Freya Adams managed as a solo mum of twin six-year-old girls for almost three years after separating from her partner.
Then, mortgage repayments on her two-bedroom apartment were set to double. Food and petrol prices continued to soar.
“There was nothing [else] I could cut – don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t buy coffee, don’t buy new clothes for my girls,” said 32-year-old Adams, who works part-time and is studying social work at university.
Her parents suggested a solution six months ago: Adams and the girls move in with them to their Auckland home. Initially, Adams felt grief for her perceived failure at making it on her own. But the good – financial and other benefits such as childcare – far outweighed the bad.
Adams is one of a number of New Zealand’s financially independent young adults conserving money by moving back to the family home – or never leaving in the first place. It’s an about-turn from the cultural norms of previous generations when young people were expected to be out the door for good. The shift is largely attributed to the staggering rise in what it costs to live in New Zealand, especially the cost of housing, a contentious issue for October’s national election.
“Children are becoming financially dependent for much longer, but even when they have to make that transition to become owners in the housing market, still the parents are quite often the key financial source,” said Paul Spoonley, a sociologist at Auckland’s Massey University.
About 25% of 18 to 34-year-olds in New Zealand live with family, according to the latest data from Stats NZ. While that’s only a slight increase from a decade earlier, the number of young people living with family who have full-time jobs has jumped. In 2013, only 38.5% of young people living with family had full-time jobs. A decade later, almost 55% work full-time.
New models of living
Clare Happs, 54, had her 22-year-old son return to their home near Queenstown a few months ago. Despite his well-paying engineering job, he would be NZ$6,000 out of pocket each year if he lived in a rental property. “He would have been in a cold, old house and the only thing he would be gaining was independence,” she said, adding that her son saved “brilliantly” since his teenage years, but had been unable to get on the housing ladder, even with help from the bank of mum and dad.
Properties in New Zealand are valued at a little over seven times the average household income, a key marker of affordability. The figure is down from a peak of 8.8 in 2022, but higher than the long-term average of 6.1 times the average household income, according to an August report from CoreLogic. It’s a similar story in other parts of the world, like in Australia where median house prices were 8.5 times the median annual household income in 2022, an increase from 6.8 before the Covid pandemic.
A housing shortage in New Zealand has thousands of families living in hotels for months and even years while they wait for government housing. Dozens of workers in the ski town of Queenstown spent freezing nights sleeping in cars unable to afford inflated rents. Homeowners, too, are being squeezed with mortgage repayments accounting for half the average household income.
Amid those pressures, new models of “intergenerational living” are gaining popularity.
Tessa Wicks, 31, has a goal to buy into Wellington’s housing market within the next five years. If it wasn’t for her mother, Jenny Ralston, the timeframe would be doubled, Wicks said. She lives in a permanent one-bedroom unit that Ralston built in the back yard of her house. Wicks and her husband contribute rent, but nothing near the several hundred dollars the unit would command at market rate.
“It’s a form of intergenerational living that is much more manageable as opposed to living within the same four walls as the person who raised you,” said Wicks.
About 10% to 15% of inquiries for Te Whare-iti modular homes come from parents wanting to help their kids, said Richard Wright, the architect who designed Wicks’s unit. “It’s really a whole new field of design,” he said.
Parties divided on policy
The planning rule change that enabled places like Ralston’s family compound was a historic policy agreement in 2021 between New Zealand’s two main parties, Labour and National. Part of that policy supercharged the construction of medium-density housing —such as rows of three-story townhouses— in cities and regional centres.
However, the conservative National party, which is leading in the polls, will renege on the part of the agreement that favours concentrated urban housing. Instead, National promised to immediately unlock enough land on suburban outskirts to satisfy the next 30 years of housing demand.
“The consensus that we had was cities need to be allowed to grow up and out if you want housing to remain affordable,” said Eric Crampton, chief economist at the New Zealand Initiative, a public policy thinktank. Now, the two major parties are tilting further apart in their housing strategies, he said, with National promising to repeal other key Labour policies.
National and the right-leaning ACT party, whose support National is likely to need to form a government, are both pitching policies that would give cash-strapped councils a continuous revenue stream to pay for infrastructure needed for new housing developments. Currently, Labour has allocated an almost-$4bn infrastructure fund to support about 70,000 new homes over the next two decades, but National has accused Labour of a slow rollout.
Labour has yet to announce any housing policy promises ahead of the election.
For Adams, now she wonders if New Zealand’s traditional push for independence straight after high school or university is misguided and unnatural. Not only is Adams reducing her costs by living with her parents, but she is also gaining practical support for raising her twin daughters.
“I can see culturally why in other countries, the [adult] children stay with their parents because it just makes so much more sense,” she says.
