Greg Toppo and Paul Overberg

USA TODAY

About one in four households now have only one person

One-person households triple since 1970

2 million more Americans living alone than in 2007

Living alone? You've got company.

More than one in four households had just a single person in 2012, greater than at any time in the past century, according to new Census Bureau findings. In 1970, one-person households accounted for just under one in six. In 1900, it was one in 20.

Americans are marrying later, having fewer children, divorcing at higher rates and living longer — all of which add up to this: At some point, many will find themselves living alone, perhaps temporarily, says Robert Lang, a professor of urban affairs at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas.

The sheer number of Americans living alone has more than tripled since 1970 to 33.2 million.

Even the recent recession failed to put a dent in the slow, steady rise. Since 2007, 2 million more Americans have said they live alone, according to Census statistics out Tuesday.

Lang cautions that the new findings don't necessarily show that Americans want to live alone. The findings, he says, are a kind of stage-of-life snapshot.

Lang says the rate of one-person households would be even higher except for large families emigrating to the USA from Latin America and Asia.

Likewise, Daniel Lichter, director of Cornell University's Population Center, says non-traditional family arrangements of all types are crowding out two-parent households.

He notes that recent figures from the National Center for Health Statistics found that more than one in five first children were born to unmarried, cohabiting couples.

Tuesday's figures show that the share of households consisting of married couples with children has declined by half since 1970, from 40% to 20%.

Other findings:

--Between 2005 and 2011, the number of households that had children and at least one unemployed parent rose by 33%.

--In the same period, home ownership among households with children declined by 15%. The six states with the steepest drops in home ownership among this group were Michigan (23%), Arizona and California (22% each), Ohio (20%) and New Hampshire and Florida (19% each).