4 minute readOne of housing’s biggest stress-tests of the 2020s will be a reality reset that trues-up household demography with, um, homes and places.
Still, the way things look now — in terms of priority focus on generational stress-tests — you’d hardly know it mattered.
Let’s zero in on part of this now.
Demographics is destiny. It has that truthy ring to it.
Housing and its business sector strategists live and breathe demographics, right?
Why, one wonders, are more than half of new homes built today for married-couple-with-children-under-18 families, when they’re less than a fifth of all households? And, why are fewer than one in 10 new residences designed, developed, and built for a one-person household, which has soared to almost one of every three U.S. domiciles, and growing fast?
Here’s a In 1960, just 13 percent of American households had a single occupant. But that figure has risen steadily, and today it is approaching 30 percent. – New York Times The sentence that follows that one in the NYT article is worth its own emphasis: For households headed by someone 50 or older, that figure is 36 percent. It’s an impressive step-change by itself. Consider, though, the flip-side of that coin through the lens of sheer household composition pivots. In 1960, 44% of U.S. households were made up of married couples with children under the age of 18, commonly known then as the very American “nuclear family.” So, in the same time frame we observe demographic change in one-person households – from 1960 to the present – doubling, we see this: Married couples with children under the age of 18 now make up just under 18%, less than half of their share in 1960. Getting away from percentages for a moment, almost 38 million of the U.S.’s 131 million households are one-person households. That number’s rising. Compare that to the raw number of married-with-children-under-age-18 households: 23 million or so. That number’s falling. Effectively, and in most locales, America’s developing and building – even in the hot, new single-family build-for-rent development, investment, construction, and design communities – like there are 55 million (42% of U.S. households) married-couples-with-children nuclear families, not less than half that. Demographically speaking, 30%-plus of houses and neighborhoods today need to be: The Times reporters Dana Goldstein and Robert Gebeloff get at the symptoms we see showing up in the intensifying mismatch between these distinct, verifiable, and growing household composition trends and the homes and communities being built these days: In many ways, the nation’s housing stock has grown out of sync with these shifting demographics. Many solo adults live in homes with at least three bedrooms, census data shows, but find that downsizing is not easy because of a shortage of smaller homes in their towns and neighborhoods. Compounding the challenge of living solo, a growing share of older adults — about 1 in 6 Americans 55 and older — do not have children, raising questions about how elder care will be managed in the coming decades. At face value here we’re talking strictly about data and its path of change over time and what that means. In home and neighborhood development, investment, and construction, however, there’s other forces at sway that it’s hard to ignore. As is too often the case, zoning and land use and all of their tentacles stand squarely in the way of much of what could and should be happening to re-route housing’s path into greater alignment with household patterns’ driving forces. Nuclear families – despite making up a smaller and smaller slice of the American household demographic pie – still stamp themselves into the minds of 50-, 60-, and 70-year-old influencers of design, development, construction, planning, and policymaking as the quintessential American families. It’s true, the iconic paradigm of a young married couple and their children are a bedrock value to the culture and society and promise of America. Still, lot size requirements, and minimum garage sizes, and other locality design guidelines are not going to bring back nuclear families in greater numbers to make up a bigger slice of the demographic pie. Instead, demographics’ ultimatums include this one. A household stands as a household, not with our strong and powerful associations with a nuclear – two-parents-and-young-children – family as its defining composition. Either the private sector learns ways to recalculate its route forward to realign with where people who form those households are headed, or demographic destiny and business investment will wind up in two parallel universes.
