Baby boomers want to age in place. U.S. houses aren’t designed for them to do that

Just 10 percent of homes are set up to accommodate older adults.

Baby boomers don’t want to go to a senior care facility — 8 in 10 in fact say they’d rather age in place. The problem? Most houses aren’t designed for older adults.

While about 94 percent of the 115 million homes in the U.S. had at least one aging-accessible feature, a 2020 Census Bureau report shows that just 10 percent were ready to accommodate older residents. In other words, they had an entryway with no steps, a bedroom and bathroom on the first floor, and one or more bathroom accessibility features.

By the end of this decade, the entire baby boomer generation will be 65 or older. A good portion are already reporting trouble aging in place in their current homes. Twenty-eight percent of older adults have trouble using some part of their home without assistance, the Census Bureau report shows, citing 2011 American Housing Survey data. That might mean getting up stairs, turning stiff faucets, getting into or out of their shower, or reaching kitchen cabinets.

That makes it not terribly surprising that about 1 in 3 adults say they will need to make major repairs or modifications as they or other family members age, according to the 2021 Home and Community Preference Survey from AARP.

What’s highest on the priority list? Of those who expect to make changes to their home, 79 percent anticipate making bathroom modifications. That’s followed by 7 in 10 who plan on making home access modifications at the entryway and/or inside the home, and 6 in 10 who will install a medical emergency response system.

Not an affordable option for everyone

But many elderly people may have trouble affording those types of accessibility changes. Home remodeling and care services get expensive quickly and aren’t always covered by medical insurers or government programs, according to the authors of a recent report on housing from the Hastings Center and the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University.

The median cost of hiring a home health aide, for instance, is upward of $5,000 a month, according to estimates from Genworth, an insurance company. Putting in safety features, like grab bars or sink handles (instead of knobs) in a bathroom can cost in the hundreds. And a medical response system, which is usually based on a monthly subscription, can be as much as $90 each month.

As of 2019, more than 10 million households headed by someone aged 65 or older were cost-burdened (in other words, they spent more than one-third of their income on housing). About half of those households had spent more than 50 percent of their income on housing. People of color, renters, people with low incomes and the oldest age groups were disproportionately affected.

For many older adults, Social Security benefits are the main income source. Between 2006 and 2016, those payments rose just 6 percent compared to the median rent, which increased by more than twice that rate, the authors of the Hastings Center’s report wrote.

About 29 percent of 7.8 million households with the worst-case housing needs in 2019 were headed by older adults, ages 62 and older, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s 2021 report to Congress.

The pandemic only worsened many of these affordability concerns for older households, especially during the economic recession, the Hastings Center said in its report. Many older people, and particularly people of color, lost income, whether because of cuts to their own wages or to a family member’s.

“When housing costs consume a large portion of household budgets, older adults often sacrifice on other necessities,” the authors of the Hastings report wrote. That means spending less on food and healthcare than otherwise similar households do.

“The key to ending worst-case housing needs is increasing affordable housing,” the Housing and Urban Development Department wrote in its report.

Where you age in place can make a big difference

For baby boomers who want to age in place, it helps to live in places where houses are more likely to have features that are better for older Americans. In the mid-Atlantic, for instance, just 6 percent of homes have accessibility features that are naturally part of the area’s home style, according to census data. That’s compared to 14 percent of homes in Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas that were aging-ready.

One issue is the number of floors a home has. Multistory homes are more common in New England and the mid-Atlantic, where they make up about 90 percent of housing units in those areas. Why? Less land, for one. So instead of going out, houses went up. Out West and down South, where land is more readily available, single-story homes are more typical (and also cheaper to cool in warmer climates).

Another factor in these regional differences is the age of the housing stock. Houses skew older in the Northeast, with the median year built being 1958 for the mid-Atlantic and 1963 for New England. By comparison, the median build year for houses further west are in the 1980s. (States with higher rates of population growth tend to have newer homes.)

It’s possible, the census report said, that renovations in the Northeast might be limited in scope simply because making modifications would be more extensive and expensive because the houses are older. Not to mention, the bedrooms and full bathrooms are often on the second story of a multistory home.

The good news: The older you are, the more equity you’re likely to have — for some

Compared with their younger counterparts, older adults are more likely to be homeowners and to have paid off their mortgages.

About 79 percent of adults ages 50 and older say they own their home, with half of them saying they’ve fully paid off their mortgages, AARP survey data shows. By comparison, half of adults ages 18 to 49 identify as homeowners, with less than a quarter having paid off their mortgage.

Older adults are also less likely to be renters. About 19 percent of adults ages 50 and over rent their homes, compared with 39 percent of younger adults.

For many older adults, home equity can represent a significant portion of total net worth. Even when median incomes are similar, older homeowners have greater wealth than older renters, according to the Hastings Center’s analysis of data from the Federal Reserve Board’s 2016 Survey of Consumer Finances.

The median older homeowner, for instance, had a net worth of $319,200 and home equity of $143,500 in 2016. The renter, though, had a net worth of about $6,700.

Of course, not everyone has had equal access to home equity, with lasting impacts on today’s aging population.

“A long history of racial discrimination in the real estate market and housing finance — often codified through government policies — have restricted housing options and housing quality for Black Americans, while white Americans have received more opportunities to buy homes in communities where housing increased in value,” the authors of the Hastings Center’s 2020 report wrote.

“Policies that limited access to mortgages and investment in neighborhoods of color also limited Black Americans’ ability to use homebuying as a tool for investment, inhibiting intergenerational wealth transfer and resulting in starkly different financial resources in late life by race,” they added.

Baby boomers will move out but prefer a private home to a senior facility

Despite the majority wanting to age in place, a good portion of baby boomers do move to smaller homes or apartments later in life.

At 42 percent, baby boomers make up the largest share of home sellers in the last year, according to a 2022 report from the National Association of Realtors.

Where are they going? When selling their homes, baby boomers were more likely to downsize and move the furthest distances, compared to other generations, to be closer to friends and family members, the data shows. Members of the Silent Generation, ages 78 to 93, were most likely to move to be closest to family and buy the smallest homes.

AARP data suggests many baby boomers take this approach in hopes of avoiding nursing homes or other long-term care facilities. About half of adults say they’d consider leaving their home if it meant finding one that would help them age independently, AARP found.

And then there’s the market

But when looking to sell a home, the market doesn’t always cooperate.

Selling their homes at the top of a real estate boom can be great for baby boomers looking to cash out, Forbes reported last November. But trying to sell at the bottom of a bust can spell out bad news.

“If that life emergency happens at the bottom of a bust, it just makes things a lot worse for them during one of the most difficult times in their lives,” the outlet reported. “Those last-home sellers have less discretion on when they sell than first-home buyers have on when they buy.”

Thanks to Lillian Barkley for copy editing this article.

Anna Deen

Baby boomers want to age in place. U.S. houses aren’t designed for them to do that