As Boomers Retire With Record Housing Wealth, Finding Accessible Housing Is A Challenge

Despite being the beneficiaries of historic increases in home-price appreciation during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, older baby boomers — many of whom are approaching the age of 80 in 2025 — are now finding themselves challenged by a dearth of housing inventory that can best accommodate living in later life.

This is according to a recent story published by Business Insider, which characterizes the dynamic as partially of the generation’s own making. Baby boomers are now “beginning to suffer from their own housing woes: a severe shortage of accessible and affordable retirement homes,” which are compounded by “the rising costs of healthcare and elder care,” according to the report.

Mortgage rates remain high and for-sale inventory remains low, while an overwhelming majority of baby boomers (78%) stated in a survey from Redfin that they have no intention of moving out of their current homes. A separate survey from Redfin also found that homeownership tenures in the same house are rising significantly.

“Is it aging in place or is it stuck in place?” Jennifer Molinsky, the director of Harvard University’s Housing an Aging Society Program, told the outlet. “There’s a lot of people in the middle, homeowners included, who are stuck.”

One of the reasons that boomers may be having these challenges could come down to restrictive land-use policies, according to the article.

These include laws “prohibiting apartment buildings in areas with single-family homes, [which] have made accessible housing options harder to find in many of the communities boomers have called home for decades,” the article states. “Less than 4% of US homes have the three essential factors necessary for those with limited mobility: a single floor, wide hallways and doorways, and no steps to get in, the Harvard report found.”

Older homeowners are also struggling with rising insurance premiums, particularly if they’re still paying off forward mortgages.

“Nationally, home-insurance premiums rose by an average of 21% from May 2022 to May 2023, Policygenius, an insurance marketplace, found. Insurance companies are increasingly dropping customers and pulling out of entire regions, particularly those hardest hit by climate-related disasters,” according to Business Insider.

While baby boomers as a cohort have largely benefited from the run-up in home prices, the generation’s wealth is far from evenly distributed. Older renters and homeowners of color endure “much higher housing costs,” while Molinsky’s 2023 report on housing trends indicated that older Black homeowners “had less than half the home equity of older white homeowners.”