Should older people move house to make way for the young?

Yes - I often watch Escape to the Country and it makes me smile: retired people looking at large homes with steep gardens, narrow stairs etc. - they have no idea how difficult these places could become in only a very few years. And then they would have to move again.

I live in the country which some might not feel is ideal at my age, but the house itself is suitable to my age and decrepitude and it is in a warm and supportive community which is worth a king's ransom.

Jaxjacky I own by house paid for by me alone it needs at least £50/60,000 in repairs updates it’s the only thing I ve ever owned that’s bigger than a smart TV and I have earned the right to stay in it if I want to and I do want to
I ve lived in a prefab, flats, a council house and didn’t own a house until I was in my forties. I think I have every right to stay in it whether it’s too big for me or not. I ve presumably not got that many years so I ll stay where I am as long as I can

I watched Escape to the Country - a retired couple who wanted 'more space' than their 4 bedroom house in suburbia. I switched off.

At 65, do people not look at 75 yr olds and say that could be us in 10yrs?
Why does people want a big house to keep clean and heat?
Why do people not see that modern houses are easier to keep clean than 'character properties'?
We like gardening, we'd like a bigger garden. Do you have magic knees?
We want views. No, you want to be a short walk from shops and a health centre. And public transport would be good

UK needs a lot of 2 bedroom homes without stairs (accessible to wheelchairs would be good). Definitely affordable. Upstairs flats would be good for young couples, singles and non-resident parents

I live in a small house in Greater London, due to location it is more expensive than 10 miles further out.
I don't want to move, I am near a station, bus stop, and shops. I can drive without too much bother to the dentist, Doctors, and hospital.
I could get more for my money by moving further out, but would lose my support network.
No I don't believe anyone should be should be asked to leave their home, especially if they have been there years and they consider it their home. Also asking people to leave when they are older would be stressful fir them.

I live in London and if anybody offered me money for my 3 bedroom modern house built in the 1980s I would give it consideration, but could they afford it?

I haven't seen a house built here for many years. It is flats everywhere, even in the middle of town and those when built will be at least 6-8 storeys high, an eyesore.

Some of the modern flats are so expensive I wouldn't have any money to go towards my care home fees. Also I like to hang my washing out, the simple pleasures.

I agree with ViceVersa and MOnica,
I myself moved fairly recently but it was to live somewhere with more facilities and a smaller, safer garden and the house had to be low maintenance. It still has 4 bedrooms, only one of which is a spare…for family visits. All the other rooms are filled with my stuff and used for various purposes, frequently because I’m mostly in.
In any case, a young person who struggles to buy a small first time home won’t afford mine.

No, I will never feel that I should give up the home we live in now so that a younger person can have it. We’ve worked hard for this place and want to stay in it as long as we possibly can.

We have been looking at moving since the new year.

I have no real interest in modern homes (unless they are super modern) so have spent this week looking at barn conversions thinking they might be an option.

However... they are really badly designed with very small rooms upstairs and "dining hallways" quite often. They also tend to have turned (and often painted) newel posts and baulsters - and sand-blasted beams so out of keeping with the agricultural and functional nature of the original.

I wondered today why I ever thought this might be an interesting solution.

They also come with microscopic gardens - presumably to do with planning laws around agricultural space and how much "belongs" to the barn. I suspect the land "allowed" to become residential is close to the internal space the barn sits on. I'm only guessing this though.

Basically what i was trying to say is that it is VERY hard to find somewhere you like (and can afford) no matter what age you are.

ViceVersa has put her finger on the stupidity of the arguments used by those who think the answer to the housing crisis can be solved by older people in bigger homes selling them to families.

The only way to solve the housing crisis is to build more homes. It actually doesn't matter whether those homes are big, small or medium sized, All that matters is that the number of houses in the housing stock euals, broadly, the number of households of all sizes looking for self contained accommodation.

I also do not understand this obsession with bedrooms. A bedroom is a room people sleep in, but too often it is taken to simply mean the upstairs rooms in a house and that is grossly misleading.

Having moved house in the last year I have looked at hundreds of house plans and photos, and time and time again you see upstairs rooms being used for all kinds of purposes that do not include sleeping: gyms, offices, sewing rooms, gaming rooms. Rooms clearly never used for sleeping. We have twice owned houses where one of the bedrooms was a dedicated study/office.

And being always willing to be a devil's advocate, I would ask the question, which group in society spend the largest proportion of their time in their home? The answer is, of course, older people. Single people, families, spend little time in their homes. They are at school, at work, at leisure facilities whether gyms or cafes, out visiting friends and so on.

The older people get, the more time they stay at home. Surely, therefore we are the ones most in need of big houses with large rooms where we can move around, do different things in different rooms, just have space to keep moving and active, even when we are house bound. It is older people who are most likely to fully occupy their homes.

We will probably downsize, due to possibly incurring inheritance tax for our ACs . We are looking at other options , but We live in the south east and the value of an average 4 bed house puts a lot of people over the iht threshold . In South London a 3 bed is over 1 mil .
However regarding older people downsizing and taking housing stock from young families . Where I live young families are buying bungalows and extending upwards to create bigger homes. The bungalows are in need of a lot of work , having been owned by older people . So it works both ways .

Reasons not to move when elderly:
- stress, stress and more stress ... our house buying and selling system is some kind of nightmare and I would not want to do it again ever. I did it 5 years ago and it was truly awful!
- familiarity with layout etc.
- local support
- room for family to visit and stay
- local social life
- ill health ... many elderly people are not well enough to engage in the decluttering, selling of furniture, refitting new home with curtains etc

It all sounds so simple on paper, but it is not a sliding block puzzle ... these are real people!

Is it also that children don't share rooms so much these days?

Norah

BlueBelle

No young person would want my 3 storey Victorian house with no central heating, sash windows, and fireplaces but
I love it. One grandaughter loves it who knows what ll happen when I’m gone

I feel the same.

Nobody wants this old one storey home, no central heating, fireplaces, huge gardens, even larger yards.. we love it as much as when we married.

Depends what you call young, plenty of people in their 30’s/early 40’s buying larger, older properties near us, rural areas of the Winchester district. A lot of them commute to London, they add central heating, turn outbuildings into Airbnb. A few we know are multi generational living.

BlueBelle

No young person would want my 3 storey Victorian house with no central heating, sash windows, and fireplaces but
I love it. One grandaughter loves it who knows what ll happen when I’m gone

I feel the same.

Nobody wants this old one storey home, no central heating, fireplaces, huge gardens, even larger yards.. we love it as much as when we married.

The answer is to build more, you're right, but until that happens I'm a bit on the fence.

Well, they are building more; very many more but, as several posters have reported here, they're not building the size of houses that first time buyers, small families or older people need; they're building 4/5/6 bedroom houses because they're selling at a bigger profit.

In the next village over from me, the local council is demolishing 45 old people's social housing bungalows. Originally the reason given was that they needed major maintenance and upgrading and that, once completed, the residents would be able move back in. In truth, they've sold the land to a developer for millions of £s. The residents who have lived there for many, many years have already been evicted, rehoused a long way away from their families, friends, church and social support networks. The plans show that 30 new 4/5 bed houses will be built with a block of 8 apartments. So even having raised millions of pounds in selling off some of their social housing stock, they're not replenishing it. They're just pocketing the profit. And the elderly residents have just been told to accept where they've been placed or sort an alternative for themselves. Where's the humanity in this?

Cossy

If you own your own house (on a mortgage or without a mortgage) then my opinion is that you can have 90 or 9 or 1 room/s. So long as it’s yours and you can afford to run it, then it’s no one else’s business.

However, if you live in in social housing and your children have moved out and you are one person or a couple living in 4 bed roomed accommodation, imo, your council should downsize you (easier said than done) to a smaller property, that you like and is in an area you like, and use the bigger property for a family.

👏

I agree on most of this.

Though I feel it’s not quite the same if you live in social housing but are paying the full rent yourself, then you are entitled to live there, even if it’s too big now.

If you are getting your rent paid through housing benefit, a smaller residence should be used (if possible, of course) and the larger home allocated to a family.

paddyann54

No ,I ,m staying put ,I don’t think council tenants should be moved out either it’s THEIR home they,ve paid rent I and in many cases spent a lot of their income in keeping it nice.
We had a council house when we got married,brand new 2 beds and box room with garden back and front and a garage across the road .
There are still people in those houses who were there when we were.Why should they move in Scotland there’s never Ben shame in living in council houses and they were told they were for life.
The answer is more council houses.
There are hundreds in this wee town,many of them flats for the elderly

The answer IS more council houses, but in the interim period something does need to be done.

We don’t have enough social housing, due to Mrs Thatcher selling them to existing tenants, no issue with this this, however the money received was not used to replenish stock and personally I think there should have been stricter controls in place around who could apply for social housing and for the period after which they bought and subsequently sold extended.

I personally know three different sets of people occupying three and four bedroom social housing, all of whom are on very good incomes, paying literally peanuts for their homes, along with the benefit of never having to pay for new roofs, new kitchens, boilers and bathrooms.

On the other end of the scale my daughter has two close friends, both on awful accommodation, both with two children, due to having to be moved due to domestic abuse and the other due to losing her job. They’ve both been told, by different councils, not to expect permanent housing for up to three years!

I agree that houses are homes regardless of tenancy, but I wonder if it is right to have a single person in a large house when families are overcrowded. The answer is to build more, you're right, but until that happens I'm a bit on the fence.

No ,I ,m staying put ,I don’t think council tenants should be moved out either it’s THEIR home they,ve paid rent I and in many cases spent a lot of their income in keeping it nice.
We had a council house when we got married,brand new 2 beds and box room with garden back and front and a garage across the road .
There are still people in those houses who were there when we were.Why should they move in Scotland there’s never Ben shame in living in council houses and they were told they were for life.
The answer is more council houses.
There are hundreds in this wee town,many of them flats for the elderly

Maremia

Are we the first generation to be faced with this 'issue'? If so, why?

Good question. I don't know. If so, probably because of the huge rise in prices in many areas. Before the war the majority of people lived in rented accommodation, and council houses were built to replace both bombed houses and slums. Now so many of them have been sold and prices have risen there is a shortage of places the young can afford.

Also, divorce and the fact that many people live alone before marriage means that there are more single person households than there used to be, and it is less usual for children to share bedrooms, I think. Probably the fact that we live longer adds to that, too.

No young person would want my 3 storey Victorian house with no central heating, sash windows, and fireplaces but
I love it. One grandaughter loves it who knows what ll happen when I’m gone

Are we the first generation to be faced with this 'issue'? If so, why?

Stamp Duty (SDLT) is a good example of what taxation is for. It isn’t to fund public spending but to control inflation. Stamp Duty “holidays” result in a rush of people trying to buy a limited number of properties. Sellers raise prices as a result. Similarly, we know that developers took advantage of Help to Buy by raising their prices. Demand pull inflation. Give older people an SDLT concession to downsize and they will be competing unfairly with people at the lower price ranges. Prices will rise and trickle up. In addition, older buyers without a need for a mortgage will have a unfair competitive edge over younger people.

There is a paucity of new homes built which are dedicated to the physical needs of older people. This has been the case for decades. The McCarthy & Stone model is ridiculously expensive both in capital costs and maintenance charges. Small apartments are priced the same as an average four-bedroomed home. Here anyway, these developments have been built in unattractive locations I would not want to live in, on major roads with the ensuing noise and pollution and not even that close to the city centre.

There are some older developments of bungalows but many have been converted into larger dwellings and not only by younger families. There there have been a number of bungalows on good-sized plots extended and converted into HMOs, rented to students and hospital staff.

There is also the issue of potential care costs. The capital value in a larger property is money that might be needed for that. Downsize and what does one do with the capital released? Simple cash investments won’t keep pace with the rise in care costs. Inflation will erode the value. Leaving the £20,000 cash ISA limit place for older people was an acknowledgment that they doesn’t want the risks or don’t have the time for long term gains that they might get from stocks and shares.

Dickens makes the point about corporate greed, one of the reasons care is so expensive since it was made into vehicle for venture capitalists to profit from. Were government to tackle that then we might see a knock on effect in older people not hanging onto large properties. The proposed cap scheme that was subsequently abandoned was only a half measure that would eventually have pushed the cost of care for everyone onto local councils while the money men still got their slice.

There already is a kind of penalty for staying in a larger home in the form of council tax and higher insurance premiums.

I also think it’s important that older people feel they are part of a mixed community and not herded together in “bungalow land” or retirement developments. I try to be as self-reliant as I can but there are occasions when I need someone younger and stronger to help me with something. I don’t have family to call on but I do have some good younger neighbours I know I can rely on. For the future, I am starting to look at co-housing as a possible solution to moving to something smaller but in a mixed supportive community. Schemes are few and far between but seem to offer the kind of community living I would like.

I do live in house that is much too big for me and the usual things apply about proximity to local services which are becoming more important the older I get. I moved here when I was 28. I’m now 70. Some years ago, a friend who was a senior nurse suggested I rent a room to a student nurse as she did. However, the accommodation was over her garage with its own entrance, discrete from the rest of the house. I did think about it but my house is open plan, not designed in a way that would allow two people to have much privacy. To that end, I did go to look at a new development of houses of a design that would have been more appropriate to sharing. They were ridiculously expensive. It occurred to me that the developer could have fitted twice the number of smaller homes onto the plot. Why didn’t they? I asked the developer. His answer was to do with the social housing developers are obliged to provide. The more houses overall, the more “affordable” housing has to be included which, in his opinion, would make the development less attractive to private buyers. I don’t know if that's how buyers thinks. But it’s a similar thing with new developments generally, that social housing provision and the cost of infrastructure obligations mean developers make more money selling big detached houses rather than a mix with apartments, bungalows, terraced and semis.

The whole housing model needs to change but where to start? I would start with three things. The cost of social care, more co-housing projects and removing the obligation for developers to pay for infrastructure.

Not necessary.

My husband and I are pleased with our home, we use all rooms, if only occasionally. It suits our life. We've no reason the leave the home we've lived in 65 years. Our daughters and GC may do as they wish - later.

I think the major problem facing young families is the unaffordability of upsizing. They are often faced with trying to find a mortgage for up to 6,7 or 8 times their salary and the deposit required on a modest home can be a tough call (without help from family possibly).
I'll bet Gnetters holding onto their homes is the least of their worries!
I will happily downsize & future proof as soon as needed to take the burden of worry from my family. I want my daughter to think of me as safe & warm & happy and just visit for fun and cupcakes!