My brother-in-law put in a walk-in shower last year. He is seventy-one and he did not call it a retrofit. He called it a remodel.
Then he did the front step too.
The number under that is worse than most people expect. Fewer than four homes in a hundred carry all three basics.
A no-step entry. A bedroom and a bath on the floor you walk in on. Halls and doors a chair fits through.
Harvard’s housing center has been publishing that figure for years, off the last housing survey that measured it.
So most of this generation owns a house that needs work before it needs anything else. The work is neither glamorous nor cheap.
A shower with no lip. A wider doorway. A ramp where the stoop is now. Each one is a trade, a permit, and a check the household writes itself.
What they buy
The retrofit, one room at a time. The bath goes first, because that is the room where the falls happen. The entry comes second. The money runs through small contractors and the suppliers who stock the wide door and the low pan.
Where they move
South and west, into housing that is already flat. In New England, 24 percent of older households report living on one floor. Across Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas the figure is 73 percent.
The migration story usually gets told on taxes and weather. Both are real, and both are in every article about it.
The floor plan belongs in that sentence too. A man who moves from Connecticut to Texas is buying a lower bill and a ranch house in one transaction. Only one of those two will matter to him at eighty.
Where the cohort’s money sits this quarter, read through the floor plan it has to live in.
Follow the floor plan far enough and you arrive at a builder.
The regional outfit that puts up one-story product on the edge of a metro. Three bedrooms, two baths, everything on the slab. It sells into a market where three quarters of older households already live on one floor. Nobody there has to be talked into the layout.
Both sides of that have a ceiling, and it is the same ceiling. A retrofit is paid for out of the household, and the households that need it soonest have the least left over.
Moving south buys the floor plan outright. It also puts three states between you and the people who would have checked on you.
The arithmetic
Share of US homes carrying all three foundational accessibility features, a no-step entry, single-floor living, and wide halls and doorways: Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, Housing America’s Older Adults 2023, drawing on the 2011 American Housing Survey, the last year comprehensive data were available. Single-floor living among older households by region, 24 percent in New England against 73 percent across Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas: the same report. Growth of the 65 and over population from 43 million in 2012 to 58 million in 2022: the same report, citing Census Bureau data. The shower and the front step in the opening belong to one family, not to a survey.
My brother-in-law thinks he did a remodel. He did the first half of a plan he has not written down yet. The second half is the stairs, and he knows it. Walk out to your own entry this week. Count the steps between the car and the kitchen. That number is going to matter more than the rate on your mortgage.
Andrew
Boomers Trade is written by someone getting older right alongside you, and watching who profits from it.
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