Looking for someone to blame for the years of low inventory that have pushed housing prices higher and made it harder for millennials to become homeowners? While builders share some of the responsibility, recent research by Freddie Mac finds that people between the ages of 67 and 85 who stay in their homes longer and “age in place” also play a role.
Fewer Americans ages 67 to 85 are leaving their homes than their predecessors. Homeownership rates dropped 3.6 percent among people born between 1931 and 1941 when they reached 67 compared to 11.6 percent among those born before 1930 when they reached that age.Freddie Mac’s researchers estimate that the “aging in place” trend accounts for about 1.6 million houses held back from the market through 2018 by homeowners born between 1931 and 1959. Those 1.6 million houses equal about a typical one-year supply of new construction or more than half of the current estimated shortfall of 2.5 million housing units.
Seniors keep their homes longer for several reasons, according to the researchers, including better health and higher levels of education than previous generations.
Most likely through light pressure from their star’s outflow of photons, Zubrin, an astronautical engineer who is founder and president of The Mars Society, told me. This method of bacteria transmission would work best for brighter stars such as F-, G-, and K- spectral type stars. However, Zubrin notes that Red dwarf M-stars, the cosmos’ most ubiquitous, might have a difficult time pushing their bacteria outside their solar systems.Yet if a bacterial colony was strongly magnetized, as Zubrin noted in a 2017 article posted on the popular space blog, Centauri Dreams, it might be able to act as a miniature magnetic sail. If so, it would, in theory, catch a 500 kilometer-per-second solar wind. That’s more than enough to propel it out of the solar system.
In contrast, if a manufactured microbial solar sail were shot out of the Earth’s gravity by a rocket and released into near-Earth space, it would be blown out of the solar system at approximately Earth’s speed around the Sun, or 30 kilometers-per-second. Thus, it would travel a light year every 10,000 years, and be able to reach nearby stars in less than 50,000 years. And Zubrin says the point is that at least some of these bacteria would survive such a trip.