Reddie 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. In addition, improvements in health care and technology that make aging in place easier help today’s seniors keep their homes longer and are likely to continue the pattern in the future.
Researchers found that older Americans prefer to remain where they are because they’re satisfied with their homes, their communities and their quality of life.
In addition, the researchers estimate that the number of homes retained by seniors will increase in the future as the baby boomer generation ages. Because there will be more seniors and anticipated improvements in health care and technology, that will make it even easier for them to stay in their homes.The solution for the housing shortage, according to the study, is to reduce the barriers that slow housing production in an acknowledgment of increased demand.
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.