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No Place Like Home: Older Adults and Their Housing

¹ Litigation Analytics, Inc., New York.
² U.S. Census Bureau, Washington, D.C.
³ Center for Policy Research, Maxwell School of Syracuse University, New York.
⁴ Population Reference Bureau, Washington, D.C.

Address correspondence to Jonathan D. Fisher, Litigation Analytics, Inc., 370 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY 10017. E-mail: econofish{at}gmail.com

	Abstract

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Objectives. The home is both older Americans' largest asset and their largest consumption good. This article employs new data on the consumption and assets of older Americans to investigate what role the home plays in the economic lives of older adults.

Methods. We used 20 years of data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey to examine the asset and consumption trends of four cohorts of older Americans. We compared the data with other survey results.

Results. Older Americans' homeownership rates were stable until age 80. The homes were increasingly mortgage free; home equity increased with age, and relatively few older adults took out home equity loans or reverse annuity mortgages. Housing consumption flows increased with age; nonhousing consumption flows declined after age 60 at a rate of approximately 1.4% per year.

Discussion. The results suggest that the consumption of cohorts of older Americans does not decrease dramatically over a 20-year period and that they are also not converting their housing assets into other types of income or consumption, at least up to age 80. A number of reasons, including the bequest motive and the life cycle hypothesis, might explain this behavior.

The single largest asset of older adults is their home. In addition to being the single largest asset, the home is also the single largest item in an older adult's consumption bundle. Therefore, the home is central to the economic calculations older Americans must make over time. And how older adults manage their housing assets and consumption gives insight into their motivations and the incentives they face as they age.

Researchers can interpret how the older population manages its housing assets and consumption from many different perspectives, including the life cycle perspective, a financial portfolio perspective, a bequest motive, and a socioemotional selectivity perspective. This article contributes new data and findings but no resolution among these different perspectives. However, it illuminates some of the economic trends of the older population over time and raises questions for further research.

We used a data set, the Consumer Expenditure Survey (CEX), that no other researcher has used before to investigate the economic role of older adults' homes. We discuss the comparative strengths and weaknesses of the CEX data set and compare our results to others', including those based on the American Housing Survey (AHS) and the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF). We then describe the asset and consumption trends of four cohorts of older Americans over the past 20 years. Finally, based on the CEX data, we discuss possible reasons for the trends and their implications.

	BACKGROUND

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The life cycle hypothesis is perhaps the best known perspective from which to view the housing behavior of the older population. It predicts that individuals will smooth consumption over their lifetime, saving when they are working and then using their savings and assets (such as their home) to maintain their consumption after their income declines in retirement (Modigliani & Brumberg, 1954). Recent research suggests that the actual behavior of the older population may be more complicated than the simple form of the hypothesis suggests.

Recent work using the Asset and Health Dynamics Among the Oldest Old and the Health and Retirement Study suggests that housing equity for those who continue to own a home does not decline as they age (Venti & Wise, 2002, 2004). This is consistent with the research of Anderson, French, and Lam (2004), who also used the Asset and Health Dynamics Among the Oldest Old and found that older adults do not run down their assets in later life, although the dynamics are different for married couples than for singles. These data show, however, that people do reduce their housing equity when facing major changes such as death or moving into a nursing home (Venti & Wise, 2002, 2004; Walker, 2004).

Kutty (1998) used the AHS to examine the characteristics of older Americans' homes and demonstrated how elders could use reverse annuity mortgages to convert housing assets into consumption. But Kutty found that few older adults use reverse annuity mortgages, home equity loans, or second mortgages. A study using the SCF concluded that the ratio of mortgage debt to income increased considerably between 1989 and 2001 for households 55 and older (Masnick, Di, & Belsky, 2005). This study speculated that this rise might increase the likelihood that older adults will use reverse equity mortgages or second mortgages to convert their equity into future consumption but presented no evidence of such conversions.

Another reason why older people may not reduce their assets is because of a bequest motive, or the desire to leave a bequest to the next generations. If older adults wanted to leave an inheritance, they might treat their home as one part of their financial portfolio, which they are attempting to maximize. Hoynes and McFadden (1997) used the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to determine whether the increase in housing values changed the financial savings of homeowners. They concluded that savings did not change much with the increase in housing values, suggesting housing assets were not treated as a substitute for other financial assets. However, Bucks, Kennickell, and Moore (2006) used the 2004 SCF and found that housing values have risen relative to the value of other assets and are becoming an increasingly larger share of financial portfolios among older adults. This suggests that the home may be a strongly performing asset in an older person's investment portfolio and therefore an asset that the homeowner might hold for investment returns alone.

It is also possible that the older population treats their homes not primarily as an asset or an investment but more as a meaningful consumption good. Socioemotional selectivity theory suggests that as time horizons shorten, motivations and incentives change. The shorter the time horizon, the more people, both young and old, look for emotional meaning in their life goals (Carstensen, 2006). If the home holds emotional meaning for older Americans, then holding on to the home may be more important than leaving a bequest or expanding a financial portfolio.

Our study adds new evidence to address these different perspectives, but because of data limitations it cannot reconcile them.

	METHODS

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Because the home is both the most important asset and consumption good of older adults, researchers cannot understand older adults' economic behavior without understanding the dual role housing plays. The fact that housing has a dual nature is not a new observation; Henderson and Ioannides (1983) recognized it more than 20 years ago. Most empirical research on the home, however, has been on its role as an asset (Bucks et al., 2006; Skinner, 1996; Venti & Wise, 2002, 2004; Walker, 2004). Several recent studies have focused on the consumption of older adults, in which housing is an important component (Butrica, Goldwyn, & Johnson, 2005; Fisher, Johnson, Marchand, Smeeding, & Torrey, 2005; Johnson, Smeeding, & Torrey, 2005; Munnell & Soto, 2005). This recent work has consistently shown that the home is the most important item in total consumption of older adults and that the value of imputed rent for their homes has risen over time relative to other consumption flows.

The challenge in understanding the role of older adults' housing is to examine it as an asset and as a consumption good simultaneously, as older adults themselves do. Few data sets, however, have the kind of long-term, consistent measurement of both consumption and assets that would guarantee that the calculations of housing assets and housing flows would be internally consistent. The CEX meets those requirements, and no researcher has utilized it to study these questions. The comparative advantage of the CEX relative to other surveys is its consistent, detailed, and accurate measure of consumption outlays over a long period of time. Furthermore, the CEX collects an inventory of durable goods and financial assets.

The CEX has been a continuous cross-sectional survey since 1980, and we used data from every 5 years starting in 1983. To get an adequate sample size for each year, we used the four quarters of data for each year plus data from the last quarter from the year before and the first quarter for the year after. This means that for 2003 we used data from the fourth quarter of 2002 through the first quarter of 2004. This allowed us to have around 2,000 individuals per year. The CEX collects data from the same consumer unit over a 3-month period for four consecutive quarters. The CEX uses a consumer unit, which is defined as members of a household who are related or who share at least two out of three major expenditures (food, housing, and all other). A person living alone is a single consumer unit. (There are approximately 3% more consumer units than households as defined by most surveys.)

We disaggregated consumer unit information by the age of each individual within the household so that we could examine the assets and consumption of individuals by age group. We wanted to be able to compare consumption of individuals living in households of different sizes, so we adjusted the consumption resources of a consumer unit using an equivalence scale and used the consumer unit size (multiplied by the unit's sample weight) as a weight. Adjusting consumption in this manner yielded equivalent resources per person and provided us with a sample of individuals whose resources were given by the equivalent resources of their consumer unit, which allowed us to compare resources across households of different sizes. The scale we used was given by the square root of family size and indicated that the resources for a two-person family must be 41% more than those of a single-person family for the two families to have an equivalent standard of living.

One concern about equivalence scales for the older population is the change in family size caused by the death of a spouse. Holden (1988) first documented the importance of changing family size on the measurement of the well-being of widows. Burkhauser, Giles, Lillard, and Schwarze (2005) showed how income replacement rates for widows are sensitive to the chosen elasticity. The CEX has marital status, including whether the individual is a widow(er), but we chose not to separate widows from other individuals because of sample size limitations.

Our chosen scale fell within the general constant elasticity scales developed by Buhmann, Rainwater, Schmaus, and Smeeding (1988). In general, the constant elasticity scales are given by (family size)^e, in which e is the scale elasticity. If the elasticity equals 1, then the scale equals family size; there are no assumed economies of scale in living arrangement and the equivalent resources are simply the per capita resources. Alternatively, if the elasticity equals 0, then there is no adjustment for family size; there are complete economies of scale in living. Our chosen elasticity of 0.5 lay halfway between these two implausible extremes and is commonly used in the literature (e.g., Burkhauser et al., 2005; Burkhauser & Smeeding, 1994). We also tested the sensitivity of our results to the equivalence scale and found the results to be insensitive to the scale.

We constructed 5-year cohorts from the CEX that ranged from ages 50 to 54, to 80 and older. We then followed their cohort characteristics at five points in time over 20 years: 1983–1984, 1988, 1993, 1998, and 2003. Our youngest cohort was born between 1930 and 1934 and was aged 50 to 54 in 1984; we followed this cohort until they reached age 70 to 74 in 2003. The oldest cohort was born between 1915 and 1919 and was aged 65 to 69 in 1984; we followed them until they were 80 or older in 1998. The comparative disadvantage of the CEX is that it is not a longitudinal survey like the Health and Retirement Study. Therefore, we could not examine the dynamics of individual behavior over time. We, however, partially compensated for this disadvantage by following four cohorts over a 20-year period.

Cohort analysis allowed us to follow the median individual within different age groups across given points in time. Cohort analysis has some built-in biases that are similar to the biases in panel data sets. Following a single cohort over time becomes increasingly biased the longer the time period because of differential mortality rates for individuals of different social and economic statuses. To judge the size of the bias, we used education as a proxy for socioeconomic status and calculated how the percentage of each cohort with a high school education or less changed as it aged. There was almost no detectable change before age 60. The percentage of the cohort with only high school or less education, however, decreased 9% from on average as each cohort aged from 65 to 69 to 80 and older. This means that the consumption estimates for age groups older than 65 to 69 tended to overestimate consumption levels relative to what they would have been without differential mortality.

A second source of bias was in how the sampling frame changed in the very old ages. The CEX's survey sampling frame includes only the noninstitutionalized population, which means that older adults who move to a long-term care facility will drop out of the sample. Although this seems likely to bias the results over time, it is hard to tell in which direction without knowing much more about the characteristics for each cohort of the very old that move into institutions. The CEX does include older individuals who might no longer live in their own home or apartment but who are not institutionalized, such as older individuals who have moved in with adult children.

To examine the stock of housing, we used the property value and equity in the individual's residence. The CEX includes the current property value, the outstanding principal on all home loans, and the year the individual moved into the home, all of which the homeowner provides. Another source of concern is the respondents' optimism about the value of their home. Recent studies have suggested that homeowners may overestimate the value of their homes by about 10% (Kiel & Zabel, 1999; Venti & Wise, 2002). If homeowners did overstate the value of their home in the CEX data, median housing equity and median net worth will be overestimated in our results as well.

To examine the consumption of older adults we developed two consumption measures that differed only by how they treated the largest durable consumption good: the owned home. Our first measure, consumption expenditures, included only direct expenditures during the year. The issue was how to handle expenditures for durables, such as the home, which the homeowner enjoys many years after the expenditures on a mortgage have ended. Therefore, the second consumption measure treated the value of consumption of the home as a flow throughout the entire period of homeownership. More specifically:

1. Consumption expenditures equaled the direct spending for current consumption. It included expenditures for housing, food, transportation, apparel, medical care, entertainment, gifts to organizations or persons outside the consumer unit, and miscellaneous items for the consumer unit. Excluded were expenditures for pensions and social security, savings, and life insurance.
   
2. Consumption flows reflected current direct consumption plus the rental value of the home rather than the expenditures for the home. (Consumption flows equaled consumption expenditures minus the costs of home expenditures plus the rental equivalent of the owned home.) Although data for other durables existed, the flows were much smaller and would not have affected the conclusions. For renters, consumption expenditures equaled consumption flows, and both included rental payments.
   

The concepts of consumption expenditures and flows both included direct home maintenance, repairs, insurance, and utilities. For homeowners, consumption expenditures also included payments for mortgage interest and property taxes. Housing flow, however, replaced mortgage interest and property taxes with the rental value of the home. The rental equivalence value of the home equaled the amount the individual's home would rent for unfurnished on today's market, excluding utilities. The respondent provided the rental estimate, which may have had the same upward bias as the homeowners' estimates of the value of their home.

Finally, we present median instead of mean equivalent expenditures and flows because of the skewed distribution of assets and consumption. All asset and consumption data are in real 2003 U.S. dollars using the item indexes from the Consumer Price Index Research Series (CPI-U-RS).

	RESULTS

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Asset Value of Housing for Older Adults
Between 1984 and 2003, a large majority (81%–89%) of our four cohorts were homeowners (Table 1). The CEX estimates of the percentage of older adults who were homeowners were consistent with estimates from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (Venti & Wise, 2002) but were somewhat higher than estimates from the AHS. (The AHS reports the percentage of older adult households that own their home, and the CEX estimates are of the number of older adult individuals who own a home.) When we aggregated the CEX individuals to consumer units, we found numbers that were closer to the AHS estimates. For example, we found that in 1998, 82.0% of 65- to 69-year-olds and 83.4% of 70- to 74-year-olds owned a home, whereas the AHS reported 84.2% and 83.6%, respectively. The CEX showed no significant decrease in the percentage of older adults who were homeowners until after age 80, and even then the decreases were small.

Despite the absolute increase in home equity after ages 60 to 64, few older adults had converted their housing stock into consumption with home equity loans as of 2003 (Table 1). When including second mortgages with home equity loans, the percentage that could have been using home loans to finance other consumption increased to 12% of older adults aged 65 to 69 in 2003. The AHS estimated that 9% of 65- to 69-year-olds had home equity loans in 2001.

Median net worth for 65- to 69-year-olds varied from $100,000 to $180,000 for the four cohorts over the 20-year period (Table 2). These estimates of median net worth were roughly consistent with median estimates of assets based on Asset and Health Dynamics Among the Oldest Old (Anderson et al., 2004), but they were lower than estimates of net worth found in the SCF, which one might expect given that the SCF measures net worth more accurately than other surveys.

For each cohort, there was at least a fourfold difference between home equity at the 25th percentile of the home equity distribution and home equity at the 75th percentile, with the younger cohorts exhibiting a larger difference at ages 65 to 69 (Table 3). This was consistent with general economy-wide increases in wealth inequality between 1984 and 1998 noted in the SCF and elsewhere (Kennickell, 2002, 2006). Home equity as a percentage of net worth was more similar across the percentiles than were home equity levels. Home equity was the single most important asset in the four cohorts' net worth, except at the 25th percentile of home equity.

Although median nonhousing consumption for older adults may have been falling, it was only decreasing by 1% per year. Between ages 60 to 64 and 80 and older, medical expenses increased about 54% for the median consumer unit in Cohort 3 from about $1,900 to $2,900 (or about a 2% increase per year). That was offset by a decrease in consumption expenditures for food, transportation, and all other areas of 23% from $8,800 to $6,800 (or about a 1% decrease per year). Nieswiadomy and Rubin (1995) found similar patterns for the consumption of older adults between 1972–1973 and 1986–1987.

Comparing Homeowners and Renters
This article has focused on the behavior and economic changes among homeowning older Americans. As each successive table has shown the economic circumstances of older adults in more detail, questions arise about the older adults who are not captured by the homeownership data: the nonhomeowners. Table 6 compares the absolute differences in the medians of a series of economic variables between homeowners and nonhomeowners. Of course, these two populations were not random distributions within the U.S. population, but the comparison is particularly important in focusing on how the home represents a fundamental dividing line in the well-being of older adults.

At every percentile and at every age, homeowners were better off than renters for equivalent disposable income and equivalent consumption flows. In results not shown, at every age median consumption flows for renters was lower than the 25th percentile consumption flows for homeowners. The differences between renters' and homeowners' disposable incomes shrank with age, whereas their differences in consumption flows grew with age (Table 6). This could have been partly a function of the changing composition of each group because of differential mortality. For instance, if the poorest renters died sooner than other renters or homeowners, then the differences would shrink, but they never disappeared.

	DISCUSSION

TOP Abstract Background Methods Results Discussion References

 
This analysis shows stable homeownership rates for older adults; this is consistent with recent work using the Survey of Income and Program Participation (Venti & Wise, 2002). The results also show increasingly mortgage-free homeownership, low numbers of home equity loans, and long tenure in their homes for four cohorts of older Americans over 20 years. While this was occurring, homeowners were able to maintain their housing and nonhousing consumption well into their 70s. All of this suggests that there really is no place like home for older Americans. We argue that the older population may be holding on to their homes for several reasons: (a) They may want to provide their children with an inheritance, consistent with a bequest motive; (b) the older they become, the more adults may want to stay in a place that has emotional meaning and memories, consistent with the socioemotional selectivity hypothesis; (c) their home is liable to be the highest performing asset in their portfolio, especially in recent years; or (d) they may be facing one last major consumption expense (long-term care), and, consistent with the life cycle hypothesis, they may want to ensure that they have enough assets at the end of their life to finance this last major consumption need.

The CEX data cannot distinguish among these different motives because it follows cohorts over time. Only with longitudinal data sets, which follow the same individuals over a long period and which contain data on the aspirations and actual disposition of housing assets, will researchers be able to draw more definitive conclusions about motives. Longitudinal data will also help investigators to evaluate whether a significant portion of older people transfer the deed of their home to a younger family member while staying in the home. And only longitudinal data that include the institutional population can be used to determine whether people use their home as long-term care insurance. Because the CEX does not include this critical transition in the lives of the older population, the data can only hint at its importance rather than describe it.

A recent study of homeownership rates over time in 17 developed countries suggests that the housing behavior of older Americans is anomalous (Chiuri & Jappelli, 2006). Homeownership dropped between the ages of 51 and 60 and 71 and 80 by an average of 26% in the 16 other countries studied. Canada, the United States' closest neighbor and largest trading partner, had about the same rate of homeownership as the United States (78.6% vs 76.5%, respectively) in the 51 to 60 age group, but by ages 71 to 80 Canadian homeownership rates had declined 25% whereas those for the United States had dropped only 6% (Chiuri & Jappelli, 2006). There may be many reasons for these international differences, such as the treatment of estate taxes. A full understanding of these differences is beyond the scope of this article. One possible future research issue is to explore the locus of responsibility for the last major consumption item in many people's lives, the expenses of long-term care.

In most countries, long-term care expenses are either the responsibility of the government or a shared responsibility based on the income of the recipient. In the United States, long-term care expenses are the responsibility of the recipient, not the government. Only if the patients are living on a minimum income and have spent down their assets can they become eligible for public assistance for long-term care. Kemper and Murtaugh (1991) estimated that after age 65, about 7% of men and 20% of women in the United States will experience a 2-year or longer stay in a long-term care facility before their death. The values of home equity at the first, second, and third quartiles are about $50,000, $100,000, and $150,000 respectively (Table 3). These amounts correspond roughly to 1, 2, and 3 years in long-term care facility (Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, 2003).

That suggests that the biggest consumption expenditure in the life of older Americans may still be ahead of them if they have to pay for long-term care. The CEX cannot explore this question in more detail because, like most surveys, its sampling frame is restricted to the noninstitutionalized population. Only the Health and Retirement Study, which is not restricted, will be able to observe this last stage of the life cycle for its survey participants, and therefore evaluate the life cycle hypothesis over the framework of a completed life.

	Acknowledgments

 
We want to thank the Social Security Administration (SSA) retirement research center at Boston College and the SSA for their support of this research. Kati Foley provided excellent help with graphics and table design, and Martha Bonney provided much-needed editorial assistance. Helpful references were made by John Quigley and Edgar Olsen. The research reported herein was supported (in part) by the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College pursuant to Grant 10-P-98361-1-04 from the U.S. SSA funded as part of the Retirement Research Consortium. The opinions and conclusions are solely our own and should not be construed as representing the opinions or policy of the SSA or any agency of the federal government, or the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College.

	Footnotes

 
Decision Editor: Kenneth F. Ferraro, PhD

Received for publication April 17, 2006. Accepted for publication September 5, 2002.

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