Aging-in-Place Trends Affect Availability of Housing for Younger Adults

With the tight housing market, especially in the Seattle Metro area, first-time home buyers including millennials and Gen Xers are facing an uphill battle when it comes to house hunting. This is in part because of a growing trend in which baby boomers, the generation that owns the largest share of American homes, are planning to stay put, to age in place—leading to less inventory for new buyers.

ConstructionCoverage.com recently released a report about the U.S. locations with the most baby boomer-dominant housing markets.

However, baby boomer homeownership rates vary across local and state markets. Researchers calculated the percentage of owner-occupied households that are headed by baby boomers, then ranked locations accordingly.

These are the key takeaways from the report for the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA metro area, according to ConstructionCoverage.com:

• Baby boomers account for 33.4% of homeowners in Seattle, though they make up only 18.2% of the metro’s population.
• Nationally, while baby boomers comprise 20.7% of the population, they account for 37.8% of all U.S. homeowners.
• Overall, the Seattle metro's housing market is less dominated by baby boomers than the nation as a whole.

Here is a link to the complete results of the analysis, with data on more than 250 metropolitan areas and all 50 states: https://constructioncoverage.com/research/baby-boomer-dominant-housing-markets

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