Aging in place and housing over-consumption

Abstract

Societies are aging and the number of households with heads or even all members over 65 is increasing rapidly. Many of these households are well established in the housing market and occupy housing at the apex of the housing choice process. These houses are large, nearly always owned and with substantial equity value. The households that occupy such dwellings have lower mobility rates than households in general and are likely, with low mobility rates, to continue to occupy their houses even when they no longer need the same space as when they were raising families. The paper examines the extent of this phenomenon in the Netherlands and traces under what circumstances older households are exchanging these large houses. The data, derived from the Housing Demand Survey in the Netherlands, reveal that older households occupy very spacious housing, that they have relatively long durations of stay, and that owners over 60 are nearly certain to be ‘over-consuming’ housing with respect to equilibrium consumption. At the same time, when older households do move, they reduce the amount of space they consume. The issue for society at large is whether the low mobility rates create a bottleneck in access to spacious housing by younger families.