Going back to get ahead? Privilege and generational housing wealth.

• Co-residence with parents is a form of intergenerational housing wealth. • Co-residence consolidates wealth inequality. • Privilege can have different registers: having/being/doing. • Privilege as an analytic frame can evaluate the unearned advantage of co-residence. • Co-residence can function as a safety net, saving time, money, and effort. This paper uses privilege as an analytic frame to examine millennials' co-residence with parents, connecting research on privilege, intergenerational transfers, and housing. I pull apart the concept of privilege, examining how having, being and doing privilege fit the experience of co-residence: Having privilege situates privilege as a resource—having a place to stay that is often rent-free puts some young adults well ahead of their peers in terms of paying down debt and saving for the future. Being privileged is about sense of self—some participants feel lucky to be able to live with parents, but others are ashamed. Doing privilege pays attention to how young adults create privilege through their actions, emphasizing that privilege (and its reproduction) is an ongoing process. Ultimately, this paper argues that digging into different registers of housing privilege offers lessons about how privilege operates more generally and how inequality can grow over generations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]