Households doubling up

The Census Bureau blog Random Samplings reported on an interesting trend resulting from the economic downturn.  About 7 million people have moved in to live with their relatives or friends.  About a million of those are young adults living in their parents' houses.  They either could not get a job to move out, or lost their job and moved back in, or just decided that the economics of paying for housing, or buying a house, do not make sense.

It's interesting that the trend in the over-leveraged pre-recession American society has been for kids to move out of their parents' homes as soon as they can afford to do so.  In much of Europe and Asia the trend is the reverse.  In South Korea, for example, the norm is to live with your parents until you get married. The same holds in Russia.  There is a cultural norm there, but also an economic reality of pricey real estate.  The economic crisis here rubs against a cultural norm in an interesting way.  There is more household tension, sure, but also larger and more social households.  I wonder if there's a benefit in that somewhere.