The dream is still there. The route has changed.

It is tempting to look at the decline in homeownership among younger adults and conclude that Gen Z simply cares less about owning property. The data does not support such a simple story.

An OECD analysis published in 2025 found that, in the average OECD-EU country examined, 41% of people born around 1990 owned a home at age 29, compared with 52% of people born around 1980 at the same age. The OECD is careful about the interpretation because education, demographics, public policy, and access to mortgage credit all play a role. But the generational gap is significant. OECD

The important distinction is between wanting to own and being able to own.

Housing costs have risen sharply while young adults are also entering stable employment later, concentrating in expensive cities and facing tighter access to credit. Eurofound reported in 2026 that average EU house sale prices had risen by 55.4% since 2010, while rents had increased by 26.7%. Young adults are disproportionately exposed because their incomes tend to be lower and their employment situations less secure. Eurofound

So perhaps Gen Z has not stopped dreaming about homeownership. Perhaps it has stopped assuming that the dream will automatically happen.

From Tanguy to the housing problem

Twenty years ago, the image of the young adult staying at home with their parents was often treated almost as a cultural joke. In France and Belgium, the film Tanguy even gave the phenomenon a name. The stereotype was the twenty-something who had little urgency to leave because life at home was comfortable.

After the financial crisis, another term became common: the boomerang generation, young adults who had left home and then returned because of unemployment, a breakup or financial difficulty.

With Gen Z, we need to be careful not to recycle those explanations too quickly.

In 2025, young Europeans left the parental home at an average age of 26.3 years. But the European average hides enormous differences: 21.4 in Finland and 21.8 in Denmark, compared with 30.2 in Spain and Italy and 31.5 in Croatia. Interestingly, the EU average itself has remained close to 26 since 2002. European Commission. So we cannot simply say that Gen Z everywhere stays at home dramatically longer than Millennials did. What has changed is the pressure surrounding the decision.

Eurofound estimates that around 30% of Europeans aged 25 to 34 were still living with their parents in 2023. Its research also found that among young adults living with their parents in the four European countries studied, only about 40% would choose that arrangement if another option were available. Housing affordability was the most common reason preventing them from living as they preferred. Eurofound. That changes the interpretation completely.

The behavior can look the same. The economics behind it can be very different.

A 28-year-old living with their parents today may have a university degree, a full-time job and every intention of becoming independent, while still finding that renting alone would consume too much of their income. Living at home is no longer automatically evidence of refusing adulthood. Sometimes it is simply the most rational response to the housing market.

Independence is becoming shared

Another response I see particularly clearly in Barcelona is co-living. I live part of the year in a co-living environment precisely because being close to younger people helps me understand how their lives are changing. Over the years, I have lived alongside dozens of young professionals from different countries. That is obviously not representative research. But proximity can reveal questions that statistics alone do not.

And one of those questions is why so many young adults who have left their parents still do not live on their own.

For some, co-living is genuinely attractive. It offers community, flexibility, international connections, and the opportunity to arrive in a new city without having to build an entire social infrastructure from scratch. For others, the calculation is much more practical: an apartment of their own simply costs too much.

That distinction matters because what looks like a lifestyle trend can also be a housing affordability strategy. The public data does not yet provide a clear European figure for the share of Gen Z living specifically in commercial co-living environments. Definitions vary too much between flat-sharing, house-sharing, purpose-built co-living and flexible rental accommodation. What we can document very clearly is the pressure behind these arrangements.

In 2024, 9.7% of Europeans aged 15 to 29 lived in households that spent at least 40% of their disposable income on housing, compared with 8.2% of the overall EU population. Young people were also much more likely to live in overcrowded housing: 26.5% compared with 16.9% of the total population. European Commission

The old model of independence was fairly binary: you lived with your parents, then you moved into your own place. The emerging reality has far more intermediate stages. Living with parents. Sharing with friends. Co-living. Renting as a couple. Moving between cities. Returning home temporarily. Renting for much longer before buying. Gen Z may not be rejecting independence. It may be learning to construct it in pieces.

When housing changes the rest of adulthood

Housing is not just another purchase. It determines where you can live, which jobs you can accept, whether you can move cities, how much privacy you have and, eventually, whether starting a family feels possible. That is why the housing story belongs in this series about adulthood.

Eurofound describes housing as one of the main obstacles to young people becoming independent. Its latest research also finds that housing constraints can affect career choices and family formation. Among young adults whose actual living arrangement did not match what they wanted, between 20% and 39% in the countries studied said housing had restricted their job or career choices. More than one in six reported delaying having children. Eurofound.  This gives housing a role far beyond property ownership.

If leaving home is delayed, living with a partner may be delayed. If living with a partner is delayed, marriage or children may also move later. What can look like a series of independent generational choices may partly originate from the same economic constraint. That is an important correction to the way we sometimes talk about Gen Z. Young people do not make life decisions inside a vacuum.

The new inequality is not only about salary

There is another consequence that deserves more attention. When buying a home requires a large deposit, two young people with the same salary can have completely different housing futures depending on their families. One has parents who can provide financial support, help with a deposit, or eventually transfer property. The other does not.

Their professional success can be identical. Their access to homeownership is not. OECD research warns that declining and increasingly unequal access to homeownership among younger generations could reinforce wealth inequality because property remains one of the main ways households accumulate wealth over time. Eurofound has similarly highlighted the importance of parental resources and inheritance in shaping wealth outcomes. OECD

That changes the traditional story of adulthood again. The old promise was roughly: study, work hard, earn enough, buy a home. For some young adults, the emerging question becomes: what can my family help me access? This is not simply a housing issue. It is an equality-of-opportunity issue. And it means that homeownership increasingly risks becoming not only a marker of income but also of inherited advantage.