by Don Peck
In January 2010, things brightened somewhat: Nickelsen got a two-year job at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security through a federal fellowship program. “It’s professional work,” he said, a reassurance that may have been meant more for himself than for me. He gathers information from other arms of the government, updates spreadsheets, takes notes in meetings. The job doesn’t make use of his law degree, and he doesn’t advertise that degree around the office, he said. Whenever a colleague finds out, “they’re like, ‘You went to law school? What are you doing here?’ ”
Nickelsen told me he realizes that other people have taken much larger hits than he has. And he’s grateful for his salary. Still, it’s nowhere near what lawyers typically make, and even with the night job he’s taken with Kaplan Test Preparation, he doesn’t have much left over after making his monthly debt payments. What gnaws at him most is the sense that the things he used to take for granted about his future—not riches, necessarily, but merely the basic pleasures and privileges of a fully adult life—keep receding from him, rather than drawing closer.
“My dad worked in a factory … and when he was twenty-two, he had a house and two children,” Nickelsen said. “Maybe I bought into it, but you’re sort of fed the line that you can’t have a normal life unless you get an education. And so you take on this tremendous debt. And so I’m just starting out now at the age of twenty-seven, with prescription glasses and all these payments coming due. And I’m living in an efficiency with a roommate. I had a nicer apartment in law school; I never would have thought that.” A house? A family? “There’s no car in the near future for me. Everything’s been pushed back so far, I can’t even see it. How did this happen?”
• • •
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN many Millennials and their parents has become complicated since the recession began. In one recent poll, 39 percent of people aged eighteen to twenty-nine said they regularly received money from their parents to help them pay ordinary expenses, and many have moved back home. But these arrangements have worn on both parties. Recent research by the Purdue University psychologist Karen Fingerman indicates that while modern parents do provide more financial support to grown children who are struggling, by and large they prefer to offer their continued guidance and companionship to those who are already succeeding, perhaps because time spent with successful children flatters the parents more.
A May 2010 “Shouts & Murmurs” column in The New Yorker captures the ambivalence felt by many “helicopter parents” as their children have returned to the nest. Titled “Your New College Graduate: A Parents’ Guide,” it begins, “Congratulations! It took four years and hundreds of thousands of dollars, but you’re finally the parents of a bona-fide college graduate. After the commencement ceremony is over, your child will be ready to move back into your house for a period of several years. It’s a very exciting time.” Around the country, family and financial consultants have begun to offer their services to assist with this transition; one consultancy in Los Angeles has created a four-step program that seeks to settle in advance certain questions: What will the child do to earn money if he or she can’t find a full-time job? What domestic responsibilities will he or she undertake? What’s the target date for moving out?
Near the height of Japan’s economic boom in the late 1980s, a relatively small but growing number of teens and twentysomethings began to turn away from well-worn corporate career paths (or at least defer their entry onto them), instead living at home with their parents and taking a string of temporary or part-time jobs. By and large, they valued self-expression and a flexible lifestyle, and many had artistic ambitions. A new term was coined to describe them—freeters—and while many criticized them as coddled and lazy, a certain glamour seemed attached to the term.
With the bust of the 1990s, the number of freeters grew rapidly. Aging freeters could not find permanent work; new ones, typically with relatively little education and no designs on an artist’s life, found traditional career paths closed off from the start. In 2002, perhaps 2.5 million Japanese between the ages of fifteen and thirty-four were freeters, and year by year their ranks were both increasing and aging. Since the bust, freeters has been joined in the Japanese vernacular by a host of other new terms to describe single young people living with parents: NEETs (not in education, employment, or training), hikikomori (men, mostly, who do not work or socialize, seldom leave their room, and are in some cases physically abusive to aging parents), and several more.
Japan’s economy has been troubled for decades, and its culture is in many respects sui generis; one should treat comparisons to the United States with caution. But the evolution of freeters’ portrayal in Japan is perhaps telling. By the mid-1990s, most traces of glamour and indulgence were gone. And by the late 1990s, freeters had been subsumed into a newly popular term—parasaito shinguru, or “parasite singles”—who were blamed for everything from low economic growth to low birthrates. Even as the phenomenon became less a matter of personal choice, the tensions and criticism resulting from it seemed to rise.
Whether the intensive and incessant involvement of today’s parents in the daily lives of their children has, in the end, helped the Millennial generation or held it back is a hard question, and one outside the scope of this book. At its worst, one can see in the relationship between helicopter parents and their teenage or twenty-something children a new form of codependency, destructive and debilitating. But it is difficult to criticize parents for offering whatever assistance they can in these times. And it is more difficult still to criticize young adults—particularly those with no degree and few imminent prospects—for taking it.
What often gets lost in the discussion of parents’ continuing assistance to their children today is that the children, by and large, have always planned to return the favor. In a 2005 Pew poll, 63 percent of Millennials said they felt a responsibility to allow an elderly parent to live in their home one day if the parent wanted to do so. That’s a slightly lower percentage than in Generation X, but much higher than in the generations before that. (Only 55 percent of Boomers and 38 percent of the Silent Generation felt the same way.) By a variety of measures, the bond between this generation of young adults and their parents is stronger than those between past generations of parents and children, and so is the sense of mutual obligation.
But obligations of nearly every sort—current and future—are growing harder for young adults to meet, as high expectations collide with limited means. According to one recent poll, just 16 percent of eighteen- to twenty-nine-year-olds were saving money, and about two-thirds were in debt. In 2009, according to Pew Research, 12 percent of adults younger than thirty-five said they’d acquired a roommate, 15 percent had delayed marriage, and 14 percent had put off having a child. Surely all those numbers are higher now.
In nearly every way, the Great Recession has delayed the ability of young adults to reach the milestones that society has always associated with full adulthood, and to assume the responsibilities that many of them want to accept. With each passing year of economic weakness, more and more of them find themselves swimming in a seemingly endless adolescence, whose taste has long since grown brackish, and from which they cannot fully emerge.
AS ECONOMIC MALAISE lingers on, the ideas and ideals of twentysomethings—about politics, society, the nature of life—are slowly changing. Millennials entered the Great Recession as the most politically liberal generation in many decades, and as the most socially liberal ever. And between 2008 and 2010, the number who called themselves liberal held steady. Yet cynicism about government’s efficacy is growing. By 2010, 37 percent of Millennials said that although they might like to see the government play an active role in the economy in theory, they weren’t sure they could trust the government to do that effectively. When asked whom they trusted more to solve the country’s economic problems—President Obama or Republicans in Congress—27 percent said “neither.” Confidence in elected officials fell between 2009 and 2010.
/> Economic troubles are sanding away the generation’s openness and confidence as well. According to one 2010 survey, just 28 percent of adults younger than thirty believed that most people could be trusted, a lower figure than in prior years. And nearly one in three said they believed their financial well-being primarily depended not on their own actions but on events outside their control. Forty-two percent, a plurality, believed globalization had decreased the opportunities available to them.
The changes now taking place in Millennials’ political ideals and social attitudes will shape American politics and culture for decades. A recent paper by the economists Paola Giuliano and Antonio Spilimbergo shows that previous cadres of young adults who endured a recession emerged with different beliefs than they’d held before—and that those new beliefs then stayed with them for the rest of their lives. They became more concerned about inequality, more cognizant of the role luck plays in life, and more likely to support government redistribution of wealth, but also less confident in the efficacy of government institutions—changes, for the most part, that can be seen happening again today.
The optimism of the Millennial generation has not been completely dispelled. A Pew survey early in 2010 found that even among those who were struggling financially, 89 percent were confident that they’d have “enough” income in the future, a characterization that was basically unchanged from 2006. Fewer Millennials were dissatisfied with the country’s direction than were other adults. And overall, Millennials were as happy with their lives as other generations, or happier.
This period has not been without silver linings for some young adults. Due to poor job prospects, college attendance has risen since 2007; as a result, some people who would not have gotten a college degree now will; whatever the economic climate today, they’ll almost certainly find better long-term prospects than they would have otherwise. Houses are cheaper throughout the country, allowing young adults who have good, secure jobs to buy sooner if they wish to do so. For some twenty- and thirtysomethings on the fast track, aggressive workplace restructuring has meant bigger responsibilities more quickly. And to the extent that young adults embrace thrift the way Depression-era twentysomethings did—still an open question for the generation as a whole—they will leave themselves less vulnerable to shocks that happen later in their lives.
Many factors throughout a lifetime affect generational character. No one can know what technological and scientific breakthroughs await us in the coming years, but it’s hard to believe that the nation’s material standards in 2030 and 2050 won’t be far higher than they are now. Nonetheless, for young adults, perhaps more than anyone else, the key question is: How much longer? How much longer will we remain mired in a weak economy with bad jobs or no jobs for people just beginning their careers? The Great Recession has indelibly changed the lives of many twentysomethings already. The longer this generation marinates in it, the more widely those changes will spread and the deeper they will be. Over the past year, as I’ve talked with young adults around the country, I’ve often had the sense of lives in abeyance—particularly among the jobless. Many hopes and many futures can still be realized—or at least nearly so—if the job market soon rebounds. But as the months and years tick by, more of those hopes and futures will become irretrievable. The urgency of recovery is highest for the young.
5
HOUSEBOUND: THE MIDDLE CLASS
AFTER THE BUST
IF YOU DRIVE NORTH FROM TAMPA ALONG I-75 FOR ABOUT TWENTY-FIVE miles, then take the off-ramp onto Wesley Chapel Boulevard and drive east a few miles more, you’ll eventually come upon Curley Road, up on the left. And if you take that left, you’ll see before you a clean divide between suburb and country. On the right side of the road lie vast acres of cow pastures, and beyond them an electrical power station. On the left lie subdivisions, neatly set, one after another.
The last and largest of them, before you hit the orange groves, is Bridgewater, a planned community of some 760 houses built mostly in 2005 and 2006, at the height of the housing boom. It’s a nice if generic-looking community of McMansions and somewhat smaller homes. Many of the houses back up onto one of the development’s several artificial lakes. All are painted in neutral, inoffensive colors. Visually, the neighborhood is indistinguishable from innumerable other exurban communities that have promised the trappings of affluence to millions of middle-class families, and that have become, arguably, the physical representation of the modern American Dream.
Drive around a bit, though, and you’ll quickly notice many of the dissonant images that now appear in exurban neighborhoods nationwide. More driveways sit empty than you’d expect, and the streets are curiously quiet, even by suburban standards. In other driveways, there are too many cars altogether—jumbles of pickups and old Camrys; more cars, seemingly, than bedrooms in the house behind them. On some streets, most of the houses are for sale.
Since the recession began, about 80 percent of Bridgewater’s houses have been in foreclosure at one time or another. Midway through 2010, nearly half were occupied by renters. Sixty or seventy were vacant.
On a Friday afternoon in August 2010, I chatted with an attractive young couple I saw washing their car in front of their house on one of the subdevelopment’s many identical streets. They’d been living there for the past two years, they told me, because the rent couldn’t be beat. But that was the only reason. “It’s not what you’d expect by just looking at it,” said the man, a leanly muscled police trooper with a buzz cut. “The people here are the kind of people I encounter in my line of work,” he said, pausing. “People I arrest.” Half the houses on the street were vacant—“that one, that one, the one over there”—and he didn’t count any friends among those neighbors he had. He kept his police car parked prominently in the driveway of one of those vacant houses, to scare off undesirables.
Mark Spector is one of Bridgewater’s original homeowners and now the president of its homeowners association. I sat down with him in the kitchen of his spacious, six-bedroom house that same day, as his seven-year-old daughter, Chloe, played in the living room, and he told me the story of the community. Spector had bought his house for $350,000 in 2005, as the subdevelopment was still being built out. He and his wife—who both have a graduate degree—had moved from California to be closer to her family, and he’d taken a job in business development at a large health-care company. When we talked, he was forty-one, and behind his wire-rimmed glasses, more often than not, he wore an expression of weary bemusement, colored by a deeper bitterness, as he described the past five years.
As their house was being built, Spector said, he tracked other neighborhood house sales with no little excitement—every month the prices seemed to go up by $5,000 or more. At the peak of the market, about a year after he’d moved in, houses with floor plans like his were selling for $550,000. By then he was enjoying the new swimming pool he’d put in, financed by a $50,000 home-equity loan.
Spector knew things were going to go wrong, he told me, when he began to see contractors who’d been working in the neighborhood snapping up houses, planning to flip them. But he wasn’t prepared for how far wrong they’d go, or how quickly. In fact, more than half of Bridgewater’s home buyers were speculative investors. When the market turned down and they couldn’t sell profitably, many went into foreclosure almost immediately. Overcapacity turned out to be so severe—not just in Bridgewater, but everywhere in the region—that even finding steady renters proved difficult. Section 8 voucher recipients became desirable, because their rent payments were assured.
As the neighborhood became more transient, its character began to change. People in the midst of foreclosure stopped keeping their yards carefully; some stripped their houses of appliances and electrical fixtures as they left. Unkempt lawns and visible disrepair became more widespread as new renters and other residents saw that the neighborhood standard of upkeep was not always high. As the months went by, vacant houses, low rental prices, and budding disorder began t
o attract criminals, Spector told me, and for a time drug sales became a problem; a Miami-based gang briefly established an outpost in the neighborhood and tagged its streets with graffiti. On at least a couple of occasions, he said, gunfire was exchanged. Through it all, people continued to wash in and out of the community, and they still do today; on the first and last day of each month, a “parade of U-Hauls” goes up and down Bridgegate Drive.
“My daughter is always telling me, ‘I have a new classmate’ ” at school, Spector said. But then the classmate will disappear a few months later. No small number of the neighborhood’s renters, he said, will pay the deposit and the first month’s rent and then just wait to be evicted, which can take several months. More than half the kids at Chloe’s elementary school now qualify for the free or reduced-price lunch program, Spector told me, and he worries that the school’s quality, which was excellent when he moved in, may be declining. “I understand that people are down on their luck,” he said, “but this isn’t the neighborhood that I moved into.… It’s never going to recover to what it was.”
The waves of foreclosure buffeting Bridgewater seem unending, Spector said. The investors defaulted first, followed by ordinary homeowners who’d been in over their heads from the day of their closing. The latest wave was washing out people who’d lost their jobs in the recession and seen once-manageable payments become impossible. “Every single time you think you’ve hit some type of stability, the next round comes.”
Spector’s house was most recently assessed at $179,000, though he’s not sure he could sell it for that much. “We’re completely trapped,” he said. “There’s no way I can move anywhere unless I’m coming to the table with more than $200,000.” And besides, he adds, “where would we move? Wherever you look, it’s the same, unless you go to one of the really older communities.” Spector’s house in Bridgewater isn’t his first; he and his wife had previously owned a home, and had reinvested part of the proceeds into this one. “To think that we would have to save up just for a deposit now,” he says. “It’s like starting from scratch.”