Back to your parents at 40: rent prices force a return home

Back with your parents at 40: housing eats up 96.6% of your pay

A job is no longer enough to pay for a roof over your head. Patricia Álvarez, a 34-year-old hairdresser, has had to move back in with her parents in Madrid after breaking up with her partner. Ana Pastor, a 40-year-old nursing assistant, also returned to her father's home after moving out at 27. Neither is unemployed. Both earn a wage. And it isn't enough for either to make it on her own.

The arithmetic behind it is uncomfortably blunt: the average salary of a young person rose 4.6% to €1,089 net a month, but rent rose 7.5% to €912, or 83.7% of take-home pay. Add water, electricity and gas, and the bill climbs to €1,053, or 96.6% of the salary. That leaves €37 to eat, get dressed and have something of a life.

How much is left of a young person's salary after paying rent?

Thirty-seven euros. That is the exact answer and, at the same time, the portrait of a generation that works full time and cannot afford a home. The director general of Injuve (Spain's youth institute), David Veloso Larraz, puts it in even starker terms: young people's purchasing power has fallen 34% in the last 25 years and by around 23% since the start of the 2008 crisis.

Leaving a shared flat doesn't add up either. A room costs an average of €445 a month in Spain, when eight years ago the same thing cost €258, according to Fotocasa. Almost double. What was once a stage has become, for many, the only gateway to anything resembling independence.

From independent thirty-somethings to 'boomerang kids'

The sociologist Mariano Urraco, a professor at the Universidad a Distancia de Madrid, describes the phenomenon without embellishment: they are people who are no longer so young, thirty-somethings who once started a life project as a couple or sharing a flat with friends, and whose precarious jobs do not allow individual independence. Transitions to adulthood, he notes, are increasingly fragmented and reversible.

Ana Pastor sums up her case in one sentence worth a whole report: «You can't live in Madrid on €1,200». She lives with her father, saves all she can and is studying Diagnostic Imaging to move up to a salary of €1,600 or €1,700. Buying a flat is nowhere near her plans.

Patricia Álvarez shared a 20-square-metre studio in Carabanchel for €600 with her ex-partner. When they broke up, she undid the journey. She earns €1,030 and accepts that renting alone is now a pipe dream: for less than €850 she can't find anything in Hortaleza, where she works, and landlords are asking for ever higher guarantees.

Less homeownership and more returning to the family home

The Esenciales report, from the socioeconomic research programme produced by Fundación BBVA and Ivie, measures the shift. Among those who moved out aged 30 to 34, renting has gone from representing 24.9% to 39.8%, housing provided by family members has risen from 6.3% to 13.2% and homeownership has collapsed from 68.7% to 47%. Twenty percentage points less in a single generation.

That last figure explains why moving back in with parents is no longer read as a one-off failure and is now interpreted as a survival strategy. When buying is closed off and renting gets more expensive, the family home works as the last available buffer.

The €250 youth rent bonus that, according to the CJE (Spain's Youth Council), doesn't reach many applicants

Juan Antonio Báez, vice-president of the Consejo de la Juventud de España, points to another layer of the problem: regional governments have not paid the €250 youth rent bonus for under-35s to many applicants. The promised relief exists on paper and, in practice, arrives late or not at all.

His diagnosis goes beyond the current situation: «we're seeing people aged 35 or 40 who are forced to live like 25-year-olds». The cost is not only economic, and in the debate itself some also point to the psychological toll that returning to the parental home can take.

A forum user recounts how one salary bought a flat in 1965

Historical comparison is the most repeated argument in any conversation about housing, and in this debate it appears as an anecdote: one participant says his parents married in 1965 and bought a 90-square-metre, three-bedroom flat in Prosperidad (Madrid), paid off in five years, and only he worked.

In the same debate, some argue that today, with few exceptions, two full salaries would be needed to aspire to something similar. And that the mass entry of women into the labour market multiplied household disposable income, that the market adjusted prices upwards and that the net effect was diluted: two incomes buying what one used to buy. The thesis has defenders and detractors, and neither side has budged.

Live in central Madrid or move to the outskirts?

Another part of the clash centres on location. It is argued that the problem is wanting to live in central Madrid, when the centre is for the wealthy, and that in the outskirts —Getafe, Alcorcón— decent homes appear at competitive prices.

Patricia is clear: «I'd have to move to Toledo». Romina Da Graca, 35, works in a bakery in Vigo, earns €1,200 and shares rent costs with her parents. She used to pay €450 for a studio next to El Corte Inglés; that price, she says, no longer exists: now they're asking €650.

With these numbers, the question is not who moves back in with their parents, but how many are one bad patch away from doing so. Will housing adapt to wages, or will wages keep chasing prices that never look back?