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Comment by xnx | Hacker News Reader

Part of the "housing crisis" is older Americans aging-in-place and using way more home than they need too. A widow/er might occupy the same suburban single family home in retirement that could house 5 people.

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For sure, but this is tied into the elder care crisis. My aunt is the sole occupant of a gigantic "2 family" [0]. Not even in the suburbs, but in what you'd describe as a small city downtown. She toys with the idea of assisted living, but the deal basically seems to be trading her house to buy in, and then a huge monthly ongoing fee. And we all know once you're in such a place, the rosy marketing about the care you're going to get never really pans out. Whereas she gets the full attention of the hired helper who comes by twice a week.

At this point I think she's well past assisted living, and relies on being in a familiar environment. So those concerns plus the non-winning finances, my advice is to stay there as long as she can. Because from what I've seen of nursing homes, they're basically grueling slow-motion assisted suicide.

[0] It's actually 3 units, one in a state of paused remodel. I haven't been able to tell if it started its life as 2 units each with an upstairs and downstairs and a shared stairway, or as 4 separate units even.

Great example. It's a shame the switching costs are so high, and the availability of appropriately-sized housing so low that she can't downsize in a financially advantageous way.

From the patterns I've seen there are roughly two buckets of people. Some get ahead of this when they're still quite young, embrace "retirement" and "downsizing", etc. This makes the switching costs worth it - they're paying to start a new deliberate life.

And others just want to stay in their same home they know and love even as they slow down and do less and less. I myself feel I'm going to be in this latter camp, and I don't know what I'd do differently to change that.

I wrote another comment elsewhere in this topic about the lack of multi-generation households, and I feel that is directly part of the problem here too. Of course it's a very tall ask to expect your kid(s) to stick around in the American individualist culture. Although the economics of this might change with where we're headed...

The shortage of decent retirement communities is a problem in of itself. It's perfectly possible to make senior care homes that aren't awful. My grandmother lives in one, it's basically university with more expensive food and decor and slightly fewer classes. I'd move in today if they'd let me (and I had the cash). But it's soooo much cheaper to just slap people into tiny cells and provide the bare necessities.

She better get her affairs in order because if not somebody will be taking that house and it won't be her heirs. Details vary by state.

lol. I'm well aware of those legal details - lookback period, intestate succession, etc. The situation is so far from properly planned, but I've made my peace with it. I've at least got a signed healthcare proxy though!

One piece of advice of my own that I will throw out is to act quickly after someone's spouse dies to get them to sign the appropriate papers and get those details in order. Otherwise as the depression settles in they tend to "clam up" shortly thereafter and become extremely negative on doing anything like that. If you're an honest person you might feel bad doing this, like you're picking the bones of the dead, but just get over it and do what's best for everyone - dishonest people will have no such reservations.

(thank you for throwing out the advice in case I didn't know, though!)

My mother is in this situation. All of the assisted living facilities in mher area are either owned by Private Equity or are way too expensive. She has no choice other than to age in place. It’s terrifying for both of us.

That in itself is a failure of society, that someone who has spent X amount of time in a home they love, have lived life in, raised their children in etc. is implicit expected to sacrifice all that so younger people can take the space.

We just need to get better at redistributing our economic activity instead of concentrating everything in the same place and then wondering why everyone wants to live in the same and its unfeasible to house them all

It’s a complete mis-use of needed space regardless of someone’s sentimental value attached to it.

The culprit is not the concentration of jobs to a geographic area, it’s NIMBYs and crap like California’s Prop 13 artificially constraining supply.

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