Flipping the Switch — Ten Years Later (Part 1 of 3)

Used to be, parents took care of us; now, more and more often, we’re taking care of the parents. I call it, “flipping the switch.”

Multi-generational households are becoming more commonplace; parents following the (grand)kids seems to be increasing.

I first wrote about this in 2015. At the time, I was going on instinct and anecdote — clients telling me they wanted a place for mom and dad to stay, or live, or at least be close enough to help with the kids. The data backed me up, but barely. About 13% of homebuyers were purchasing multi-generational homes back then. It felt like the beginning of something.

It was.

A decade later, the anecdote has become the norm. NAR’s most recent Generational Trends report — covering transactions from mid-2023 through mid-2024 — puts that number at 17%. That’s not a rounding error. That’s a structural shift in how American families are choosing to live.

And the who has changed as much as the how many.

Gen X is leading the charge. Twenty-one percent of Gen X buyers — folks in their mid-40s to late 50s — are buying multi-generational homes. That share has nearly doubled from 12% in 2013. These are the sandwich generation buyers. They’ve got aging parents who need proximity or care, and they’ve got kids — sometimes adult kids — who haven’t left. Or who came back.

That last part is new. In 2015, about 7% of NAR survey respondents said their adult children or relatives had never left home. In 2024? Twenty percent. One in five.

Here’s the other shift I didn’t see coming in 2015.

Back then, the top reason people bought multi-generational homes was to care for aging parents — about 21% cited that. Cost savings was down the list. I wrote the original post almost entirely through the lens of “parents following grandkids” and “taking care of mom and dad,” because I was living the first, and the second was on the horizon. Now, we’re helping some with the grandkids 30 minutes away, and watching out for our parents.

That story is still real. I see it all the time. But cost savings has overtaken caregiving as the number one reason families are doubling up — 36% cited it in the most recent data. When a third of multi-generational buyers are doing it primarily because it makes financial sense, you’re not looking at a family trend anymore. You’re looking at an economic adaptation – driven by all that we’ve seen and lived in the past decade.

The Charlottesville market skews a bit differently, I think. The clients I work with tend to fall into one of two camps: either they’re bringing parents closer for the grandkid equation, or they’re planning ahead for the day when mom or dad can’t manage the house alone. Our market is hard, and expensive, to find the right home that fits this demand.

But it’s coming. Maybe. If mortgage rates stay elevated and inventory stays tight — and I don’t see either changing dramatically — the math will push more families toward shared, even squeezed, housing here too.

The scale of this is worth understanding.

Pew Research found that nearly 60 million Americans were living in multi-generational households as of 2021 — and that population has quadrupled since 1971. Among adults aged 25 to 34, a full quarter now live in a multi-generational arrangement. That’s up from 9% fifty years ago.

This isn’t a pandemic blip. The growth line was climbing before COVID, accelerated during it, and shows no signs of reversing.

And in Virginia specifically? The Weldon Cooper Center at UVA reports that about 1 in 5 Virginians — 22.6% — are aged 60 and older. Outside of Northern Virginia, that number jumps to 25%. Central Virginia, our market, sits at about 23.2%. The Commonwealth has 1.9 million residents over 60, and the Weldon Cooper Center’s population projections show the aging trend intensifying through at least 2030. (Wondering: will I be retired by 2050?)

The generation that built the suburbs is getting older. And they’re either moving closer to their kids, or their kids are making room. If only local and state governments would build infrastructure to facilitate walking or biking to our families’ homes!

In my original post, I wrote about the value of having parents close by — how having a mom who was a practicing Realtor, who understood the demands of the profession, made me better at my job. How having grandparents willing to watch the kids “at the drop of a hat” was, in my words, “extraordinarily, unquantifiably valuable.”

That’s still true. Ten years later, I’d double down on it. The families I work with who have that proximity — who’ve solved the multi-generational puzzle — have a fundamentally different quality of life than those who haven’t. It’s not just about childcare or elder care. It’s about the fabric of daily life – something other societies value. Someone to pick up the kids when a showing runs late. Someone who notices that dad’s been a little forgetful lately. A family unit or team who make the whole thing work.

The switch flips slowly. One day you’re the kid; one day you’re the one making sure mom’s doctor appointments are scheduled and the gutters are cleaned. And somewhere in between, you start thinking about what your house — or the next house — needs to look like to accommodate all of that. See: Alula, a Charlottesville-based platform built for exactly this.

That’s where we’ll go in Part 2.

Next week: What does a multi-generational home actually look like in 2026? Universal Design, dual primary suites, and why “parent suite” means something different than it did a decade ago.