Economy Shift, Population Decline, Aging and the Housing Stock That’s Left Behind
We began dialogue with Michael Clarke and Anthony Armstrong of LISC concerning abandoned houses on the East Side of Buffalo this past May.
Yesterday, Clarke sent us this NPR story about the land bank in Flint Michigan. According to Clarke, Dan Kildee’s landbank is the best example out there. “We hope to bring Dan here early next year as part as a 1-2 day session on vacant land reclamation. If we’re lucky we’d also get the mayor of Youngstown, Ohio,” Clarke said. Youngstown went through a similar land banking and rightsizing process.
Considering the shifting economy of this post-industrial town, it’s no surprise that our population has dwindled. Moved out, carried out, aging, our population can’t make use of the housing stock that’s left behind.
At a city auction last week, houses that were in foreclosure were bought up after a stern warning about pre-existing code violations from Judge Nowak and under the watchful eye of the FBI, the state attorney general’s office and the Buffalo’s Anti-Flipping Task Force. That’s all well and good for houses that are still on the fringe of densely populated neighborhoods, but where the residents have gone, very often there are few amenities left, and the desirability of living in these areas has evaporated as well.
On the LISC tour, senior-owned homes often stood out as obvious on an otherwise blighted block, cared for by elderly owners who are living on social security, pension, disability, etc. Owned through the neighborhood’s heyday and now otherwise unsalable for what they’re worth, these homes would fetch a fortune picked up and set down in a dense and gentrified portion of the city…but not where they are, in close proximity to boarded up houses.
The houses are aging, and so are their residents. At $16 or more per hour for in-home care, these homeowners can try to age right where they are, or move into a group home. If the latter is chosen, and the house is undesirable due to the neighborhood it’s in, it gets boarded up, adding one more to the list of abandoned houses.
And then today, this report from the Federal Reserve:
Senior homeowners likely to find it difficult to “age-in-place”
BUFFALO, NY – The Buffalo Branch of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York today released “Aging in Place in Upstate New York,” the latest issue of the Branch’s Upstate New York Regional Review.
According to author Jane Humphreys, Branch regional analyst, senior homeowners may find it hard to remain in their homes as they grow older, or “age in place,” because of a growing disparity between the features of the houses they own and the housing they need.
The author concludes that demand for housing services and products that enable aging in place will likely create opportunities as well as challenges for both the private and public sectors.
This change in demand is likely to be of particular significance in upstate New York, where the majority of seniors are homeowners living in older, single-family homes that they have owned for a long time.
“The senior share of the population in upstate New York is larger than in most other parts of the country and seniors’ homes are often ill-suited to aging in place,” explains Humphreys. “This suggests that as the population ages, the region will experience a growing demand for supportive services such as health care, transportation and accessible housing, which may pose significant challenges to local governments and community-based organizations but also create new business opportunities.”
More from Humphrey’s six-page report:
City of Buffalo
About one-quarter of the seniors in Erie County, roughly 40,000 people, live in homes within the city of Buffalo. Structural and maintenance characteristics make the city’s private housing stock among the least suitable for aging in place.
For example, only 6 percent of the owned homes in the city are single-story dwellings. The remaining 94 percent—nearly all two- or three-story homes—contain one or more flights of stairs and are unlikely to be outfitted with elevators, creating problems for senior homeowners with mobility constraints. Moreover, the old age and poor condition of many of these homes make for high maintenance demands. In Buffalo, the median year in which homes were built is 1925, and more than 70 percent of seniors live in homes that were built before 1940.
As for the relative ease or difficulty of meeting the needs of aging in place, seniors in the city have fewer resources on average than seniors in other parts of the county: they are more likely to live alone and to have a lower income and a lower home value,
and they are less likely to have access to a car. Some characteristics of city homes, however, are more favorable for seniors. City homes tend to have smaller lots to maintain, and they are more likely to be located near hospitals and other services and to have ready access to public transportation.
This report lends credibility to what Clarke and Armstrong at LISC have been telling us about rightsizing. Consider the woman from Flint who compared her changing neighborhood to a rural landscape. There is a certain eerie quality about a city resident saying she feels as if she’s in the country, but we’re sure to follow suit; our aging population will leave yet more houses vacant in this community. If it can’t be dense, shouldn’t it be green rather than mean?
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