Households Changed; Housing Hasn't

BIGGER PICTURE | We don't live in the 1960s anymore, so North Carolina shouldn't zone like it.

The life of the typical adult American, 1960 vs 2014. The chart was created by Hamilton Lombard at UVA's Cooper Center and calculated from Census surveys using IPUMS, University of Minnesota, as well as from Centers for Disease Control vital statistics data.

"The decline of the nuclear family is in large part due to changes in the way we live," writes demographer Hamilton Lombard from UVa's Cooper Center.

Sometimes people blame the sharp decline in the proportion of nuclear-family households on "family values," when in large part it's because of good things such as improved longevity and better education leading to later marriage. Lombard charted "the portion of the adult population within the common age range to have a family (highlighted in the chart above)," which went from 61% in 1960 to 32% in 2014.