Without building up or out… or at all.
The American way is to build and grow our way out of any constraint. So it is with affordable rentals. Need more? Build them. But where? And how? While the need gets greater, the barriers get higher and the rich get richer such that some have two or three homes, while many have none.
Note: This is not your classic personal post about the joys of aging, but…
Here is data about Utah, but Axios reports about the USA: “More than half a million new apartment units are expected to be completed this year — down roughly 21% from last year’s record.”
Can you imagine a solution that helps:
retirees keep up with the cost of living,
the elderly age in place,
and young people fledge from their parents’ house
and addresses loneliness?
Is it:
Public housing?
Building in flood areas in low-regulation Texas?
Everyone doing geographic arbitrage, like young digital nomads in Portugal or like older people in Ajijic?
These such strategies may scatter families, increasing loneliness and insecurity. They are do-able, but not optimal.
The new old ways
Taking a tip from the million year history of humans on earth, people are safer, happier, better cared for, and more valued… when they live together in communities – clans, tribes, villages, neighborhoods.
How can we have these health and security benefits now?
Sharing homes, safely, not like college students, but like healthy people in intergenerational homes.
Homeowners with surplus space – daylight basement, family room, garage – can convert that into a second “home within the home” for long term renters.
Suddenly, an older person on Social Security or a Pension, living in a family-sized house, can earn extra income, and feel the safety of someone else nearby, by converting such surplus space into “In-home Suites”, rentals with a private door to the outside, a private bath and a kitchenette.
No sharing kitchens. No sharing bathrooms. No strangers sprawling on your couch or playing music at night. No. The suite is separate, and you barely know your renters are there.
How do I know this works? Because I’ve done it.
I built two suites on the ground floor of my plain-Jane house.
My 1900 single family split-entry house is now, functionally, a cross between a triplex and housemates.
I live on the upper floor. One suite is in the family room, lower left, the other in the garage with a sliding glass door.
For each suite, I earned back the cost of conversion in two years, and for 10 years I’ve earned enough rent to cover all costs of the house – and new appliances, upgrades, repairs, service professionals, garden fence, etc. In other words, I basically live in and maintain the house… for free.
Why do I care… at this late date in my life?
Frankly, I wish I could let go of this idea. I have zip desire to form or lead an organization to promote this. That was never my strong suit. But I want to live in an intergenerational, thriving community, with trades, hospitality, medical, and government workers – and schoolteachers. I don’t want to move out. I want young people and working people to move in.
The build-it way of affordable rentals looks so inadequate to the need, and so expensive now for materials, that turning a family house into a 2 or 3 suites house is the tasty low hanging fruit of a solution. It’s already built but will homeowners come to realize this may be their salvation.
People on the FI (financial independence) path have already figured this out. A resource shared is a cost halved. They buy duplexes, live in one, rent the other, which pays the mortgage.
What does this have to do with Coming of Aging?
I refer you to my post Coming of Aging for Empire. We are at the end of the road for the hyper-individualistic, debt-based, resource-intensive way of life we think of as the promise of freedom. I refer you to the Cycles of Freedom and What is Freedom? I have a whole unpublished book on this topic.
My inquiry into the last part of life, the years after prominence and before death, is very much grappling with the imagined freedoms of the middle years – when we can ignore the end – and facing that life is, indeed, for everyone, limited.
We live in a civilization built on sand, or the oil beneath the sand and the forests above with a duff of ancient leaves. You may disagree but mark my word. We live in an oligarchy that is squeezing wealth and well-being coming out of the New Deal and liberal politics through Reagan. You may disagree but talk to me in five years – if we are still above ground.
In a resource-constrained world, cooperation is key. Also, having resources you can trade, for money or some other currency, is key.
Financial independence, local food, shared housing, conversation with people who may not agree with you – the through line of all of this is cooperation, localization, community and enoughness.
The In-Home Suite version of shared housing is elegant and intelligent: separate and complete living spaces all under one roof, sharing only the envelope and services of the house. It’s not an old hippie solution. It’s not right out of college solution. It’s not a poverty solution. It’s not shameful or low class or dangerous.
The smart money is on shared housing, and my version isn’t single cubby holes like PadSplit, but homeowners seeing that their house can support them in more ways than one, and, by the by, may solve for in-home care, security systems, extra help with chores and an end to loneliness.
Please consider this for yourself.
Please send me stories of how others have done something similar.
Please share this widely to help spread the idea, and possibly create rentals where there are none – and quickly.
There are other measures that require the government – squeezing out short-term rentals, changes in codes and permitting – but this is classic American DIY.
Teaser image credit: Author supplied.