How Vacating Seniors Will Crash the Housing Market

The great senior sell-off, rising household sizes, dropping homeownership, tighter lending standards, and other reasons why the next decade will be a disaster for homebuilders, writes Robert Steuteville.

1 minute read

April 29, 2011, 9:00 AM PDT

By Tim Halbur

Arthur C. Nelson, an urban planning professor at the University of Utah, spoke on the housing market recently at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Nelson says one of the problems with the future of the U.S.'s housing stock is that when seniors leave single-family homes, the market is no longer there to fill them:

"When those 65 and older move, 80 percent vacate single-family houses, but only 41 percent move into single-family units. The rest - 59 percent - move into multifamily buildings for a variety of reasons such as low maintenance and proximity to services. That's a huge shift coming from the decade's fastest growing demographic group."

Thanks to Robert Steuteville

FULL STORY: The coming housing calamity

Thursday, April 28, 2011 in New Urban Network

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