I agree with some of the commenters who note that the author tries hard to portray this as "financial savvy" but without a whole lot of evidence.

Have any of these adult children successfully moved out after saving up money while living with their parents?

Moving back home wasn’t an option for me or my wife (she spent some time living in her car) but if my kids, in high school now, wanted to move back home after college I’d be ok with it as long as they had a plan to get on their own two feet. If they just wanted three hots and a cot all bills paid then not so much.

Sometimes you just hit impossible life scenarios like a pretax clawback in a hostile workplace which drains your liquid savings and leaves you broke, or breakup with a partner which forces you out the home, or learning that the landlord you split your duplex with is a charged criminal of some pretty awful crimes.

You can’t fail sometimes, even if you thought it were failure

well, it's a sign of societal failure to provide more + better wages / housing, etc.

archive.is is caching error messages for this page. Is WSJ now immune to paywall bypasses? As fun as it is to have discussions entirely based on headlines, it threatens to turn HN into yet another low information high emotion discussion forum.

If this is being published in the Wall Street Journal, you can rewrite the headline in your head this way:

“To extract increasing returns from real estate, property prices and rent must be priced out of reach for people whose parents read the Wall Street Journal. Here’s an article you can quote to your friends at cocktail parties to feel good about yourself when your kid moves home.”

Here are two quotes by Karl Marx on landlords:

> Landlords do not create value. They merely charge others to use natural resources (like land) that were already there

and

> Landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed

Plot twist: these are actually Adam Smith quotes. Karl Marx quoted the second in particular.

There is a contemporary economist and former wealth manager by the name of Henry Fudge who describes the housing markets in Western countries as a "rentier asset black hole" [1] and has written a paper called "The Housing Theory of Everything" [2]. The idea is fairly straightforward: capital moves to housing instead of and at the expense of productive output (eg factories) because of tax advantages, inelastic demand, artificial constraints on supply and it being a political goal to make sure that housing prices always go up.

China had made this same mistake as well. Real estate was one of the few ways people could build wealth prior to Xi Jinping who came in and quietly popped a trillion dollar real estate bubble, famously saying in 2016 [3] "Houses are for living, not for speculation".

My personal view is that ever-increasing house prices are simply stealing from the next generation, a massive wealth transfer to the old and wealthy. It has so many negative effects on society too because it makes everything more expensive. It's an input to every cost (through commercial real estate, which either has to hafve a similar return to residential real estate or it gets replaced with such).

I say all this because the WSJ is defending this generational theft by arguing that people are being "financially savvy" when people seek independence ultimately and this is simply a product of the affordability crisis and declining real wages. It's asinine.

[1]: https://henryfudgeofficial.substack.com/p/the-rentier-asset-...

[2]: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6571818

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houses_are_for_living,_not_for...

shame "home" for me is manhattan, and moving there would be financial ruin

> I say all this because the WSJ is defending this generational theft by arguing that people are being "financially savvy" when people seek independence ultimately and this is simply a product of the affordability crisis and declining real wages. It's asinine.

Indeed. There's this common trope in modern journalim of pretending that these financial moves are pure results of personal choices and nothing else. So, tweens going back to their parents is them "being financially savvy". Americans spending more on groceries and rent rather than other goods and services is them "adopting new consumer preferences".

It's always chosen, never suffered. Once you start seeing it, you notice it everywhere.