Analysis of: More gen Z men live with parents in this city than anywhere in the US. How do they date?
The Guardian | January 7, 2026
This Guardian article about Gen Z men living with parents in Vallejo, California reveals far more than a lifestyle trend—it exposes how decades of neoliberal economic policy have fundamentally restructured the material conditions required for working-class adulthood. The article inadvertently documents a generation caught between the collapse of manufacturing employment, skyrocketing housing costs, and stagnant wages, while mainstream discourse frames their predicament as individual failure or cultural choice. The piece centers on young working-class men—personal trainers, bar attendants, apprentice welders, union workers—earning wages that cannot cover Bay Area rents. Edward, a government employee making under $3,000 monthly, spends three hours daily commuting because he cannot afford to live near his workplace. This is not a story about 'emerging adulthood' as a psychological phase, but about the material impossibility of household formation when housing costs have outpaced wages for decades. The academic framework offered by psychologist Jeffrey Arnett—that young adults are 'exploring identity'—obscures the economic coercion at work. These men aren't choosing extended adolescence; they're priced out of the basic prerequisites of independent life. The article also reveals how state violence compounds economic precarity. Daniel lost his driver's license through what he describes as police harassment, directly impacting his ability to work as an electrician. In Vallejo—a city with a documented history of police violence—young men of color navigate both economic exploitation and racialized state repression. The intersection of housing crisis, deindustrialization, mass incarceration's aftermath, and immigration enforcement creates a web of constraints that the article's lifestyle framing cannot adequately capture.
Class Dynamics
Actors: Working-class young men (service workers, apprentices, union workers), Immigrant working-class families, Property owners and landlords (largely absent but structurally present), Employers in service and knowledge economies, The state (police, ICE, municipal government), Academic/professional class (psychologists, researchers framing the narrative)
Beneficiaries: Property owners benefiting from inflated Bay Area real estate values, Employers accessing cheaper labor from workers who can't demand living wages, The knowledge economy sector that has displaced manufacturing, Landlords extracting rents from constrained housing supply
Harmed Parties: Young working-class men unable to achieve financial independence, Immigrant families living under threat of ICE enforcement, Communities of color subject to police harassment, Working-class families absorbing costs of supporting adult children
The article depicts young workers with minimal leverage—they cannot afford housing, face employer-friendly labor markets, and navigate a state apparatus that alternates between neglect and repression. Their parents' homes become a form of collective working-class survival strategy, pooling resources across generations because individual wages no longer cover individual reproduction costs. The professional class (academics, journalists) frames this structural crisis as a developmental or cultural phenomenon, depoliticizing what is fundamentally a class issue.
Material Conditions
Economic Factors: Transition from manufacturing to service/knowledge economy, Bay Area housing costs vastly outpacing wage growth, Cost of higher education creating debt burden without guaranteed returns, Decline of union density and job security, Rising costs of 'dating' and household formation in inflationary conditions
The shift from manufacturing to a 'knowledge economy' has displaced workers without college credentials from stable employment. Those who remain in the workforce occupy precarious service positions—personal trainers, bar attendants, government clerks—that don't generate sufficient surplus to cover the costs of social reproduction (housing, family formation). Capital has effectively externalized these costs onto working-class families, who must now subsidize the labor force through intergenerational housing arrangements. The three-hour commute Edward endures represents labor time stolen by the spatial organization of capital—workers pushed to geographic peripheries while employment concentrates in expensive urban cores.
Resources at Stake: Housing and real estate in the Bay Area, Wages and labor power of young workers, Educational credentials as access to stable employment, Family wealth and intergenerational resource transfers, Time itself—commuting, working multiple jobs, delaying life milestones
Historical Context
Precedents: 1970s deindustrialization of American cities, 2008 financial crisis and housing market collapse, Post-WWII GI Bill and housing subsidies that enabled previous generations' independence, Historical patterns of multigenerational housing among immigrant and minority communities, Vallejo's 2008 municipal bankruptcy—one of the largest in California history
The article notes that in the 1970s only 8% of 25-34 year olds lived with parents, compared to 18% today. This trajectory tracks precisely with neoliberal restructuring: the decline of manufacturing, the attack on unions, the financialization of housing, and the withdrawal of state support for working-class household formation. Vallejo itself embodies this history—once a thriving Navy town with good working-class jobs, it became one of the largest municipal bankruptcies in American history in 2008. The 'trad son' phenomenon is not new behavior but a return to pre-Fordist conditions, when independent nuclear households were a luxury unavailable to most workers.
Contradictions
Primary: Capital requires workers to reproduce themselves (housing, family formation, consumption) but refuses to pay wages sufficient for this reproduction, forcing working-class families to collectively subsidize the labor market through multigenerational living arrangements.
Secondary: The ideology of American individualism and 'adulthood' contradicts the material impossibility of individual household formation, The knowledge economy demands expensive credentials but doesn't guarantee employment that justifies the investment, Cultural expectations of masculinity (provider, independent) clash with economic conditions that prevent men from fulfilling these roles, Immigrant families' cultural traditions of multigenerational living are reframed as explanations for structural economic constraints
These contradictions are intensifying rather than resolving. Rising housing costs, stagnant wages, and declining job security suggest more workers will be pushed into extended family arrangements. This could generate political consciousness—recognition that individual solutions are impossible—or it could produce the anomie and violence the article documents (the research linking young men at home to increased violence). The question is whether this generational crisis will be channeled into collective action for housing, wages, and workers' rights, or into individualized despair and reactionary politics.
Global Interconnections
This Vallejo case study reflects global patterns of capitalist development in the neoliberal era. Across wealthy nations—from Italy's 'bamboccioni' to Japan's 'parasite singles' to the UK's 'boomerang generation'—young workers are being pushed back into parental homes as wages fail to keep pace with housing costs. This represents a global crisis of social reproduction: capital has captured an increasing share of value while offloading the costs of maintaining the workforce onto households and unpaid family labor. The phenomenon also connects to rising right-wing populism among young men, who experience downward mobility relative to their parents' generation but lack a class-conscious framework for understanding their predicament. The article's framing—focusing on dating, psychology, and cultural traditions—exemplifies how liberal media depoliticizes structural crises. By presenting housing unaffordability as a lifestyle issue or developmental stage, it obscures the policy choices (deregulation, financialization, austerity) that produced these conditions. The casual mention of ICE threats, police harassment, and the 2020-2024 decline in police killings points to the racialized state violence that compounds economic precarity for communities of color, connecting this housing story to broader patterns of racialized capitalism.
Conclusion
The young men of Vallejo are not experiencing a 'new phase of the life course'—they are experiencing the predictable consequences of four decades of class warfare waged from above. Their inability to form independent households, their precarious employment, their fear of police and immigration enforcement all stem from deliberate policy choices that have enriched property owners and employers at workers' expense. The article's most revealing moment may be Daniel's observation: 'I can't do anything. They're gonna win either way.' This fatalism reflects a generation that has been materially dispossessed without being given the analytical tools to understand their dispossession as political rather than personal. The task ahead is transforming this diffuse frustration into organized class consciousness—recognizing that the housing crisis, the wage crisis, and the crisis of state violence are interconnected features of a system that can and must be challenged collectively.
Editorial Note: This analysis applies a dialectical materialist framework to news events. It represents one interpretive perspective and should not be considered objective reporting.
AI-Assisted Analysis | Confidence: 92%