The Emerging Emerging-Adulthood Majority

Is New York is a city where adults have roommates or a city of adult roommates? The cause/symptom connection is unclear:

It used to be that if you were set on having a place all to yourself, you moved to the boroughs. But while rents are significantly less out there in no-man’s land, thanks to gentrification and rising apartment costs, roommates are still largely necessary. Wiener says, “In Brooklyn, [rents] have been creeping up. They call it the second Manhattan now. I have seen a rental increase almost on par with Manhattan. But still, there are deals to be had there.” Howard Wong, 33, a software engineer who lives in Bushwick, Brooklyn, shares a place with three roommates, two in their early 30s and one in their mid-20s. Their combined rent is $2,600, only $650 each.

Clearly, having roommates is the financially savvy way to go. But how does living in a style close to dorm life during the prime of life affect one’s transition into adulthood? Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, author of Emerging Adulthood: The Winding Road from the Late Teens through the Twenties and editor of the Journal of Adolescent Research, says, “Emerging adulthood is a period of your life where you have a sort of independence and freedom to focus on your own life and your own self-development that you will never have so much of before or after.” Whether living with roommates is a cause or a symptom, the fact remains that many New Yorkers suffer from a mutated strain of Urban Peter Pan Syndrome. Without the emotional engagement required by the old ball and chain and the little chainlets and the responsibilities of home owning, these 30-is-the-new-20 roommates are free to indulge in, well, themselves.