Unfortunately, it’s often the cities that are most economically dynamic and have a lot of amenities, that are actually better at promoting upward mobility, that have these problems with zoning. So that’s definitely an area where policymakers should take a look.”

The hidden factor of marriage

Women, for the third time ever in history, now outnumber men in the workforce. And as women earn more than their male counterparts, they perform more labor at home. Winship echoed previous reports of a growing distancing from traditional values of marriage as a major reason for this phenomenon.

“I think, sort of the sleeper issue, is the decline in marriage. In the past, a lot of these younger men and working class men would have been married, and therefore they could have tolerated higher housing costs without having to move back home,” Winship said. “But because marriage has declined so much, you have a lot of single men, especially among young adults, and more so among working class adults. And when housing is expensive, they’re much more likely to find that financially burdensome than in the past. I think that is kind of underlying a lot of the findings of the paper.”

“If you’re a young man looking at the situation, you don’t see in the future that you’re going to need to be responsible for a family,” he concluded. “And they don’t really know what their role is in this new world where they’re not going to be the primary breadwinner. And so that pushes towards working less and potentially living at home with their parents. I think marriage really is the sleeper issue here.”