Multigenerational living fell out of fashion for much of the postwar era, bottoming out around 1970 as families spread into their own separate households. It has been climbing back ever since, and now sits at its highest level in more than fifty years, with roughly 18 percent of Americans, close to 60 million people, living across generations under one roof.

Most of the coverage treats this as a story of necessity, young adults priced out, boomerang kids, the economics of student debt and rent. For much of the country, that is the real driver. But at the high end, something different is happening, and it is a matter of choice rather than constraint.

Affluent families are increasingly buying to be near one another on purpose. In its 2024 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers, the National Association of Realtors found that 17 percent of buyers purchased a multigenerational home, the highest share since the organization began tracking the figure in 2013, up from 14 percent the year before. Gen X led the way at 21 percent. The language of listings has shifted to match: The Agency’s 2026 mid-year report, drawing on Realtor.com data, found that terms like multigenerational, casita, and compound nearly doubled in frequency in two years, from 2.5 percent of listings in early 2024 to 4.9 percent by early 2026.

At the top of the market, the preferred form is the compound. Rather than one large house shared under a single roof, families assemble adjacent parcels or large properties with several structures, so that each generation keeps its own home, its own entrance, and its own privacy, while sharing the land in between. Proximity without compromise. Grandparents a short walk from grandchildren, adult children close but independent; everyone gathered on common ground without anyone living on top of anyone else.

Part of what is driving this is the largest wealth transfer in history. An estimated $100 trillion will pass from older generations over the coming decades, and families are thinking carefully about what to do with it. A compound answers more than one question at once. It keeps the family close, it holds wealth in real estate, the asset class many of these families trust most, and it creates something durable to pass down, a place rather than simply a sum. The Agency’s report calls the result a kind of “family alignment asset”: a single holding that consolidates family capital in appreciating property, keeps it under unified ownership rather than scattered across separate transactions, and preserves both the wealth and the family’s connection to one another in the same stroke.

There is a cultural shift underneath the financial one. The stigma that once attached to grown children living near their parents has largely faded, replaced by a renewed value placed on being together, on raising children near their grandparents, on the kind of daily closeness that earlier generations gave up in the name of independence. For families with the means to design it deliberately, the compound offers both at once: the togetherness of the old multigenerational household and the autonomy of separate homes.