Which Areas Will Be Flooded with Homes Once Boomers Start Leaving Them? | Hacker News Reader

Which Areas Will Be Flooded with Homes Once Boomers Start Leaving Them?

zillow.com

104 pointsSQL221955 comments

It seems likely that, in the coming two decades, the construction industry will need to place a greater focus on updating existing properties, in addition to simply building new homes.

Remodelling existing stock seems like an enormous opportunity for construction tech.

Remodeling is already fairly prevalent in the US, especially in popular, expensive places where it's difficult to get new housing approved. Most people I know that bought a house also did a remodel that costed them $100k-$300k before moving in. I'm somewhat surprised more construction companies haven't gotten into it.

There's a company in my area that is focused on this and to your point they are doing great for themselves.

The elephant in the room here is that the lifespan of a lot of recently built houses is not necessarily what we might expect. A lot of these houses will turn out to have problems that will effectively “total” them as they age. There are a lot of McMansions out there that simply have no real long term future.

Could you expand on some of these points? For example, has there been new construction material of which the long-term effects are unknown, or has there been new architectural design methods?

Or were you saying that as a blanketed statement of opinion

Not the new materials but the new design and construction methods. The decades of shaving margins have had their toll to the point where apartment complexes are not even making it out of the warranty period before developing major structural flaws.

There is also, for example, the fascination with butterfly or hipped roofs (where the main gutters are in the middle of the roof instead of the edges), which will cause problems any time the rainfall exceeds the capacity of the gutters and down pipes. Given we are heading into more extreme weather with shorter, heavier downpours, it seems to me that hip and butterfly roofs are a bad idea.

I have seen a few houses condemned because of water damage due to eg: one builder using a three inch deep gutter instead of the specified six inch gutter. Saving a few dollars at the cost of destroying the value of the property.

Cutting corners and an increasing reliance on industry “self regulation” means that housing built in the last decade here in Australia is only temporary.

Florida is likely in for a double-whammy with climate change compounding with the Silver Tsunami.

I wouldn't want to own property in Florida in the long term.

or the short term, if i’m honest.

I keep saying that once rise to the point where the problem is undeniable, Floridians will demand— and probably get— a colossal bailout on the taxpayers’ dime for their property, either in the form of some megaengineering project to hold back the ocean or just forcing the government to buy their homes, because Florida is a swing state with a large number of crucial electoral votes and neither major party can blow them off.

It's literally not possible to hold back the ocean in Florida. The bedrock is porous.

Yes, but that doesn’t mean we’re not going to spend billions of dollars trying. Voters don’t like to be told “there’s no fix”; they’ll gravitate toward any politician who promises to preserve their property values, especially with other people’s money.

sigh

You're not wrong...

They basically already get that. All coastal communities and flood prone areas do. In the form of the National Flood Insurance Program. NFIP is massively subsidized flood insurance and does not charge nearly enough to cover the costs of liabilities. We've basically been rebuilding structures with taxpayer funding in flood prone areas ever since the NFIP started. Climate change has nothing to do with this bad policy.

The sunbelt is a weird place as there are a lot of businesses there now, but many areas are dependent on tourism and retirement real estate.

I don’t know a lot about Florida, but I usually go to Hilton Head, SC every couple of years. The last trips there have been noticeable issues reported and evident about the lack of workers — you have bazillions of old people from somewhere else, but anyone who is working there cannot afford it.

It would be interesting to put some work into changing that. For example, national popular vote is basically a dead letter because you'd need support from states whose majority party benefits from the status quo (e.g. Texas), which you thereby can't get.

But suppose you throw them a bone and give them something like national popular vote weighted by electoral college delegates. Now you can get them on board because the change doesn't result in electoral math less favorable to their preferred political party, but it still removes swing states like Florida from their privileged position, to the benefit of the people of Texas, California and everywhere else who suddenly need to be paid attention to by both parties again.

So instead of the swing vote being in Florida the swing vote is somewhere else. Nobody is talking about designing a system without a marginal voter who determines the outcome. I don't think such a system is even a candidate in discussions.

It is a lot of mucking around for essentially no improvement; an argument that a swing voter living at address A is going to be better than a swing voter living at address B is suspect. You're still going to have a situation where ~50% of the voters will still be getting an outcome they didn't want.

National popular vote is exactly such a system, and it is being discussed although I think practical people realize this is unlikely to change.

National popular vote has been discussed, is being discussed and will continue to be discussed. It is, however, a terrible system.

Imagine a national vote where the margin of victory was 2,000 votes. The entire country would be consumed in a conflagration of litigation. It would be Florida in 2000 but 100 times worse.

The electoral college, for all its faults, is designed to create a clear winner and not contain the contagion of a close election to a state.

States experiment with alternatives. For example, I believe Vermont distributes its electors proportionally based on the popular vote within the state, which means everyone ignores the state because it makes at most 1 elector difference (to be fair, it's a safe blue state and only has 4 (IIRC) electors anyway).

> Imagine a national vote where the margin of victory was 2,000 votes. The entire country would be consumed in a conflagration of litigation. It would be Florida in 2000 but 100 times worse.

Except that it would also be far less likely to happen, to the point that it has only happened once in history, in 1880 when the US population was barely five million people. The closest Presidential election since 1888 was Nixon vs. Kennedy and that was a margin of more than a hundred thousand votes.

Moreover, if you have a close election then you have a recount. It's sufficiently rare that when it happens you just have to suck it up. And if it was actually a problem then we could address it ahead of time by improving the procedures for elections and recounts so that they take hours rather than weeks.

> The electoral college, for all its faults, is designed to create a clear winner and not contain the contagion of a close election to a state.

If you really want to do this then you should draw the lines like the delegates are assigned -- two to each state and one to each Congressional district. Then there would be swing districts rather than swing states, but there would be so many of them and they would be spread all over the country which would make it a lot harder to write off entire regions with millions of people in them.

The "safe states" could get together as a coalition and agree to vote according to that formula as well.

> States experiment with alternatives. For example, I believe Vermont distributes its electors proportionally based on the popular vote within the state, which means everyone ignores the state because it makes at most 1 elector difference (to be fair, it's a safe blue state and only has 4 (IIRC) electors anyway).

The reason states assign all their votes to the same candidate is pretty clear. If it's a swing state then it's because it causes candidates to pay disproportionate attention to them, because then it's the full number of delegates on the table and not just a difference of one or two. If it's not a swing state then to assign delegates proportionally you would be taking some from the majority party in that state and giving them to the minority, but the majority party likely controls the state government, so since they're the ones who would have to choose to do it, they typically don't.

But national popular vote doesn't have those incentives for the safe states, because the country as a whole is about evenly split, so (modulo the issue about proportionality of electoral college delegates) changing it doesn't inherently benefit one party over the other. Who it benefits is the people in the states that always go for the same party, because then their votes would be worth as much as the people in swing states instead of being completely worthless. And those states, it turns out, have the majority of the electoral votes. If you could get them to come together on this.

No it isn't. National popular will still have a marginal swing voter who decides the winner, that swing voter will still be pandered to and will still have the power to make about half the voters unhappy with the result.

At best, it changes the address of the swing voter. It is basically fiddling around the margins from that perspective. Complaints about the address of the swing voters is not a good reason to switch electoral systems. Saying the swing voter should be in California or Texas rather than Florida is basically just insulting Floridians for no reason (and they are still probably close to holding the opinions of the median voter). There are much better arguments for changing a voting system.

I don't understand. In NPV, the marginal voter is any voter, in any state. Or, to put it another way, every voter for the winning side is the marginal voter. You don't pander to a particular geography, you pander to the electorate as a whole, because that's whose votes count.

I was going to say, a title just as apt would be: "Which Areas Will Be Flooded Once Boomers Start Leaving Them?"

An example of "worth" (as in net worth) which has potential to simply evaporate. Individually disastrous for families assuming intergenerational wealth was safe in the parents house, fiscally disastrous because the economy will be in shrinkage as it was in the sub prime, because of excess housing stocks causing a decline in construction spend, and declining values forcing more people into drawdown on capital, or a retreat from spending. Under employment hits. Deflation isn't fun.

A lot of this also appears to be visible in the northeast. Entire towns greying so rapidly that it's hard to find any services at all already. I wonder what will happen with so many houses being dumped on the market.

Same thing that happens to any dying town. Decrease in property values and decrease in quality of life.

I expect this will hit every city differently as a lot depends on what the younger generations can afford relative to what the median price of boomer housing is in the area.

A substantial portion of retiree houses will come onto the market as elderly move into care homes, sometimes several years before they pass away. The price houses sell for depends on who will be buying _ either other retirees or local employed people, who may enjoy opportunities to upgrade. As usual housing prices depend on either local incomes or outside cash.

Corporate-sponsored research is always suspect. Why is this an important research topic? Is the study notable or significant compared to other studies in this field? Just asking.

Is this actual research? Or is it just Zillow extrapolating from data they already have to drive traffic?

It’s mostly based on census data. It looks pretty solid, I’ve run numbers like this before (although I was looking families with children to live near, but old people.)

Well, the URL contains the word "research", so I assume Zillow considers this to be a research report.

"I don’t think industry really does very much research. They come up with an idea and they try to sell it. If it was a good idea, maybe they will make money. Even if it was a bad idea, if they have good marketing people, they might still make money and we never know..."

Héctor Garcia-Molina, 1953–2019

LOL. The article completely ignores that today's 40-somethings will be 60-something 20 years from now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_United_State...

edit: Seeing the flood of downvotes I'll give some data. Home ownership increases with age. 60+ers leaving their homes from death, poor health or inconvenience will be supplemented by today's 40+ers over the next 20 years. https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2018/08/homeownership... . We were in the same situation 20 years ago, 21 years ago, 22 years ago, and so on.

Does that somehow change how many current 60 year olds will be moving out of their house in the next twenty years? A demographic change isn't what's being discussed.

40 somethings are not baby boomers... boomers are in their late 50s to early 70s right now. [0]

The baby boom happened after world war II ended in 1945 which was 74 years ago.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_boomers

40-somethings are Gen-Xers. We've been raised on the idea of an unstoppable grim-meathook future. We don't want that, but we're powerless to stop it.

>the idea of an unstoppable grim-meathook future.

As a millennial... what does that mean?

The point is that there is a surge of baby-boomers who will die and the number of people younger than them are a significantly smaller group, so there will in fact be a surge in available housing.

I thought so as well, but it simply isn't true. Total number of folks in their 60s will continue to grow.

Today, there are ~77 million Americans over 60. In 2040, there will be ~100 million Americans over 60.

You can play with the numbers here. https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-states-of-america/2...

This argument is missing the point - the questions is not how many people will be of age X in 2040.

It is about how many homes will be released due to owners passing away in 2020 vs 2040.

The very fact that there will be more older people in 2040 also contributes to getting more homes released.

What the statistics does not even consider is what happens if we manage to extend life, even by say 10 years. A completely different picture emerges where homes get even more expensive.

"In 60s" and "over 60" are not the same thing. That's playing a little too fast and loose with the statistics for my taste.

Sorry for any confusion, I looked at the numbers both ways. As posted elsewhere:

There are 37.5 million folks in their 60s now.

There will be 40 million folks in their 60s in 2030.

There will be 39 million folks in their 60s in 2040.

There are as many millennials as boomers, whereas gen X is about 10 million less than either group.

I’d like to know what they are going to do with all the old-folks homes that are going up.

There's a precedent for this: schools. A lot of towns had to build out to accommodate the boom, then deal with declining enrollment for GenX, then another increase for the "echo" generation that we now call millennials. If you want to know what retirement homes will go through, look at what schools already did.

It’s very different. I’m fortunate to be in a good place from a retirement perspective, but at this point my parents had made a 10x return on their home that they purchased in late 70s NYC, plus a legacy pension, plus a retirement healthcare.

Most of the housing wealth will be eaten up by health costs. With families moving away and people retiring to alternate locales, property wealth will be seized and sold off by the county to pay for Medicaid.

Many of the folks in our field are doing great, but tech is boom/bust and people are making way too much money now.

A 10x return on something bought in the 70s is very poor in comparison to the stock market which will double your money roughly every 7-10 years.

> Most of the housing wealth will be eaten up by health costs

Unless the home is somehow stripped down or otherwise damaged, the intrinsic value of the housing wealth will not change; it just is owned by a different entity.

I was skeptical at first, but you are right

Today, there are ~77 million Americans over 60. In 2040, there will be ~100 million Americans over 60.

The issue is not in 2040, it's between now and 2040. For example, the current population in the 40-45 age range is nearly 2 million less than the 55-59 range. So sometime between now and 2040 (probably around 2030) we are going to see a decrease in the number of newly retired individuals. By 2040, the first wave of millennials will start retiring, which should make the 'silver tsunami' less of an issue.

I agree there will be a small peak, but there is no cliff on the other side. 5 years is a pretty small range to look at 10 years you get the following:

There are 37.5 million folks in their 60s now. There will be 40 million folks in their 60s in 2030 there will be 39 million folks in their 60s in 2040.

But people who are 40 now have different priorities and tend to want to live in different places than 60 year olds did 20 years ago.

Nope. Everyone still wants to live in coastal Southern California.

The point is the flood of the market with these folks' homes.

If there's demand because of a new set of people come by them, that doesn't negate a rise in available properties from which they may select.

Real estate companies make money from the _churn_ of the market, not whether there are too many or too few houses to meet demand.

Why do demographics matter? It's completely missing the point. The only thing that matters is that the population is still growing and therefore there will be no housing shortage.

The us birth rate is at a 32 year low, less than 2 for nearly a decade.

Combining with an increasing middle age mortality rate via suicide, opiods, and obesity (including diabetes)

https://www.npr.org/2019/05/15/723518379/u-s-births-fell-to-...

Meh, we can just increase the number of refugees we accept. Germany just did this.

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