Donald Garcia, 35, and his wife, Augustine, were living in a Burbank apartment when Augustine's mother approached them for help. She had refinanced her three-bedroom Tujunga home a year and a half earlier with an interest-only loan, and what had been a $900 monthly house payment had doubled.
"Her mortgage company told her she couldn't refinance for seven years, so we moved in to help out," says Garcia, who added that a change in his apartment's pet policy would have forced a move anyway.
Then, a few months ago, more change: Augustine lost her $60,000-a-year job as a manager at a hardware store. Garcia, trained as an electrician's assistant, could find no such work following the collapse of the housing market, so he started driving a tow truck. Now he and Augustine, he says, owe money to her mother because they haven't been able to help much with household expenses.
"It's hard because I've been living on my own since I was 17," Garcia says. "We went in like roommates -- we wouldn't be in her business, and she wouldn't be in ours. She lived here alone for the last six years, and to have her son-in-law and daughter back -- I'm sure it's been hard on her not having her own privacy."
First, the subprime meltdown and housing market collapse, then the woes on Wall Street, now mounting layoffs. Each has contributed to a phenomenon that many Southern Californians never imagined they would have to face: moving back home with mom or dad after years -- sometimes decades -- of being on their own.
An AARP study released in September reported that more than a quarter of the foreclosures and delinquencies in the second half of 2007 involved homeowners ages 50 or older -- and that was before giant drops in the stock market unraveled the financial safety net for many midcareer Americans.
No reliable figures yet exist on the number of adults forced to move in with parents because of the financial crises, but it's clear this group consists of older, previously well-established homeowners as well as people such as 29-year-old Ondor Ozer of West L.A. In 2006, Ozer was working in retail when he decided to buy a 3,500-square-foot house in Hemet with plans to find a new job nearby. After a year without success, he realized he'd have to lose the house to foreclosure or rent it out and move back in with his parents. He chose the latter.
