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Which Areas Will Be Flooded with Homes Once Boomers Start Leaving Them?
- cletus 7y agoFlorida 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.
- hprotagonist 7y agoor the short term, if i’m honest.
- Analemma_ 7y agoI 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.
- ohazi 7y agoIt's literally not possible to hold back the ocean in Florida. The bedrock is porous.
- Analemma_ 7y agoYes, 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.
- ohazi 7y agosigh You're not wrong...
- crisdux 7y agoThey 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.
- Spooky23 7y agoThe 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.
- AnthonyMouse 7y agoIt 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.
- roenxi 7y agoSo 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.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 7y agoNational popular vote is exactly such a system, and it is being discussed although I think practical people realize this is unlikely to change.
- phlakaton 7y agoI was going to say, a title just as apt would be: "Which Areas Will Be Flooded Once Boomers Start Leaving Them?"
- perspective1 7y agoLOL. 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_States#/media/File:Uspop.svg 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-by-age.html 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.
- boomboomsubban 7y agoDoes 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.
- pg_is_a_butt 7y agoOK, boomboomer. whooooooooosh.
- flyGuyOnTheSly 7y ago40 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_boomers
- drivingmenuts 7y ago40-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.
- flyGuyOnTheSly 7y ago>the idea of an unstoppable grim-meathook future. As a millennial... what does that mean?
- carrozo 7y agoIt 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.
- bcrosby95 7y agoRemodeling 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.
- to11mtm 7y agoThere's a company in my area that is focused on this and to your point they are doing great for themselves.
- smhinsey 7y agoThe 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.
- kevinyun 7y agoCould 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
- manicdee 7y agoNot 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.
- chmaynard 7y agoCorporate-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.
- Aeolun 7y agoIs this actual research? Or is it just Zillow extrapolating from data they already have to drive traffic?
- topkai22 7y agoIt’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.)
- chmaynard 7y agoWell, 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
- itronitron 7y agoI 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.
- ggm 7y agoAn 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.
- nine_zeros 7y agoA 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.
- lotsofpulp 7y agoSame thing that happens to any dying town. Decrease in property values and decrease in quality of life.
- BXLE_1-1-BitIs1 7y agoA 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.