Stuck at Home

Thanks to soaring housing costs, a generation of twentysomethings are still in their childhood bedrooms. A portrait of aily life with no empty nest.

- Claire Gagné

At age 21, Liam Tully was living on his own in a twobedroom apartment on the third floor of a house.

He loved being on his own-working, paying rent, buying groceries, doing laundry, watering plants, blasting music with his friends every night. He had the kind of financial independence most people his age could only dream of. The catch: he was living on a tiny island off the coast of Honduras called Utila, paying just US$500 a month in rent.Tully went down to Honduras during COVID to get his scuba certification. But it was always meant to be temporary. In 2022, when he returned to Toronto to start a career, he moved right back into his childhood home. Soon after, the family sold the house. Tully, who was working for a real estate agency, harboured no illusions that he could afford to rent an apartment in the city on his salary of $3,000 a month; the average rent in Toronto at the time was $1,685. So Tully, his younger brother, his mom and the dogs all moved together. Their new space, a condo in Toronto's Canary District, has a bedroom for each of them and two bathrooms.

Liza Finlay, Tully's mom, was happy to make room for her boys when she downsized.

"It's hard to launch these days," she says. "Young adults who live at home aren't taking advantage of their parents. They don't have much choice." Tully is now working for a tech startup, making $65,000 a year. His contributions to the household have grown over time: first he covered some of the grocery bills, then took on a small amount of the rent. He gives his mom $700 a month-a significant contribution, but much less than he'd pay on his own.

In years past, Tully would be called a boomerang kid: someone who moved out with a plan for an independent life but wound up back under mom and dad's roof. In the old days, this trajectory might suggest that the kids-or the parents-were screwups.