Pat Malone moved to Arvada with her husband in the early 2010s for a more affordable retirement than they could have found in California.
“Or so we thought,” she said wryly.
The empty-nesters rented at first, then bought a single-family home. When the stairs became more daunting for her husband, it took them a long time to find what they needed.
A Colorado Sun series. Read more.Colorado is getting older, rapidly. Are we prepared? We’re taking a look at how these shifting demographics are affecting housing, the workforce and quality of life, and whether Colorado has the services needed for people to age in place.
Follow alongA single-floor condominium, with no stairs and no garden to maintain is a unicorn in Colorado.
“We couldn’t find anything like that when we were (first) looking for a property,” said Malone, 76. “We really had no choice but to buy a house.”
Seniors like Malone make up Colorado’s fastest growing generation. Today, 1 in 6 Coloradans are over 65; by 2050, demographers expect 1 in 5 will be.
But even though seniors are more likely than younger generations to own a home, they’re also confronting an uncomfortable reality: The vast majority of Colorado homes weren’t built with their needs in mind.
As Colorado grows older, the needs of seniors are colliding with a housing affordability crisis that has left those who grew up with social media competing with those who remember World War II for a scarce supply of homes.
”To have to still have members of four distinct — maybe even five distinct — generations in the housing market right now is astounding,” said Chris Hardy, a Realtor in Fort Collins. “People are living longer. People are actually living healthier longer. That stretch has also added to the strain of available housing.”
Seniors didn’t cause the housing crunch, experts say. Today’s affordability crisis can be traced to a number of factors, including a dearth of homebuilding after the Great Recession, rising construction costs and restrictive local zoning policies that make it hard to build large numbers of units.
But in many ways, seniors are increasingly at the center of it. Older adults are staying in their homes longer, real estate experts say, stretching what was once a five- to seven-year cycle into people staying in the same home for a decade or more.
Fewer homes up for resale limits the options of younger generations looking to get a foothold in the housing market with their first home — or upgrade to something larger as they have families of their own.
Meanwhile, those seniors who do want to move find themselves in fierce competition with younger homebuyers — if they can afford anything at all.
“It’s a niche market,” Hardy said. “But it’s a niche that’s big enough that it impacts inventory in a cascading effect.”
We’ve built a whole lot of housing stock that doesn’t work for older adults.
— Rodney Harrell, Vice president of family, home and community at the AARP
Realtors say high prices make it hard for seniors to downsize when they want to. Meanwhile, the majority who prefer to stay where they are face financial challenges of their own, as aging pipes fail — and knees and hips do too, requiring costly home renovations.
As seniors age, fall risks increase, and the health benefits of climbing to a second-story bedroom turn into a hazard. But not all seniors have the thousands of dollars needed to install a chair-lift — not in addition to their home maintenance needs, medication and rising property tax and insurance bills.
Sometimes, a single step leading to the front door is all it takes to turn an otherwise accessible, single-story, ranch-style home into a mobility nightmare.
“We’ve built a whole lot of housing stock that doesn’t work for older adults,” said Rodney Harrell, the vice president of family, home and community at the AARP.
Most seniors want to age in place
Malone, with her cross-country move to Colorado, is something of an outlier.
Three in four seniors want to stay in their current home, according to an AARP survey — and most of them do. According to the Colorado state demographer, seniors are more likely than any other age group to stay in their current home from one year to the next.
Experts say that’s usually a good thing. Seniors tend to be happier when they age in place — but only if they have strong community ties that keep them social after retirement. If seniors live alone and never leave their homes, a senior living facility with built-in activities and social opportunities may be the better option.
“There’s a lot of research that shows that aging in place is better for people’s well-being,” said Jennifer Greenfield, an assistant professor of social work at Denver University. But, she added, “it’s really about the isolation. It’s not about where you are.”
Even so, aging in place — even when it’s the most affordable option — often comes with trade-offs and hidden costs.
“There are concerns. There’s fall risk,” Greenfield said. “Their balance is maybe not what it used to be, and it’s very difficult unless they’ve got significant wealth that they can tap, doing those home modifications that are needed are really expensive.”
The Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies found that only half of seniors live in a single-floor home with a no-step entrance. Only 4% of homes nationwide have both of those features and the wide hallways and doorways needed for accessibility.
And just like every other generation, the Harvard study found that a record number of older households — 37% of all seniors — spend more than 30% of their income on housing costs.
Those burdens are the worst for those who rent or still have a mortgage. But the vast majority of seniors making less than $25,000 a year spend more than is considered affordable on housing — even when they own their home outright.
“Older adults who own their home, they’ve got a limited Social Security budget, but it’s enough, and they can, you know, buy food and pay the insurance and stuff — but now we’ve got property taxes that are soaring, homeowners insurance costs that are soaring,” Greenfield said. “The jumps are several hundred dollars at a time, sometimes, and their cost of living increase from Social Security does not match that.”
Even as property taxes rise, Colorado’s signature property tax relief program for seniors — the homestead exemption — has shrunk to less than half its former value. When voters added it to the constitution in 2000, the median home price was $166,600 — and the exemption wasn’t indexed for inflation.
Some seniors are making impossible choices to scrape by.
“We often find folks are kind of camping in their own home,” said Jason McCollough, who runs a senior home modification program for Brothers Redevelopment. “We’ve got folks with no active water that are still there. They’re dealing with, do I get my medication and just rely on SNAP (food assistance)? Or do I get this repair done, or just have my power turn off and then I don’t have to have the repair done.”
Brothers, a nonprofit housing provider based in Denver that runs the Colorado Housing Connects hotline, works primarily with low-income seniors, and doesn’t charge for repairs or its home modifications, like installing railings and walk-in showers.
Crews removed a bathtub in an upstairs bathroom for a senior homeowner, and replaced it with a walk-in shower in this Thornton home. (Kathryn Scott, Special to The Colorado Sun)But the need far outpaces the organization’s $3 million annual budget. In some cities, McCollough said, seniors have to wait as long as a year to have work done.
Greenfield fears the challenges of aging in place will only get worse if Congressional Republicans and the Trump administration follow through on plans to cut Medicaid. Seniors and those with disabilities make up half of what Colorado spends on the low-income health care program. Some of the largest expenses are to provide long-term care, either at a nursing facility or in a senior’s home.
“If the federal Medicaid cuts go through, payments for nursing homes are going to be reduced, and nursing homes, especially in rural and mountain areas, will close,” Greenfield said. “Payments for in-home caregiving are going to be reduced or go away, and families will increasingly be the ones who just have to step in and care for mom and dad — even if they’re working, even if they’ve got their own kids at home.
“We very well may see a significant trend toward aging in place, but aging with care needs in place,” she said. “That’s my biggest worry right now.”
The math of downsizing
For many seniors, the headaches of a large house outweigh the emotional ties they have to their longtime family home.
“This was stuff we were hanging on to, its value sort of evaporated when we saw what was possible, which was moving into a carefree life with no lawn mowing and no sprinkler blowouts, no fighting the assessor’s revaluation of my home every two years,” Jim Smith, 77, of Golden. “Rita had to constantly weed.”
Smith, a broker who writes a newsletter and newspaper column on real estate, said he often recommends that seniors follow in his and his wife’s footsteps. They sold their home three years ago and now rent an apartment.
“The reward for all of this is we walked away with $1 million,” Smith said. “We put half of it into an annuity and half of it with a financial planner who invested it. It increases every year by more than we’re paying in rent on our apartment.
They want something fresh and new and clean, but small and nice. And what they don’t realize is that doesn’t cost that much less than the home they bought in 1990.
— Kelly Moye, Realtor in Broomfield
“We now have a very clear picture of our future,” he said. “We have more than enough money to live for the rest of our lives and in fact, we have money to splurge, like on a world cruise.”
But the math of downsizing doesn’t add up for everyone — particularly those who want to buy.
“The challenge is, even though they may own their property free and clear, which gives them a certain amount of leverage, because prices have increased so much — even that equity isn’t enough for them to move laterally into something smaller and less expensive,” said Hardy, who has a special certification in senior housing needs.
The Harvard study found that among seniors 65 and over, housing motivations were the No. 1 reason people moved. Many want to live somewhere less expensive, many want somewhere newer — and a lot of seniors think they can have their cake and eat it, too.
In Colorado, that often isn’t the case.
Kelly Moye, a Realtor in Broomfield, said she frequently has senior clients who assume they can trade in their three- or four-bedroom home for something smaller nearby. But finding a smaller, less expensive home that they actually like is “almost impossible,” she said.
“They want something fresh and new and clean, but small and nice,” Moye said. “And what they don’t realize is that doesn’t cost that much less than the home they bought in 1990.”
Even when seniors can make the finances work, there’s still the matter of what to do with a lifetime of accumulated things. There’s so much demand for help, a cottage industry of professional downsizers has popped up to help seniors go through their things and figure out what to keep, what to sell and what to donate or throw away. Moye’s real estate firm, Compass, even offers a relocation product of its own.
“Out of all the things (involved in moving), the price of the new place is always one, the location is another, and how in the world to go through the basement and what are we going to do with all the stuff?” Moye said. “It is enough to stop them in their tracks, and I don’t blame them.”
More options needed
To some in the real estate industry, it’s baffling that more builders didn’t see this coming.
“I’ve been selling real estate for 22 years now, and you could see the senior demographic — all you had to do was look at an age distribution chart of the U.S.,” Hardy said. “(I was) begging builders who were building townhomes — put a bedroom on the main floor.”
Even with a ground-floor bedroom, a multistory townhome’s not ideal. But the alternative — a single-story home — is hard to build affordably, Moye says.
In a complex, “they can only be on the ends of the buildings, because they require more land,” Moye said. “Most developers will only put in a handful of ranch, one-floor units in a whole development because they don’t have enough land to do it.”
Some developers make it work by moving farther out, to places like Frederick, Mead and Firestone, she said.
“The ground is cheaper, and they’re actually able to build little one-story patio homes for a fairly affordable price,” Moye said. “But if they can’t get the land cheap, like Platt Park (in Denver), no way — there’s no way they can make the numbers work. There’s not enough land on the ground to do it.”
Model homes are seen at Montaine, a resort-style luxury neighborhood for seniors and single families in Castle Rock. (Olivia Sun, The Colorado Sun via Report for America)But while more accessibility is important — experts say that more than anything, seniors just want the same things everyone else does: more choices.
The AARP’s housing agenda sounds a lot like Gov. Jared Polis and the state legislature’s plans to boost housing for working-age Coloradans. The organization supports zoning reforms to allow more so-called “missing-middle housing” — condominiums, townhomes and the like that can be built more affordably than single-family homes. The AARP also says homeowners should be allowed to build accessory dwelling units, sometimes called granny flats, in their backyards.
New laws in Colorado aim to encourage all of the above. In recent years, they’ve passed legislation promoting density, legalizing ADUs and attempting to breathe life into the state’s sluggish condominium market by reducing insurance costs for developers.
“It’s not my expectation that every one of those units will be universally designed (for accessibility needs),” Harrell said. “I hope a lot of them will be. But the more options we have, the easier it is.”
When Malone’s husband’s health declined, they sold their three-bedroom, multilevel home and moved into a rental while they looked for a better fit. Phil died before she moved into her current home, which has two bedrooms and a den — all on one floor.
“This was exactly what we needed for his situation,” she said. “And it will be for me too, when I run out of steam.”
It’s not perfect. In West Arvada, the 15-minute-drive it takes to get anywhere is farther than she’s used to. Because she moved after seven years of homeownership — three years too soon to qualify for Colorado’s senior property tax break — her taxes are higher than they could be.
Still, she considers herself lucky to have found the place she did. She monitors the listings in her development closely, and the lower-level units, like hers, that aren’t up a flight of stairs, rarely go up for sale.
“They’re escalating in equity, because there aren’t many of them,” she said. “I think there’s these seniors waiting in the wings to get one of these.”
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