Rent has eaten a lot of things over the past two decades — starter homes, savings accounts, the concept of the “starter apartment.” A new working paper from the American Institute for Boys and Men argues it’s eaten something less obvious, too: the social infrastructure through which men have traditionally learned to make and keep friends.
The finding lands differently when you sit with it. We know men are lonelier than they used to be. We know the male friendship crisis is real. What this research pins down is a specific, structural reason why — one that has nothing to do with personality or effort, and everything to do with the price of a one-bedroom.
1 in 6 — and Rising Into Their 40s
The headline number from economist Gabrielle Penrose’s paper is this: roughly one in six men without a college degree currently lives with their parents. That’s double the rate of college graduates. But the more striking figure is what’s happened to the age curve. In the 1960s, living with parents was something men did in their early twenties and quickly moved past. By 2025, approximately one in five non-college men in their early thirties still live at home — and the rates stay elevated well into their forties. What was once a temporary on-ramp has become, for a significant share of men, a permanent alternative to economic independence.
The cause isn’t mysterious. Rents have risen roughly 150 percent in real terms since 1960, while wages for men without college degrees have stayed essentially flat. The math stopped working, and men responded rationally: they stayed put. In the US, one in three young adults now lives at home — well above historical norms. In New Jersey, that figure is 44 percent. The UK is tracking the same pattern, with 35 percent of men aged 20 to 34 living with parents in 2025, up from 26 percent in 2000.
The Two Windows That Don’t Come Back
Here’s where it gets genuinely interesting — and genuinely costly.
There are two consecutive phases in a young person’s life that historically served as crucibles for adult friendship: the dorm years and the roommate years. Neither is about fun, exactly. They’re about friction. You are thrown together with people you didn’t choose, in a space you have to share, and you have no option but to figure out how to coexist. Someone always leaves dishes in the sink. Someone’s schedule is incompatible with yours. Someone becomes, through nothing more than daily proximity and the low-stakes negotiation of shared space, a friend you carry for decades.
Men who skip both phases — no dorm, and now no roommates because the rent doesn’t pencil out — miss two consecutive years of building what researchers call the basic social skills of adult friendship. How to let small irritations go. How to stay in relationship with someone you didn’t select. How to turn a stranger into someone you’d call in a crisis.
These aren’t skills anyone formally teaches. They accumulate through repetition, through being inconvenienced and working it out, at an age when that kind of friction is actually productive. Miss the window, and the skills are harder to build later — not impossible, but significantly harder.
No Job, No Orbit
The research adds a second compounding factor. Men living with parents are significantly less likely to be participating in the labor force. That’s partly cause, partly effect — men who aren’t working can’t easily afford to leave; men who don’t leave often don’t build the momentum that leads to full employment.
But the friendship implication is direct: work is one of the primary places adult men form social bonds. Not deep, confessional friendships necessarily — but the reliable, recurring contact that is the actual substrate of male connection. Coworkers become the people you grab lunch with, complain to, eventually trust. No job means no coworkers. No coworkers means no organic social orbit.
The profile that concentrates all of this risk is specific: unmarried, no college degree, ages 25 to 34. No college network. No partner providing social scaffolding. No career generating peer contact. Every natural on-ramp to adult male friendship — the shared apartment, the job, the neighborhood bar where you know the regulars — either unavailable or out of reach.
The Window for Keeping Friends Indefinitely
This matters because of timing. Your late twenties and early thirties are when the friendships that carry you through middle age either get made or don’t. The research on adult friendship is consistent on this point: after the mid-thirties, the social network tends to stabilize and contract. You stop adding people at the same rate. The friends you have at 35 are largely the friends you’ll have at 55.
Miss that formation window — because the apartment was unaffordable, because the roommate years never happened, because the job didn’t materialize — and you’re not just lonely at 28. You may be lonely at 48.
Manufacturing the Structure the Market Removed
Penrose’s policy prescription is about housing supply — build more, price comes down, men move out, development proceeds. That’s the systemic fix, and it’s probably right. But the human question sitting inside the data is more immediate.
For men navigating these conditions now, the answer isn’t to wait for the housing market to correct. It’s to manufacture intentionally what the market used to provide structurally: consistent proximity, shared activity, low-stakes recurring contact with the same people. A standing game night. A running partner. A group that meets on a schedule regardless of convenience.
The dorm did that automatically for some people. Life has to do it deliberately for everyone else. The friendships are still possible. They just require more intention than they used to — because the architecture that used to build them quietly, without anyone noticing, has been priced out of reach.