OLD FOLKS AT HOME
In Retirement, We’re Still Living in Our Dream Home
Someday we will move. It is not this day.
As a Grumpy Old Man, I’m used to telling kids to stay out of my yard. Now, however, the kids are standing on my grass with their real estate agents, eyeing my house and looking for any signs that I might die — or at least sell — soon.
Several recent articles on Medium and elsewhere suggest that Boomers like me are bunkered inside our roomy homes, taking up valuable square footage and extra bedrooms that could help relieve a housing market as compressed as my arteries. I believe the message being sent is that it is my wife’s and my civic duty to vacate and find a nice senior living ice-floe somewhere.
But have you priced senior living ice-floes lately?
Boomers Bought Up the Big Homes. Now They’re Not Budging. WSJ, April 13, 2024
About 28% of all U.S. homes with three or more bedrooms are owned by people between the ages of 60 and 78 living by themselves or with another adult, according to a Redfin analysis of 2022 census data. Millennials living with children own just 14% of these bigger homes.
I’m not unsympathetic. My housing history as a young man, and later as a young married person, was often challenging. I’ve lived in some…
