This month, Washington Post writer Jonathan Coppage made a statement that surprised no one: “Kids are living with their parents longer.” But Coppage took this idea one step further into territory few are willing to go.

“It’s a good thing” that adult kids are living with parents longer, he argues. Kids and parents can pool their resources, and mark life’s milestones together. Not only is it a good thing, he writes: “it’s downright natural.” Why? “Historical data suggests that the wholly independent nuclear-family household may be the aberration — that patterns of close familial support are the more natural arrangement.”

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In other words, it’s totally normal and historically unremarkable to live with your parents and the notion that it’s abnormal — that you’re a loser if you aren’t out of the house by age 30 and in possession of a furnished property of your own — is actually what’s atypical: before World War II, Coppage explains, multi-generational living was the way things were done.

Young people helped out around their parents’ homes, having and raising kids in said homes, often with the babysitting assistance of their much older roommates: i.e. their grandparents, long before grandparents had the means to live in nursing facilities and sit on condo boards in Boca Raton.

This history lesson is much needed encouragement for anybody who hasn’t “figured it all out” by the time they’ve grown their first grey hair, but it’s especially relevant to the young citizens of Toronto for whom an independent nuclear-family household is about as obtainable as the key to the city — maybe less so.

According to a story from last week in this newspaper, condo research company Urbanation reports that the average rent in Toronto has surpassed $2,000. Forget about buying an affordable home or condo. Good luck renting one.

For a single Torontonian who isn’t wildly rich, living with one’s parents shouldn’t be a source of shame — a fact you never bring up on a date — because in this economy, it’s a sensible thing to do. But it’s not, as Coppage argues, a particularly good thing.

I don’t believe multi-generational living situations are always positive because they are indicative — when applied to my own city — of an affordable housing crisis. I suspect that most millennial Torontonians don’t live with their parents because they’d like to make valuable memories together, but do so because they can’t afford to live elsewhere.

The only good that can come of an uptick in this type of living, I think, is that the stigma around residing with one’s parents home is slowly eroding. At least it seems that way. Nobody I know who lives with mom and dad is especially proud of this fact, but there’s a shared understanding among a lot of millennial Torontonians that desperate times call for desperate measures. And choosing to live under your parents’ roof well into your 20s is for many people their only shot at saving aggressively and one day owning a property of their own.

In other words, it’s the least lazy, loser-ish thing a person can do.

Another positive development: the media narrative around struggling millennials has softened. Only a few years ago, the consensus appeared to be that we were the authors of our many woes. We’re lazy; we aren’t “self-starters.”

Today, the narrative is consistently more sympathetic, particularly in Toronto, where the housing crisis makes statements such as “in my day, we pulled ourselves up by our bootstraps” ring fantastically hollow. Boomers, like millennials and their peers, are beginning to recognize that most people don’t live with parents unless they have a pretty good reason for doing so. And $2,000-a-month rent is a great reason, especially when it may not even guarantee you an above-ground apartment.

That’s right: rental basements aren’t even affordable anymore. You’d be hard pressed to find a decent one in the city for under $1,200.

Living in your parents’ basement seems a far more sensible option than renting somebody else’s for a small fortune.

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And if you’re lucky, there’s a separate entrance.