More People Live Alone Yet Choose Shared Housing for Surprising Reasons

The Lonely City’s New Roommates

You know the story. More of us live alone than ever before. In Europe, solo dwellers make up 39% of all households. In the US, 28%. In Japan, 34%. The narrative has been clear: we are individualizing, atomizing, choosing freedom over commitment. We are the generation that prefers experiences to possessions.

But here is the twist. A growing number of people who could live alone are choosing not to. They are moving into shared housing. Not because they have to, but because they want to. And the reasons are not what you think.

A 2021 paper by Druta, Ronald, and Heath, published in Social & Cultural Geography, takes a hard look at this paradox. The authors argue that the rise of shared housing among urban singles is not just a story of economic desperation or millennial laziness. It is something stranger and more revealing about how we live now.

“Shared housing, in all its forms from peer-to-peer sharing and co living to cooperatives, can no longer be viewed as just a marginal tenure,” they write. It is becoming mainstream. But why?

The Myth of the Solo Paradise

The standard explanation for why people live alone is simple: individualization. We have more money, more freedom, and less interest in traditional family structures. We want our own space. We want to eat dinner at 10 PM and watch whatever we want on the TV.

But the authors point out a contradiction. If living alone is so great, why are so many urban singles turning to shared housing? The answer, they find, is not that people have suddenly become communal. It is that the solo dream has cracked.

In major cities across high-income economies, the ability of single people to “pursue independent housing careers has been narrowing” (Druta et al., 2021). Homeownership, long the gold standard of adult independence, is slipping away. The gap between wanting to own a home and actually being able to afford one has grown into a chasm. So people are “opting for, or ending up in, alternative tenures,” chiefly shared private renting.

But here is where the research gets interesting. The authors argue that we have been telling the wrong story about this shift. The popular narrative is that young people are making a lifestyle choice: they prefer experiences over mortgages, travel over stability. The authors call this “misleading.” It ignores the “precarious position of sharers and exploitative forms of shared housing that may trap vulnerable people in shared living situations” (Druta et al., 2021).

In other words, some people are choosing shared housing. But many are being pushed into it by a housing market that no longer works for singles.

The Togetherness Trap

The paper draws a crucial distinction. On the surface, shared housing looks like a return to community. Co-living companies market themselves as utopian villages for digital nomads. Advertisements show smiling twenty-somethings drinking wine on a rooftop. The language is all about “likemindedness” and “togetherness.”

But the authors are skeptical. They note that this framing “has seen forms of shared housing (e.g. co living) conflated with collective and collaborative forms of housing (e.g. cohousing).” These are not the same thing.

Cohousing is a genuine alternative. Residents own their units, make decisions together, and build real community. Co-living is often something else entirely: a commercial product, sold by real estate platforms, where residents pay high rents for small rooms and the promise of curated social events.

The authors describe shared housing as “the next step in individualized, commoditized and financialized housing provision in (global) cities.” It is not a rejection of capitalism. It is capitalism’s latest innovation. You get to feel like you are part of a community while the landlord (or the platform) takes a cut.

This is the trap. The desire for connection is real. But the market is happy to sell it back to you, packaged and priced.

Who Shares and Why

The study draws on interviews and survey data from urban singles in multiple countries. The authors do not give a single number for how many sharers are choosing versus being forced into it. But they identify three distinct groups.

The first group are the adventurous consumers. These are mobile professionals, digital nomads, people who move between global cities for work. For them, shared housing is a lifestyle choice. It offers flexibility, social connections, and a way to meet people in a new city. They are the ones who might actually prefer a shared apartment to a solo one.

The second group are the precarious sharers. These are people who would prefer to live alone but cannot afford it. They are stuck in shared housing, often in exploitative conditions. The authors warn that this group is growing as housing costs rise and wages stagnate.

The third group are the intentional communitarians. These are people who genuinely want to live with others, not just for economic reasons but for social and ethical ones. They are the ones joining cohousing projects or forming intentional communities. They are the smallest group.

The problem, the authors argue, is that these three groups are often lumped together. The narrative of choice (group one) is used to justify the exploitation of group two. The language of community (group three) is co-opted by companies selling group two a product they cannot afford to refuse.

The City as a Sorting Machine

The urban dimension is critical. The paper notes that shared housing is concentrated in dense, expensive cities. This is not an accident. Cities are where the jobs are, where the young people are, and where the housing crisis is worst.

The authors describe a process of “youthification and studentification.” Young singles are drawn to urban centers, but they are priced out of solo living. So they share. This creates a new kind of urban geography: neighborhoods dominated by young professionals in shared apartments, with high turnover and little community stability.

This is not the same as the old model of roommates. In the past, sharing was often a temporary phase: you lived with friends until you got a real job and a real apartment. Now, for many people, sharing has become a permanent condition. The authors cite research showing that shared housing can “trap vulnerable people in shared living situations” (Druta et al., 2021).

The irony is thick. The city promises freedom and autonomy. But for many singles, it delivers a cramped room in a shared apartment, with a lease that renews every 12 months and a landlord you never meet.

What the Research Does Not Prove

The paper is careful about its limits. It does not claim that all shared housing is bad. It does not argue that everyone who shares is a victim. Some people genuinely prefer it. The authors acknowledge that “references to likemindedness and togetherness” are not entirely false.

What the paper does is show that the story is more complicated than the marketing suggests. The rise of shared housing is not just a cultural shift. It is a structural one, driven by changes in the housing market, the labor market, and the nature of cities.

The open question is: how much of this is choice and how much is constraint? The paper cannot answer that definitively. It can only show that the line between the two is blurrier than we think.

Another open question is whether shared housing can be reformed. Could it become a genuine alternative to solo living, rather than a fallback? The authors are skeptical, but they leave the door open. They note that some forms of sharing, like cooperatives, have a long history of being both affordable and communal.

What This Actually Means

• ▸If you are a single person considering shared housing, ask yourself: are you choosing it or settling for it? The answer matters. If you are choosing it, great. If you are settling, be honest about what you are giving up. The research shows that people who feel trapped in shared housing are at risk of exploitation.

• ▸If you are a policymaker, stop treating shared housing as a niche lifestyle choice. It is now a mainstream housing tenure. That means it needs regulation. Minimum standards for room sizes, lease protections, and limits on fees charged by co-living platforms are all overdue.

• ▸If you are a journalist, stop writing the “millennials prefer experiences” story without checking the numbers. The authors call this narrative “misleading.” It obscures the real economic pressures that push people into sharing. Check the rent-to-income ratios in your city before you write that next trend piece.

• ▸If you are a developer or investor, do not confuse co-living with community. The paper warns that co-living is often just financialized housing dressed up in social language. Real community requires ownership, stability, and democratic control. If you are building a co-living project, ask whether your residents will have any real say in how it is run.

• ▸If you are a renter who feels stuck, know that you are not alone. The numbers are stark: 39% of European households are solo dwellers, but a growing share of them are sharing. This is not a personal failing. It is a systemic shift. The solution is not to blame yourself for not earning enough. It is to demand housing that works for single people, whether that means affordable solo apartments or well-regulated shared housing.