What if more of us lived under one roof again?

Upcoming on The Mark Hope Show · November 12, 2026

I was working out the other day, and this thought wouldn’t leave me alone. What if a family lived the way a lot of families used to live — and the way a lot of families still do?

Grandparents, parents, children, and grandchildren, under one roof. Everybody who can work is working, often in the family’s own work. They’re not stacking up a pile of separate rents and a pile of separate debts. They’re building cash. And if there’s a business, it stays in the family, so the work and the benefit stay close to home.

I’m not saying every family should do this, or that it would be easy, or that it would turn out the same way for everyone. Families are different. Houses are different. People need room to be themselves. But I do think our culture drifted toward a rule that doesn’t actually serve a lot of us: that once you’re a grown-up, you need your own apartment, your own lease, your own stack of bills, even if that leaves you one bad month away from trouble.

Not everybody needs their own apartment. That’s not a failure. Sometimes that’s wisdom.

We’ve been moving toward this more than we admit

This isn’t just a memory of “how it used to be.” It’s also how a growing share of America lives right now.

Pew Research Center, looking at Census data, found that 22% of the U.S. population lived in a multigenerational household in 2024 — a home with more than one adult generation under one roof. That’s up from 13% in 1970, and up a little from 21% in 2019. In other words, this way of living didn’t disappear. After falling in earlier decades, it has been coming back for a long time.

Money is a big part of why. In a 2021 Pew survey of adults in these households, four-in-ten said financial issues were a major reason they lived with adult family, and another 28% called money a minor reason. Among lower-income adults in that arrangement, half said it helped them financially at least a little. Caregiving matters too — for an aging parent, or for a child — and so does the simple fact that, for some families, this is the arrangement they’ve always had.

Housing costs make the math even clearer. Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, using Census data, estimated that in 2024 about 22.7 million renter households — 49% of all renters — were cost-burdened, meaning they spent more than 30% of their income on housing. A third of all U.S. households, about 43.5 million, were in that position. When almost half of renters are stretching that hard just to keep a roof, it is fair to ask whether every adult in a family needs a separate roof.

A lot of families never let this go — and I admire that

Pew’s more recent figures also show that this is more common in some communities than others. In 2024, about 30% of Asian Americans, 30% of Hispanic Americans, and 29% of Black Americans lived in a multigenerational household, compared with 16% of White Americans.

Immigrants have been more likely to live this way as well. In Pew’s earlier 2021 analysis, 26% of foreign-born Americans lived in a multigenerational family home, compared with 17% of people born in the United States. That was one year’s snapshot, with a slightly different data source than the 2024 numbers above, but the pattern is the same one I’ve noticed with my own eyes.

When families come here, get established, and keep more than one generation together, I don’t see that as a problem to be solved. I see something the rest of us can learn from. People who have had to start over often remember what a household is for: to take care of each other, to put more hands to work, and to keep the cost of living from eating the future. Not everybody needs their own apartment on day one — or on day one thousand — if the family is stronger together.

I want to be careful here, because no group is a single story. Plenty of immigrant families live in their own places. Plenty of American-born families already share a home, and some of them find it hard. Pew also found that while a majority of adults in these households described the experience as at least somewhat positive, about a quarter said it was stressful all or most of the time. Sharing a house is not a fairy tale. It takes respect, privacy, and a plan.

How a family could start

If this idea has been sitting in the back of your mind, I wouldn’t leap into it. I’d talk it through, on purpose, before anybody changes an address. Here is how I would start thinking about it — not as a promise of how it will turn out, but as a way to go in with your eyes open.

Have the conversation before the move

Sit down together and say the quiet parts out loud. Why are we doing this? Is it to cut costs, to help with a parent, to raise kids with more adults around, to try a family business, or some mix of those? How long are we picturing — a season, a few years, or a long-term way of living? If people have different answers, it’s better to find that out at the kitchen table than after the furniture is in the driveway.

Get honest about the money

Write down the shared costs: the mortgage or rent, utilities, groceries, insurance, and the little things that add up. Decide who pays what, and when. Some families split everything evenly. Some contribute by income. Some have the older generation covering the housing while the younger generation covers food and upkeep, or the other way around. There isn’t one right formula. There is a right habit: don’t leave it vague. A simple written agreement can save a lot of resentment later.

If the hope is to carry less debt and build cash, say that too, and pick a few practical steps — like agreeing not to take on new consumer debt, or setting a shared savings target. I’m not going to tell you those steps will make a family wealthy. I will tell you that a household with a plan is in a better position than a household that is only hoping.

Give people real roles

A house full of adults needs more than “we’ll figure it out.” Who cooks on which nights? Who handles the kids’ pickup? Who is the point person for an aging parent’s appointments? Who keeps the books if you’re trying a family business? Shared work only feels fair when the work is actually shared.

If there’s a family business, or the seed of one, keep the conversation just as plain. What does each person do? How are decisions made? What happens to the money? The point, as I see it, is not to build an empire. It’s to keep honest work and its benefit close to the people who are doing the living together.

Protect privacy on purpose

This is the part that makes or breaks it. Adults still need a door they can close. Kids need a place that feels like theirs. Agree on quiet hours, guests, and how you’ll handle conflict when it comes — because it will come. If the house is small, even a schedule for the bathroom or the kitchen can be an act of love. Pew found that lower-income adults in these homes were more likely to say there wasn’t enough space to live comfortably. That’s a reminder, not a reason to give up: if you’re going to share a roof, be honest about whether the roof is big enough, or whether a small change — a basement room, a shed office, a clearer schedule — would make it livable.

Leave room for dignity

Nobody should feel like a guest in their own house, and nobody should feel like the landlord of their own children. The goal is a household of equals, even if the contributions look different. Help is not the same thing as control.

A positive space, and a bigger future

I keep coming back to this because I care about families having a future they can stand on. A paid-off house, even a modest one. Work that belongs to the people doing it. Kids who grow up watching adults cooperate. Grandparents who are not isolated. Cash in the bank instead of a stack of separate rents.

That picture will not fit every family, and it shouldn’t be forced on anyone. But if you’ve been told that independence only looks like living alone, I hope you’ll give yourself permission to question that. Some of the strongest households I know are the ones that decided they were on the same team — under one roof, with enough privacy to stay kind, and enough shared purpose to build something that lasts.

If this is on your heart, or if your family is already living this way and you’ve learned something the rest of us should hear, I’d like to know. You can write me on the Ask Mark page. This is a conversation I want to keep having on The Mark Hope Show.