By Brian Eason | Colorado Sun
Most older residents want to age in place. But experts say Colorado’s housing stock wasn’t built with their needs in mind.
Pat Malone moved to Arvada with her husband in the early 2010s for a more affordable retirement than they could have found in California.
“Or so we thought,” she said wryly.
The empty-nesters rented at first, then bought a single-family home. When the stairs became more daunting for her husband, it took them a long time to find what they needed.
A single-floor condominium, with no stairs and no garden to maintain is a unicorn in Colorado.
“We couldn’t find anything like that when we were (first) looking for a property,” said Malone, 76. “We really had no choice but to buy a house.”
Seniors like Malone make up Colorado’s fastest growing generation. Today, 1 in 6 Coloradans are over 65; by 2050, demographers expect 1 in 5 will be.
But even though seniors are more likely than younger generations to own a home, they’re also confronting an uncomfortable reality: The vast majority of Colorado homes weren’t built with their needs in mind.
As Colorado grows older, the needs of seniors are colliding with a housing affordability crisis that has left those who grew up with social media competing with those who remember World War II for a scarce supply of homes.
“To have to still have members of four distinct — maybe even five distinct — generations in the housing market right now is astounding,” said Chris Hardy, a Realtor in Fort Collins. “People are living longer. People are actually living healthier longer. That stretch has also added to the strain of available housing.”
Seniors didn’t cause the housing crunch, experts say. Today’s affordability crisis can be traced to a number of factors, including a dearth of homebuilding after the Great Recession, rising construction costs and restrictive local zoning policies that make it hard to build large numbers of units.
But in many ways, seniors are increasingly at the center of it. Older adults are staying in their homes longer, real estate experts say, stretching what was once a five- to seven-year cycle into people staying in the same home for a decade or more.
Fewer homes up for resale limits the options of younger generations looking to get a foothold in the housing market with their first home — or upgrade to something larger as they have families of their own.
Meanwhile, those seniors who do want to move find themselves in fierce competition with younger homebuyers — if they can afford anything at all.