Will You Have Roommates for the Rest of Your Life?

By Nan Mooney, AlterNet. Posted February 18, 2009.

Kate Duyn spent her freshman year of college living with six roommates in a tumbledown house, with dishes in the sink and pot growing in the attic.

"It was totally new and totally crazy," she recalls. "Definitely a lot of fun."

After graduation, she moved to San Francisco, where she spent the next three years sharing various apartments, lofts and houses with her boyfriend and a collection of other roommates. She tended bar, waited tables and booked bands at a club, but never made quite enough to afford a place of her own.

In her mid-20s, after spending four months traveling through Europe, she landed in New York. For six months, she sublet an apartment from a friend, a cheap studio in Spanish Harlem.

"It was awesome," she recalls. "Of course, at that point I had no idea how good I had it. I only wish I could get those six months back again."

Then it was back to a tiny apartment, this time shared with her boyfriend and another roommate. When they broke up she moved out, heading downtown to hook up with yet another roomie, a friend of a friend, who was thankfully easygoing and out of the house a good portion of the time.

When Duyn's boyfriend moved from Chicago, the three of them lived together for a few months. Then it was something reasonably adult, just the couple together in their own apartment, until they broke up but continued living together until he arranged to move into his brother's place.

Now, 11 years after graduating college, Duyn is back in San Francisco with another roommate, another friend of friend who she met days before he moved in and who periodically doesn't come up with the rent.

"It's not so fun anymore," says Duyn, 33. "I'm ready to be an adult now. I'm at the age where I should be taking care of a partner or a child, not some stranger I just met a few months ago."

For young college graduates who go into lower-paying fields like education, nonprofits or the arts, an existence like Duyn's has become a fact of life. They finish school, move to big cities, hook up with roommates and eight, 10, 15 years later, nothing's changed.

For many urban professionals -- despite having a good job and a college education -- the American dream has been seriously downsized. Instead of hungering for the house with the white picket fence, they fantasize of one day renting an apartment with no one else's milk in their fridge.

"It's hard not to ask the question," says Duyn, who now works as a yoga teacher with hopes of one day opening her own studio, "will I have roommates for the rest of my life?"

For those in Duyn's position -- working in lower-paying fields and living in urban centers -- the answer is a qualified yes. Buying a home of one's own remains a distant dream. The housing market may have softened with the economic crisis, but so have paychecks and employment rates, never mind the fact that it's now as hard to get a mortgage as it was easy this time last year.

And although rents may no longer be skyrocketing, in many cities, the downward adjustment in rentals hasn't been nearly as dramatic as the housing side. As of the third quarter of 2008, though the nationwide trend was a 6.1 percent increase in apartment vacancies, the market remained tight in major cities, including New York, San Francisco, Denver, Minneapolis and San Diego.

Marketwide for Manhattan, the average rent for a studio was $1,814; a one-bedroom, $2,513; a two-bedroom, $3,531; and three-bedroom, $4,692. In San Francisco, experts predict that "effective" rents -- which take landlord concessions, such as a free month's rent, into consideration -- will rise 3.3 percent to $1,897 a month by year's end, with asking rents rising 3.5 percent to $2,002 a month.

Such steep prices coupled with stagnating salaries means roommate-dom is hardly confined to the fresh-out-of-college set. A quick scan of Craigslist in major cities reveals numerous roommate seekers -- homeowners hoping to ease the mortgage, or renters needing someone to split costs -- who are well into their 30s and 40s.

According to Ron Goeken, a historical demographer with the Minnesota Population Center, the rise of the roommate in America is a relatively new phenomenon. Look back 150 years, and people had far more limited choices when it came to living with anyone other than relatives.

See more stories tagged with: economy, housing, roommates, shared housing

Nan Mooney is the author of (Not) Keeping Up with Our Parents (Beacon, 2008). Read more about the book and her work at Nan Mooney.com.

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