Housing

The Petersburg Borough Assembly will wait to decide a land-use appeal for a new building on Petersburg’s waterfront.

The property owner wants a permit for a two-family residential building on industrial land neat Petersburg’s South Harbor.

In April, Bill Menish applied for a condition use permit for the building he’s putting up at 710 South Nordic Drive.

The structure is on land zoned for industrial use and Menish wants to have two residential dwellings in the building.

Petersburg’s planning and zoning commission denied that conditional use permit in August, finding that residential dwellings were not compatible with the nearby cold storage and public harbor.

Menish testified to the assembly by phone and pointed out the residential properties that are already throughout that neighborhood.

“There are more non-industrial buildings in this zone than industrial,” Menish said. “Is it a perfect world? Maybe not. But this mixed use has been here a long time.”

Menish was granted a building permit for a warehouse on the site.

Borough code allows for one residence, or a care-takers dwelling with such a structure, but a second dwelling requires the conditional use permit with planning and zoning approval.

Menish is hoping to have a bed-and-breakfast or rental apartment as part of his building.

Assembly members were generally supportive of overturning the commission’s decision and allowing the conditional use permit.

Kurt Wohlhueter attending by phone agreed other dwellings have been allowed on the industrial waterfront.

“Multiple places have slid under the radar under the guise of care-taker’s shacks and have gotten away with it,” Wohlhueter said. “At what point do we draw the line in the sand and say everybody else was able to get away with it and now this person is not able to get away with it?”

The assembly sitting as the borough’s board of appeals can overturn a planning commission decision based on four specific reasons.

Those are if the assembly finds the commission made mistakes or made uninformed decisions, didn’t follow procedures or misrepresented the facts.

Assembly member Nancy Strand didn’t think those applied to the commission decision on this permit.

“When I was reading this last night I couldn’t see where any of these four applied,” she said. “The only thing that could possibly be questioned is the length of time it took to respond to his application.”

A decision on the permit did not come earlier because the planning commission was unable to meet this earlier this summer with a lack of quorum.

A motion by assembly member Wohlhueter to allow Menish to build what we wanted on that site died with a lack of a second.

Another motion, to wait up to 10 days to consider the appeal passed on a 5-1 vote.

Only Cindi Lagoudakis voted no and mayor Mark Jensen was not at the meeting.

The assembly may take the issue up again on Friday, Oct. 7, when it also meets to canvas the results of the local election.

It’s a nice afternoon in Juneau as Michael Spoon stands in front of Juneau’s City Hall looking at the abstract figure.

“You can tell it’s a humanoid form. What is this? A bench?” Spoon asks.

The figure is a little taller than Spoon, who’s been homeless in Juneau since December. It’s a plywood cut-out of a person that is part of a national effort to bring awareness to homelessness. The social art project began in Charleston, South Carolina, where the city collaborated with a design firm to create 430 plywood figures — the estimated number of homeless people in the city at the time.

The figures were placed in a park in front of their City Hall. Now, the project has gone national and every state capital has been asked to put a figure in front of their city hall in solidarity.

The figure is hollow to symbolize the invisibility of homeless people, and there’s an image of a bench with a house as a shadow near the figure’s belt line. Spoon didn’t sleep on a bench last night, but close.

“I was sleeping up behind a restaurant this morning. It was blowing like 35, 45 mph and rainin’ — layin’ on cardboard — I had cardboard covering me. I still froze,” Spoon says.

Spoon says he’s been homeless in Juneau 6 or 7 times before, and in several other cities.

“Sitka, back in my hometown, Seward, Alaska, Anchorage, Alaska, Seattle, Portland, Oregon, on the outskirts of Portland, Oregon, Grimshaw, Milwaukee, Gladstone …”

The figure is next to the large City Hall sign board tourists like to take pictures with. A couple walks by, cameras in hand. Spoon asks the man for a smoke. The man, with a cigarette in his mouth, shakes his head no.

“That’s another issue around here, too, is the drugs,” says Spoon. “I’m an alcoholic but I try and take a break from it once in a while and keep on trying to find work.”

He also says that violence is an issue, but that it’s the same everywhere. Overall, Spoon says that Juneau seems better than some other places.

“You get to wash your clothes and take a shower at the Glory Hole, and they get fed three times a day,” says Spoon. “These other cities I was in, you only got to eat once a day, and you could never use the shower ‘cause someone was always in there — beat you to it or something.”

I ask him what advice he has for Juneau.

“Just keep trying I guess. Find enough resources of what’s around you and try to use ‘em. They’re starting to do the housing thing and stuff. I missed (out by) 5 minutes. Some guy beat me by 5 minutes — he was the last guy to sign up for the housing,” answered Spoon.

The housing Spoon is referring to is Juneau’s housing first facility now under construction in Lemon Creek. The 32-unit building, which should be done in May 2017, is meant for people like Spoon. The idea is that with a stable living environment, people can then address their addictions, get medical attention, find work.

“We’ve had a great community effort in the last five years,” says Scott Ciambor, Juneau’s chief housing officer. He’s among a group of organizers and planners that have made the housing first project a reality.

“This is kind of showing that, unlike the figurine which is supposed to represent invisibility and not seeing homeless people as part of communities, we’ve gotten past that hurdle and are making active choices for solutions,” he says.

If Juneau were to fully emulate Charleston’s project, we’d put out 216 figures — maybe in Marine Park. That’s the number of homeless people counted in Juneau in January. Ciambor is proud of the 32-unit housing first project, but he says we still have more work to do.

“Realistically, that is a small sample targeted to those who are most vulnerable,” Ciambor says. “So there’s still opportunities slightly up the spectrum, more low-income, affordable housing, more supported housing that is not as intensive as that project. And some more private market rentals that social service providers can connect with to put some of their clients in.”

A couple walks by and I ask them what they think of the figure. Beyond the shape of a person, they’re not sure what it is and they don’t know how to use the QR code that links to the project website. I explain it to them. It turns out I am preaching to the choir. Eddie Snell is off a cruise ship from Florida and is active in his community’s efforts to fight homelessness.

“We should not have large numbers of people roaming the streets without receiving some type of help in this country with all the resources we have,” Snell says.

Spoon agrees, but unlike Snell he doesn’t have a stateroom.

“I don’t know where I am going to sleep tonight,” Spoon says.

Ciambor took a picture of the figure and sent it to the project organizers in Charleston. So far, Juneau, Little Rock and Santa Fe have participated. To see the figure, the pictures in this story will have to do — it was stolen the night after I did these interviews. Ciambor has mixed emotions about the theft. He’s glad it has a new home, but he’d like it back.

The city of San Francisco is in a quandary. Like many big cities, it faces an affordability crisis, and city leaders are looking for a way to build housing to help low- and middle-income residents stay there.

But one proposal to give current residents of a historically African-American neighborhood help to do that has run afoul of the Obama administration.

Consider the case of Mack Watson. At 96, he is a vision of elegance in his freshly pressed ribbon collar shirt, vest and sports coat. He has called San Francisco home since 1947.

“Nothing is like San Francisco. Like the song, I lost my heart in San Francisco,” he says minutes after finishing lunch at the Western Addition Senior Center on a recent day.

But Watson lost more than his heart in San Francisco. He is among thousands of black San Franciscans who are being displaced by gentrification. He can still recall when this neighborhood, the Western Addition, was a hub of African-American life.

“The mom and pop businesses. They’re all gone. Nightclubs and restaurants, all that stuff. Theaters. They all gone,” says Watson.

Watson witnessed firsthand as San Francisco’s African-American population plummeted from about 13 percent in 1970 to less than 6 percent today.

He might be gone, too, except that he lives with his grandson’s family in a house with stairs that are tough on his aging legs.

That’s why he applied for a lottery for a brand-new, 98-unit affordable housing development for seniors partially financed by the federal government. The complex, named for Willie B. Kennedy, a former San Francisco supervisor, is scheduled to open before the end of the year.

The city wants to give current residents, many of them African-American seniors like Watson, something called a “neighborhood preference” in that lottery.

London Breed, a San Francisco supervisor who grew up in the Western Addition, supports the neighborhood preferences. “And all we’re doing with neighborhood preference is saying that for the people who live here we’re going to give you a priority, the right of first refusal, you still have to compete in a lottery with other residents of the neighborhood, but you have a better shot,” says Breed.

But officials at the Department of Housing and Urban Development said no, you can’t do that. They told the city last month that its neighborhood preference plan would violate federal fair housing laws by limiting equal access and perpetuating segregation in this historically African-American neighborhood.

In other words, the law designed to give African-Americans a fair shake in getting housing is being cited as a reason why they can’t get a preference to stay in the community they’ve called home.

That leaves the city in a tough spot, says Tim Iglesias, a University of San Francisco law professor.

“Yes, there is an irony in this and the city is, in its own sense, trying to turn this neighborhood preferences, which have been used to discriminate, on its head to enable it to help maintain diversity in the city,” says Iglesias.

This issue also divides fair housing advocates. In New York, for example, a fair housing group has filed suit against that city’s policy of using “community preferences” for affordable housing units, saying it perpetuates segregation.

San Francisco officials met recently with HUD to press their case to use neighborhood preferences. They say the plan is vital to stemming the tide of gentrification that has driven thousands of people of all backgrounds out of the city. The agency agreed to review its decision.

Breed, the city supervisor, says that while she is optimistic, she is also realistic.

“It’s not going to reverse the African-American population in San Francisco. It’s not going to reverse the gentrification that’s also happened in the community,” Breed says. “But what it will do is give just a tad bit of hope to some people who are still struggling to stay here.”

Still, time is short. About 5,000 people applied for the complex’s 98 units, and the lottery is scheduled for next week.

It all began with a shawl.

The year was 1993. Jacqueline de Chollet, a Swiss woman then in her 50s, was on vacation in India when she stopped at a dusty village and saw a woman in a house weaving a shawl.

“She had three or four children including a baby she was nursing in her arms,” de Chollet recalls. “And she looked way older than her age.”

Hoping to provide a little help, de Chollet offered to buy the shawl. “And as soon as I gave her the money a man walked in and took the money away from her.”

De Chollet was outraged. “I felt, this woman — nobody cares about her. She’s off the map. She has no rights.”

And in an odd way, de Chollet also identified with the woman. Odd, because, de Chollet had led a privileged existence as the daughter of a Swiss baron. Still, she says, growing up in the 1950s, she felt her own path in life had also been tightly circumscribed.

“My generation of girls did not go to university in Switzerland. We were sent to secretarial school and then expected to get married.”

Which is precisely what de Chollet had done. After a one-year stint as a secretary in New York, she married a British businessman at age 22 and moved to London to set up house.

“I had three children and lived in a very male-oriented society where women really were not included in the conversation,” she says.

Her early attempts to break free of those constraints were telling. She joined the board of a housing charity in London. At meetings, she says, “one member in particular would often remark that, ‘some of us here have no understanding of financial matters,’ looking straight at me as the only woman on the board. I used to leave in tears some times.”

Eventually, de Chollet had managed to come into her own, becoming the chair of that same charity board and getting involved with women’s rights groups.

Still, standing in the woman’s house in India that day in 1993, she was suddenly struck by the thought that, “there were people talking everywhere at conferences about women’s rights, but who, actually, was going to do anything for that particular woman — and the many women like her?”

Then she thought, “I am.”

In the more than 20 years since, de Chollet, who is now 78, would go on to found a project that has saved almost 200 north Indian village girls from a life of servitude. And she did do so by teaming up with the unlikeliest of partners — a then-18-year-old Indian guy with a knack for computers and no particular plans to tackle the child marriage issue.

The organization they’ve created is called the Veerni Institute. The nonprofit operates a boarding hostel for 75 girls in the city of Jodhpur and pays for them to attend a private middle and high school a short walk away. Its annual budget of just over $150,000 is raised from family foundations and individuals in Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the U.S.

I first visited the Veerni Institute for an NPR report that ran last year and returned to report another story earlier this year.

Talk to the girls there and you quickly get a sense of the Veerni Institute’s impact. Child marriage has been illegal for decades in India. That’s why we can’t disclose any of the girl’s names. But on one of my trips, a bubbly, 16-year-old tells me, people in her village simply ignore the law.

“Our parents just hold the weddings in secret,” she says. “At night — very rushed.” She was married at age 9.

A bunch of other girls nod. They were all married around that age too. A shy girl in a pink T-shirt says she didn’t even understand what was happening at the time. Later, when she realized she’d been married, she says, “I was so sad, because I had really wanted to study.”

And if you’re a child bride, by the time you hit puberty, you’re sent to live with your husband to basically become a servant to your in-laws.

Yet here all these girls are, sitting in their dorm room at the Veerni Institute, talking excitedly about their dream jobs. “I want to be a teacher,” says the shy girl. “I think explaining things to students and seeing their progress would be so satisfying.”

“I want to be a police officer,” says the outgoing one. “They can stand up for themselves and say whatever they want.”

And it’s all possible because the staff of the Veerni Institute have convinced the girls’ parents to agree to a deal: In exchange for the free lodging and tuition Veerni provides, the parents sign a pledge promising to hold off sending the girls to their husbands until they’ve at least finished high school.

It seems like an obvious solution. But the road to get there was anything but simple.

De Chollet began by trying to help women in remote villages get basic health care services including family planning. She and her third husband pitched in about $300,000 of their own funds to pay for a team of medical workers.

There were hiccups from the start. To conform with Indian laws about charitable donations by foreigners, de Chollet had to work through an Indian nonprofit to procure supplies. In the eyes of these Indian colleagues she was a British aristocrat — her second marriage had been to the Viscount of Weir, which had made her the Viscountess of Weir. And when she arrived in Jodhpur for the health team’s inaugural trip, she was horrified to find that the medical team’s van bore a huge sign reading “Viscountess of Weir project.” Not only was she no longer the Viscountess — she’d divorced that husband a few years earlier — but more important she says, laughing, “it sent totally the wrong message! It sounded like something out of the British Raj.”

But the effort had already been widely promoted as “the Lady Weir project.” Can’t you find a name that’s at least similar, her Indian colleagues asked. A friend in Delhi suggested a solution: “Veer” means hero in Hindi; “ni” means woman. How about Veerni? “So it’s the hero-woman!” de Chollet exulted. By 1994 the name was made official.

Despite some early difficulties — including an incident when village men who were opposed to the medical team’s promotion of birth control chased them out and threw stones at the van — de Chollet persevered. It helped that she expanded the services to include health care that even the men would appreciate — glaucoma operations for elders in the villages, for instance, and basic check-ups for children. In each village she hired a man and a woman to work as the group’s contact, providing a source of income. Soon the villages began to warm up to the Veerni Project — so much so that by the early 2000s de Chollet felt it was time to broaden her ambitions into girls’ education.

“Education is the only thing you can do that will change society,” she says. “Everything else is just a band-aid.”

The problem: Village schools in India only go to fifth grade. There are plenty of schools in the city — even relatively low-cost public ones. But parents don’t have a lot of money to spend on lodging. They might raise it for a son but almost certainly not for a daughter.

At first de Chollet tried paying for a tutor to visit the villages for a few hours each week. But the girls’ exam results were abysmal. By 2004 de Chollet had reached two conclusions: She was going to have get the girls into a proper school in the closest city, Jodhpur. And she was going to need a really great local partner.

After all, running a boarding hostel for girls was a full-time enterprise. And though de Chollet was spending as much as six weeks of the year in India, she was based in London.

“You cannot run a project from abroad,” she says. “We needed to create a local leadership that could take the project to where it needed to go.”

As it happened, she’d had her eye on a promising candidate: a young man named Mahendra Sharma. They’d met a few years earlier when he was just a high school student. He was the nephew of Veerni’s accountant in Jodhpur — a city kid who was good with computers and looking for part-time work because his father had recently died and his mother needed support. De Chollet hired him to come in a few hours a week and help set up her charity’s email.

Sharma’s first impression of the Veerni project? “They did not know anything about the internet,” he says, smiling a little.

De Chollet’s first impression of Sharma?

“Well, he was a very shy young man — quite self-effacing.”

De Chollet was working with a more experienced man to recruit girls for the new boarding hostel, but he quit. That guy told Sharma that fathers in the villages were openly opposed to the idea. His meetings with them had gotten tense.

“He said to me, the villagers are too aggressive,” Sharma recalls. “They have become crazy and it’s a very bad idea to bring girls [to the hostel].”

Sharma, by this point a college student, was interested in taking on the challenge. He figured the charity had built up so much good will in the villages by now. If he could just sit with these fathers and talk it through. So night after night he did, fielding questions like: Why don’t you take our boys to be educated. Why are you taking the girls?

“They would say, “What’s the point? [The girls] are not going to remain with us. They’ll go to their in-laws and if they’re over-educated then it will be very difficult for us to get a groom for them.”

Well, Sharma would answer, with an education, a girl can get a job and bring money into the in-laws house. In-laws would want that.

By the end of that first recruiting effort in 2005, the fathers of 39 girls had come around. It was short of the goal. De Chollet had raised enough money to support 60 girls, thanks to years of work with an early partner from Switzerland named Ann Vincent.

Still says Sharma, under the circumstances, “39 felt like a very good number!”

And he decided the Veerni Institute was his calling. No one was more surprised than Sharma. His family had raised him to believe that as a member of the Brahmin caste it was his duty to choose of life of service. But he’d always figured he’d become a doctor.

Now he concluded that he could make a much bigger impact by dedicating himself to the Veerni Institute: “I hadn’t seen anyone who was doing this kind of work.”

He switched his plan of studies. Today, at 30 and officially the director of the Veerni Institute, Sharma has master’s degrees in social science and social work and is working on a Ph.D in rural development studies.

That education has been helpful. But, he says, the biggest learning curve was cultural. Many of the villagers served by Veerni belong to India’s historically marginalized castes. And they were sometimes wary of Sharma, expecting that as Brahmin he would likely treat them with contempt.

So he learned to make an extra effort to make clear he understands he’s no better than them — never wearing sunglasses so he can look everyone in the eye, accepting any drinks offered “even if I don’t want water at that particular time” to avoid creating the impression that he considers the villagers “untouchable.”

The legacy of India’s former caste system created other, more worrisome predicaments for Veerni. The institute was also working with plenty of low-income villagers who belong to the region’s historically dominant caste — the Rajputs. Early on, when Rajput fathers found out their daughters would share quarters with “lower” caste girls, many of them threatened to pull their daughters out.

Go ahead, said Sharma. More than 10 fathers made good on the threat.

But over the years the academic achievements of girls at Veerni have changed the villagers’ views.

Sharma had felt that even if the girls did not perform well on exams, Veerni would do a service by housing them for a few years. In their own homes they were treated so poorly — given less food then their brothers, made to do the heaviest chores, like carrying heavy buckets of water from the well.

“Just having their separate bed, milk in the morning, fruit in the afternoon, would be so entirely different for them,” he says.

But this past year, Sharma was thrilled when for the first time, every single girl in the program passed her final exam, including newcomers who had arrived well below grade-level. Forty of the girls got marks higher than what Sharma himself had managed in high school.

“It gives me a complex sometimes,” he says laughing.

Today parents of all castes beg to send their girls here. Veerni has enough funding for 75 girls and has to turn away nearly 300 a year.

Those cases haunt Sharma. “It’s so difficult saying no to a girl,” he says. “It’s a kind of heartbreak for us.”

And he feels saddest about those who are already married. As with so much else the nonprofit has done, Veerni’s focus on child brides developed organically. Sharma wasn’t trying to recruit child brides per se — just the girls who seemed most in need of help. Invariably, he’d find these were the girls who had already been married off.

As Veerni became popular, Sharma felt emboldened to propose the pledge that parents must now sign, committing to keeping their daughters in school until graduation — even if they’re married.

And last year a group of fathers stunned Jacqueline de Chollet at a meeting when they asked her, how about helping us put our girls through college?

“I was just … I was just speechless,” de Chollet says. “I thought it was so fantastic.”

Now, she says, the nonprofit’s biggest headache is the best kind of problem: How to meet the demand they’ve created. “This should be scaled up. It’s a model that can be replicated. We should have Veerni II, and Veerni III.”

Most gratifying she says, are the reports from the mothers of the girls. When their daughters come home on break they want to be treated the same as their brothers — insisting on getting just as much food, for example. When de Chollet compares their lives to the life of that woman with the shawl all those years ago, she’s overcome with admiration.

“I’m so proud of them,” she says. “No way are they going to have their money taken away from them. No way. No way!”

There might be a small solution to the capital city’s housing problem but it’s not without its roadblocks.

A Juneau company is building its first tiny house on wheels to sell commercially and it intends to make more.

The diminutive dwelling is crafted with reclaimed materials and locally-sourced wood.

But the city’s zoning codes haven’t caught up with the tiny house craze.

For 160 square feet, this rolling home feels pretty spacious. Step inside and you’re greeted with high ceilings and large windows. At this point, it’s still a shell which can make identifying the bathroom tricky.

“Right now, I’m in the bathroom?” I ask.

“Nope, you’re still in the kitchen,” Jason Donig explains.

Donig is the owner of AK Reuse, the company constructing the small home.

It’s in an industrial part of town.

For a guy really passionate about recycled materials, it’s the perfect spot to draw inspiration.

There are crates of mismatched drawer pulls, old doors, a vintage gym floor.

“We got a bidet. I don’t know how cool that is,” he says with a laugh.

The bidet isn’t going in the tiny house, but Donig says other pieces from the yard are. People drop off the items at AK Reuse, and he sells them to customers looking for unique or inexpensive home materials.

As a carpenter, Donig says he was frustrated by what others throw away.

“This business, I feel good when I come here because it’s not taking things apart and putting it in the dump,” Donig said. “I feel good because we’re reusing what we can. And same with the tiny home.”

Donig says he decided to build small because he saw his friends struggling to save up for a mortgage.

This tiny home is on the high-end — it could cost more than $70,000. But he thinks it could be done for less.

If you’ve watched TV lately, then you’re probably familiar with the idea of families willingly downsizing to 200 square feet.

Donig says he hasn’t seen any of these.

“Me either. ‘Cause I’m afraid,” said Beth Mckibben — a planning manager at the City and Borough of Juneau.

McKibben says she’s afraid because she knows the tiny house zoning issue hasn’t been resolved. Yet, the interest in building small is growing.

Some communities in Alaska are skeptical that this is the solution cities should be looking for when it comes to a tight housing market. Wasilla’s city council recently banned tiny houses for a temporary period, due to concerns about landlords building multiple units on a single lot and what it could do to a neighborhood’s character.

In Juneau, the real issue is what do you do with a house that rolls? You can build a 120-square foot-home on a permanent structure. But can you park one if it’s on wheels in your friend’s backyard?

“Depends on where the house might be so it’s a big fat maybe,” she said.

Maybe because it’s not zoned for every location. Tiny houses on wheels can go in mobile home parks — no problem. But it requires a trip to the planning commission before rolling one onto someone’s private lot.

So far, Mckibben says no one has appeared before them to get the ultimate OK. But she thinks it’s only a matter of time before more small homes start popping up.

“Well, for me, that’s a concern right now. If people are going to buy them, they need to know they can place them somewhere,” she said. “They shouldn’t be making an investment not knowing what they can do with that.”

In Sitka, at least one tiny house on wheels is headed before the planning commission. It would be parked in a residential neighborhood. But nothing’s been decided yet.

Mckibben expects the zoning conversation to happen in Juneau later this year.

Back at the building site, Donig is working on what will become the sleeping loft in the tiny house. He’s talked to people who work at the city about what’s coming down the line. And he thinks they’ll be able to work something out that could keep more tiny houses in production.

Still, if he could change one thing — besides the zoning rules — it would be the namesake of the movement.

“The word tiny home makes me think of something really tiny. I don’t want to live in something called a tiny home, but I want to live in something called a modest home,” Donig said.

He expects this “modest home” to be completed by spring, and he wants to build more after that. Just don’t call him that tiny house guy.

Editor’s Note: The photo caption has been expanded to explain Jeff Martinson’s role in the tiny house build. 

By now, Karen Wilk thought she would have sold her five-bedroom house in Colts Neck, New Jersey, and downsized to a smaller home. But she has had to put those plans on hold because her 23-year-old daughter, who is finishing her college degree while working part-time, still lives with her. Wilk’s 27-year-old son moved out two years ago.

“I don’t want to chase my kids out, but I expected them to be more independent by now,” Wilk, 54, said. “I don’t see my kids affording our neighborhood for a long time.”

Almost a third of young adults — 18 to 34 — lived with a parent in 2014, making it the most common living arrangement for that age group for the first time in modern history, according to a study published earlier this year by the Pew Research Center. (The Pew Charitable Trusts funds both the Pew Research Center and Stateline.)

Multiple reasons are behind the trend, lingering effects of the Great Recession, high housing costs and student debt among them. Whatever the causes, millennials in some states are living with their parents in far greater numbers than in others.

In New Jersey, a whopping 43.9 percent of young people are living with at least one parent, according to a Stateline analysis of 2014 census data from IPUMS at the University of Minnesota. Connecticut (38.8 percent) was second and New York (37.4 percent) was third, followed by Florida (37.2 percent) and California (36.7 percent).

States with the fewest young people living with a parent were North Dakota (15.6 percent), Wyoming (18.7 percent), South Dakota (19.7 percent) and Nebraska and Iowa (both 20.7 percent).

Expensive Housing

In New York City and surrounding states, scarce and expensive rental housing is a major factor pushing young adults to return home, said Dowell Myers, a professor of urban planning and demography at the University of Southern California, who wroteabout the economic impact of stay-at-home millennials in a study published earlier this year.

Full nests are also prevalent in other areas where renters are severely burdened by housing costs of more than half of their income, such as Los Angeles, Miami and Orlando.

The high cost of homeownership is also a factor. Renters who might otherwise be homeowners end up renting longer, tying up the supply for those coming up behind them.

“Millennials were doubled up at entry levels of their housing life cycle, blocked by older peers who were unable to turn over their apartments for better homes,” Myerswrote in another study he published this year.

Millennials are the most educated generation ever. But in areas where housing is extraordinarily expensive, a college degree is not necessarily a ticket out of your childhood bedroom.

Lisa Jacobs holds two bachelor’s degrees, one in photography and one in graphic design. But work has been sporadic, so this year she moved back in with her parents in Somerset, New Jersey.

“My parents have a lovely home, but nobody’s happy to be living at home at 32,” Jacobs said, adding that she needs to make at least $20 an hour to afford an apartment. “There are plenty of places that would pay me $15 an hour. But that’s not getting me any closer to moving out.”

A Question of Culture?

But financial stress may be only part of the story. More young people were living with their parents even before the Great Recession hit. Some see cultural factors at work.

Debbie Pincus, a psychotherapist who has counseled parents and adult children who live together in New York City and its suburbs, said many of the parents she helps have a tendency to overshelter their offspring.

“You just have to be careful that you’re not enabling them to avoid going out on their own when they’re ready,” Pincus said. “We baby boomers are very protective of our children. We are less likely to put the kids out and say, ‘Figure it out for yourselves.’ ”

Resurgent ethnic traditions may be another factor: In the New York metropolitan area, most adult children of Italian heritage live with parents.

Jason Cerillo, 28, still lives with his parents in the predominantly Italian-American suburb of West Harrison, New York. He said there’s a cultural understanding that he can stay until he gets married.

“My dad is Italian, and he says, ‘Oh, stay as long as you want, but we do want to retire.’ So I am under some pressure here,” Cerillo said, adding that many of his high-school classmates in the neighborhood also live with their parents.

In the New York area, “co-residence” rates are also high for people with Irish, Dominican, Puerto Rican and African-American roots.

Debt and Underemployment

Cerillo said his monthly student loan payment — $500 — has made it hard for him to move out of his parents’ place, despite having made as much as $42,000 a year working for a software company. He said he hopes to pay down his debt to $20,000 before striking out on his own.

Student loan and credit card debt keeps many young adults at home.

And underemployment among young people like Jacobs in New Jersey, who can’t find the work they trained for, is also a factor, said Christopher McCarty, director of Florida’s Bureau of Economic and Business Research.

Florida’s official unemployment rate is 5 percent. But McCarty points out that 10.6 percent of workers are unemployed or underemployed, with low-paid jobs they are overqualified for or part-time jobs when they would rather work full-time.

The underemployment rate is 11.7 percent in California, where Kelley Lonergan, 28, said she had to move back to her parents’ home near Los Angeles four years ago. She lived in a room still decorated with her brother’s video-game posters and kept her clothes on the floor because his closets were still full.

With an English degree from Brown, Lonergan said she got a part-time school communications job but couldn’t find full-time work.

The house got even more crowded when her older brother moved back in for a spell. She wrote about the comfort and frustration of living with her parents.

She said she was relieved to finally move out earlier this year. “I had been living with four people and now I’m living alone and it’s great.”

Numbers Game

Myers, the USC professor, predicts that a coming dip in the number of young adults may allow a greater percentage of them to finally find their own housing.

The number of 25-year-olds has increased every year since 2005, but is projected to start decreasing next year and for the next five years. That’s likely to free up apartments and jobs for younger people at an increasing rate until 2022.

Robert Dietz, an economist for the National Association of Home Builders, said some cities were slow to adapt to the growth by building more apartments, but are catching up now. He expects older millennials to start buying single-family homes and freeing up apartments.

“Housing is like a ladder — when there are blockages, it backs up the whole thing, and the millennials are having a hard time getting onto the bottom rung,” Dietz said.