In many cities, people increasingly live alone rather than with family or housemates.

In modern cities, more and more people live alone instead of living with their parents, their partner or other people. In my opinion, this change has both good and bad sides, but overall it is more positive.

Firstly, living alone gives a person independence. He can decide everything himself: when to eat, when to sleep, how to decorate his flat and who to invite. Young people also learn to be responsible, because they must cook, clean and pay all the bills without help from their family. These are important skills for adult life.

Secondly, it is a sign that people have more money and more freedom than before. In the past, many women could not leave their family home until marriage, and old people had no choice but to live with their children. Today they can choose.

On the other hand, there are problems. A person who lives alone can feel lonely, especially if he works from home and does not meet colleagues. Loneliness is dangerous for mental health and can cause depression. In addition, one person in one flat uses more electricity and more space than a family, so this is not good for the environment, and it also makes housing more expensive in big cities.

In conclusion, although living alone creates some risks, I think it is mainly a positive development because it shows that people are free to choose how they want to live.

Single-person households are increasing rapidly in most developed countries. On balance I regard this as a positive development, although it creates pressures that societies have not yet addressed.

The trend is best understood as a consequence of rising prosperity and expanded choice. Living alone is expensive, and the fact that so many people now can is itself evidence of higher incomes and greater independence. The groups whose behaviour has changed most are revealing: young adults who no longer remain in the family home until marriage, women who are no longer required to move directly from a father's household to a husband's, and older people who can maintain their own home rather than depending on children. In each case the alternative was not a warmer family life but an absence of options.

It is also important to separate the arrangement from the outcome. Living alone is not the same as being isolated: many people who live alone see friends daily, while a person in a crowded household can be profoundly lonely. The correlation exists but it is much weaker than the usual commentary assumes, and treating the two as identical produces the wrong diagnosis.

The genuine costs lie elsewhere. Smaller households consume more housing, heating and appliances per person, so the same population needs considerably more homes and more energy — a real problem where housing is already scarce. More seriously, families historically supplied enormous quantities of unpaid care to the very old and the unwell, and as households shrink that care must be bought or provided publicly, at costs few systems have prepared for.

In conclusion, I view the trend positively, because it reflects freedoms that did not previously exist. The care and housing consequences, however, are substantial and will require deliberate planning rather than nostalgia.

The rise in people living alone is usually reported as evidence of social fragmentation. I think that reading has the causation backwards, and that the trend is better understood as what happens when large numbers of people can finally afford an arrangement they previously could not. On that basis I regard it as positive, with two consequences that are serious and largely unaddressed.

The most telling evidence is in who has changed. Living alone is costly, so the ability to do it tracks income closely; it is a revealed preference that only becomes visible once it is affordable. The groups driving the increase are young adults no longer obliged to stay in the parental home until marriage, women no longer moving directly from one household's authority to another's, and older people — particularly widows — able to keep their own home rather than being absorbed into a child's. In each case, what has disappeared is not companionship but compulsion. Describing that as decline requires treating the earlier arrangement as freely chosen, which for a great many of those people it was not.

The loneliness objection needs care, because it conflates a household arrangement with a social outcome. These are only weakly related: someone living alone in a dense neighbourhood may see friends daily, while a person in a full house can be entirely isolated within it. Household size is a poor proxy for connection, and using it as one leads to the wrong remedies — the answer to isolation is not persuading people to share kitchens but designing places where contact is easy and unforced.

The costs that are real lie in resources and in care. Smaller households consume disproportionately more per capita — separate heating, separate appliances, separate square metres — so a population that has not grown can still require substantially more housing and energy, which is a genuine problem in cities already short of both.

Far more consequential is informal care. Families have always provided an enormous, uncosted volume of it: checking on the elderly, nursing short illnesses, noticing decline early. Solo households do not eliminate that need; they simply remove the person who used to meet it, and it reappears as paid care, delayed hospital discharges and emergencies that nobody caught in time. This is the part of the trend societies have genuinely failed to plan for, and it will be expensive.

My verdict is therefore positive, but qualified rather than comfortable. The change reflects a real expansion of autonomy, and I would not want it reversed; the obligation it creates is to build the care infrastructure that families were quietly providing for free.