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"The Boomerang Kids - Dropping Standards in a World of Rising Debts"
Blake Ragghianti

His room is shockingly cluttered; a space hardly the size of an average utility closet packed with the contents of an average warehouse. Piles of books, CD's, DVD's, posters and photographs cover shelves and dresser tops. Half-sheeted, a mattress stands askew in the center of the room, a half closed eye in a hurricane of crumpled clothing, scattered shoes, a sea of mateless socks and an upside down pair of roller-blades poised to attack the unwary trespasser. This is the room of Tommy Carr, 26, a 2005 top-of-the-class graduate from Duquesne University. But this isn't a dorm room and certainly not an apartment. You see, Tommy Carr is a "Boomerang Kid." Following high school, he moved away from home onto a college campus for four years but was unsuccessful at finding a job and was forced to move back home. After months of intense job searching, he was hired by an out of state company, shortly thereafter to be permanently laid off. Inevitably, he once again had to seek refuge

in the home of his parents.
"The fact of the matter is; soaring housing rates, sky high fuel costs, a brutally tight job market and a downward spiraling economy are all factors forcing the middle-class American standard of living toward that of another Great Depression," says Nicholas Garruba, Vice President of Brentwood Bank's Corporate Loans Department in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. According to AHP, a Pittsburgh based, multi-family housing consultation and location service, average rent for a "good-quality, one-bedroom" apartment varies between $600 and $700, that is, if you don't mind a 45 minute to one hour commute twice a day. The truth is, living even on the edge of the city would cost you almost double that, at $800 to $1100. Housing prices like these coupled with skyrocketing tuition prices (up 20% in the last decade) and it's no wonder nearly 58% of graduates are moving back home while 37% of them are forced to stay there for over two years.
"My home will always be open to my son," says Patricia Carr, "but when Tommy got a job and moved out, we remodeled his bedroom into an office for his father and me. After he was laid-off, he had nowhere else to go and his new job certainly didn't cover his basic costs of living. We did the best we could to make room for him back here at home."
Carr now lives in his parent's basement, an old den converted into a makeshift

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