Married Couples Living with Roommates Has Doubled Since 1995

via marketwatch:

Married couples are making room for roommates.

Sometimes, multiple roommates. Just ask Kelsey Riley Dixon. The 29-year-old business owner and her husband, a semi-pro kayaker, share a four-bedroom home with three male roommates “to reduce costs in the very expensive city of Seattle,” she says. “It allows us to have a home in a really expensive city with a deck, a backyard, a basement — and we are able to pay half the rate that we would living on our own.”

One big motivation for having roommates: Having extra money to travel. The couple recently spent nine months in Chile, Peru, Australia and New Zealand. “We don’t want to spend that much money on rent. This [having roommates] aligns with our values. We’d rather use that money for travel,” she says. And she adds that not only does having roommates help financially, it’s also “fun and rewarding.”

They’re part of a growing trend: The number of married couples living with roommates has doubled since 1995, according to a recent report from real estate site Trulia. About 280,000 married people now live with a roommate — and that’s particularly true in pricey cities like those on the West Coast.

The reason: Housing costs a ton. In Honolulu and Orange Country, Calif., the share of married couples with roommates is between four and five times the national rate. San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego and Seattle also have sky high rates of married couples with roomies. Those same cities all have well above average rental and housing costs (Trulia notes that housing costs in all these markets have risen more than 30% since 2009), with residents of uber-pricey San Francisco requiring more than $123,000 in income to live comfortably, one study showed.

“While only a small share of married couples live with non-family members, the ones that do often take on roommates either as a financial strategy to cope with housing costs or as a means of assisting others burdened by housing costs,” Trulia reports.

Logan Allec, a 30-year-old Santa Clarita, Calif., resident, and his wife had a roommate when they first got married. “We had an extra bedroom upstairs with its own bathroom and a little living area and we charged $850 a month,” he explains. “We were in our 20s and that was a nice chunk of change.”

But pretty soon Allec’s wife wanted more privacy for their budding marriage. “About a year ago, our roommate took a job some 50 miles away and moved out — and my wife couldn’t have been happier,” Allec jokes. And now that the couple is expecting a baby, getting another roommate is off the table, even though Allec, a CPA at Money Done Right, loves getting the extra money from renting. “A new roommate plus a new baby would be a little much,” he says.

But that situation happens too. Stephanie, a 28-year-old PR professional who asked that we withhold her last name, was only able to afford to move to San Francisco in 2017 because a married couple offered her a rent-controlled room in their apartment. And thanks to that great deal, she’s still living there today — even though the couple now has a 6-month-old baby who sleeps in the room next to hers. “It’s a great 3 a.m. alarm,” she jokes of the middle-of-the-night crying.