Age and the housing crisis: Options for Lansing are available

As I was easing into retirement from the Allen Neighborhood Center in late 2022, two housing-related issues had my full attention.

One was my longstanding plan to carve out a couple of suites in my big, funky, 107-year- old home to operate a rooming house. In the way of millions of 19th and early-20-century women of a certain age who supported themselves in this way, I decided to create Rosamond Place — the name of my little enterprise. I opened following a few months of painting, restoring wood, replacing carpet, and finally packing up and storing in the basement all of my son’s belongings that did not make the trip to New York with him 10 years ago.

As for the administrative nuts and bolts of operating a rooming house, I was guided by a little manual created in 2010 by ANC to assist older adults in determining whether they (and their houses) were a good fit for taking in renters. It included a self-assessment (e.g., “How do you feel about people using your kitchen?”) and an assessment of one’s home (“Where will boarders park? What areas of the home might be used for common space?”). The manual also offered tips on where and how to safely advertise, questions to ask prospective boarders, sample leases and more.  (Call Aurora at the Allen Neighborhood Center at (517) 999-3917 for a free copy of the manual.)  Two years later, I can tell you that this has been a largely positive adventure. Rosamond Place has provided hard-to-come-by lodging for several young people and a revenue stream and good company for me!

The second housing issue requiring my attention was finding a facility for an older family member whose complex medical diagnosis required round-the-clock skilled nursing care. Finding space in a reputable nursing home was hard enough, but figuring out how to pay the $6,000-$13,000 monthly cost of a room was truly daunting. Like many elders of modest means, he looked to Medicaid and began an arduous spend-down process in order to qualify for coverage. (Medicaid coverage is contingent upon having no more than $9,000 in savings/investments to one’s name.)

Given the mind-boggling cost of nursing homes, I was not surprised to learn that Medicaid covers nursing home bills for well over 60% of people who reside in them. It’s notable that over 60% are privately owned, another 25% are run by nonprofits and the rest are run by government agencies.  The demand for nursing home care is unlikely to come down anytime soon, given that the number of 65-year-olds is still increasing every year (the boomer population bulge), as are life expectancies. In terms of sheer numbers, demand may ease a bit by 2030 when all baby boomers will be age 65 and over and the growth in the older population will start slowing.

My preoccupation with my own and my family member’s housing issues led me to a deeper exploration of the housing crisis and ultimately to joining with about 40 other Lansing residents to create the Shared Use Housing Advocacy Network.

Regular readers may be familiar with my articles about this group’s support of zoning changes that will reduce barriers for creating more diverse housing options such as rooming and boarding houses, co-ops, cottage developments and accessory dwelling units, or ADUs, aka granny flats.  We are hoping that Lansing follows the example of 22 Michigan cities and scores more around the country that have established more inclusive zoning (as opposed to exclusive single-family zoning). Zoning changes elsewhere have resulted in creating more diverse, affordable and appropriate housing for the two-thirds of households that are not single- family households, that is, a parent or parents with children under 18 years. 

Though millennials and families of all sorts are grappling with the critical issue of housing availability and affordability, seniors are particularly hard-pressed, given their additional needs for housing to accommodate mobility challenges and to also provide relatively easy access to health, transportation and other age-related services. Overwhelmingly, older adults continue to express a desire to age-in-place, either in their own homes or within the neighborhood or community in which they have lived their lives and have established networks of support. And adults aging in place are doing so at a more advanced age. A recent study published by the Joint Center for Housing Services at Harvard University suggests that households headed by seniors aged 80 and older will more than double by 2040. 

This may not set well with some people who blame low housing inventory and elevated prices on boomers clinging to our mortgage-free homes. There are far more significant factors responsible for our critical housing shortage, including decades of insufficient production of new homes. Further, it’s not as if holding on to one’s home, even with a paid-off mortgage, is without its financial challenges. Studies suggest that seniors are carrying more debt these days, fixed retirement income is failing to keep up with inflation and housing cost burdens are making it tough to afford rising costs of food and medicine. A recent Bloomberg report noted that one of the reasons that elders are hanging onto their homes despite these challenges is that in the single-family-home-dominated communities where older adults tend to live, there aren’t enough alternatives for downsizing.

So how do we provide the housing alternatives that would enable elders to remain in communities, live in appropriate, affordable and age-friendly housing and have reasonably easy access to aging-related services? One option spreading across the U.S. is house sharing, whereby a senior shares his or her home with a couple of other seniors and perhaps with a caregiver who can assist all of them.

Multigenerational housing is also on the rise. In 2021, nearly 11 million older adults lived with at least one adult relative, up more than 80% since 2006.

And in some communities, seniors are creating duplexes from their single-family homes to downsize their personal living space while creating a rental option for another person and additional income for themselves.  At some point, the other unit can be rented to a caregiver.

If Lansing approves the zoning changes that are in the last stages of what has been an 18-month-long approvals process, the following might become additional (more clearly defined) alternatives:

— Opening a rooming house and providing desperately needed housing to a student, your newly divorced friend, a traveling nurse or a relative.

— Creating boomer co-ops, where seniors with a more communal orientation appreciate having private space as well as access to shared common spaces (kitchen, dining room) and a support system. Ann Arbor has two of these while Frankfort, Michigan’s senior co-op dates from the 1990s.

— Creating additional multigenerational co-ops, such as Rivendell here in Lansing, where millennials and elders share space, household tasks, and skills;

— Developing more cottage communities such as Dave Muylle’s Cottage Lane on Lansing’s east side, where elders rent a cottage and connect with neighbors in the shared courtyard;

— Building a backyard granny flat and renting it to a family member or perhaps eventually to a caregiver. 

What is shared by most of these options is that they are usually community-initiated and incremental. Respectful of the physical and social characteristics of a neighborhood, these efforts are not jarring but rather gradually thicken or gently densify urban communities in pretty painless ways. While the availability of these alternatives will increase housing options for people of all ages, they will most certainly help keep elders in a community for as long as possible. 

(Joan Nelson is the retired founding executive director of the Allen Neighborhood Center. She writes this column monthly.)