How we live says a lot about our changing society

Every week we get hundreds of press releases from groups and companies around the country, typically sent in the offhand hope that their promotional message will make their way into at least a few newspapers. In most cases, we give them five seconds consideration before hitting the delete button.

But every once and while, something shows up that’s actually interesting, and we’re running one such story in the paper this week. It’s about housing trends, which may not sound that interesting by itself, but it spoke volumes to me about how our society and traditional relationships are changing rapidly in the 21st Century.

One of the latest trends, according to the story, is what’s called “co-living,” where typically unrelated, often single, adults choose to live in communal arrangements, usually with a private bedroom and larger living quarters shared by multiple adults. Think of it like living in a dorm, only doing so even after your college years.

It might sound a bit like a back-to-the-land commune of the late 1960s, but these are typically in more urban settings and they’re appealing to a much broader cross section of adults.

The other up and coming trend is the proliferation of what are called “tiny houses.” These are very small but usually well-designed and cozy houses that can be built on permanent foundations or, frequently, on trailers so they are easily portable. Advocates point to these houses as a great way to provide living space for single adults or childless couples who are looking for an affordable option that’s light on the environment. They are a great response to the rise of the so-called McMansions, those gaudy energy hogs that seemed to pop up like mushrooms in subdivisions all across the country back in the early-to-mid 2000s.

I’m a big fan of smaller houses. My wife Jodi and I have lived happily in one for 32 years, so I’m always fascinated to see how some folks have successfully taken the small house concept to the extreme.

But what’s most interesting to me is to consider how these housing trends reflect the changing reality that so many people, particularly the younger generation, face today. These new housing trends suggest the greater fluidity and lack of permanence in social relationships, particularly among young adults. The traditional two-parent family residing in a suburban rambler seems like an anachronism to so many Americans in the 21st Century.

Young people aren’t getting married, or having as many children, and the economy certainly has something to do with it. Fifty years ago, a reasonably educated young adult could expect to get a good job and work for the same company for their entire career. That’s almost unheard of today. Fifty years ago, young adults routinely left college with a degree, great job prospects, and no debt. Today, job prospects are often marginal for many students and most leave school with tens of thousands of dollars in student loans.

Co-living or tiny houses make sense for many of them, because the suburban rambler is totally out of reach financially (even if that was their goal) and because next month or next year, they may be heading down the road in search of employment or some new experience. Younger Americans now expect they’ll be uprooted at various points in their lives, so they don’t sink their roots as deeply in any one place.

That, of course, has many implications for traditional communities, particularly in rural areas. Longtime service organizations, like the Lions, Kiwanis, and Rotary International, struggle to bring young people into the fold. Our rural volunteer fire departments and ambulance services face the same challenges. I hear some of my generation bemoan the lack of community commitment among the younger generation. Yet, I understand that the world in which the young are coming of age is much different from the one that I, and most of my generation, grew up in. I see our Millennials making decisions that fit that new reality.

Young adults have a different sense of community, to be sure, but there’s plenty of evidence that it’s as strong as any previous generations’. From my experience, today’s young adults have a good sense of solidarity with their fellow Millennials, are devoted to social tolerance, environmental consciousness, and have a strong desire to make the world better in many ways. They don’t measure their value in the size of their paycheck or in the amount of their stuff. They don’t want a big house and a two-car garage because they don’t want all the downsides that come with it.

We certainly see these trends in our politics as well. If Millennials dominated our political scene, Bernie Sanders would be comfortably cruising to the White House. His message resonates with young adults because it reflects their experience and their values, and that should be a lesson to a crusty old Democratic Party establishment that has increasingly moved away from long-held principles of equal opportunity and shared prosperity. Millennials, after all, may be our younger generation in 2016, but they’ll be running the country soon enough. Their values will become the nation’s values.

So when we look at the way Millennials live today, we can catch a glimpse of America 25 years from now. It will be different, but that’s the nature of things. Society is in a constant state of evolution, perhaps now more than ever. The two-parent family with an average of 2.3 children is already the exception rather than the rule in 2016, and it’s likely to be even rarer in the future. The economy is changing, the climate is changing, and people are changing. It’s no surprise that the way we live is changing as well.