Every holiday has its lesson for the study of the city. Halloween illustrates the quality of our neighborhoods, the Fourth of July spotlights our public gathering practices.
And Thanksgiving is the moment to contemplate the mismatch between the housing stock and the people who live in it. This week has long been the busiest travel period of the year in the United States. Tens of millions of Americans will be taking advantage of one of the nation’s underrated pieces of infrastructure: The national spare-bedroom supply.
According to a Census analysis from last year by Apartment List, there are an astonishing 137 million spare bedrooms in the United States.
That is great news come Thanksgiving time, of course; one might venture that this national bedroom reserve makes our current scale of Thanksgiving possible, though of course the holiday has been celebrated for a long time and the trend is relatively new. Consider: In 1970, the share of U.S. households with three or more people and the share of U.S. households with three or more bedrooms was about the same. Now, nearly two-thirds of houses have three or more bedrooms, but just 38 percent of households have three or more people.
In part, this is the result of two long-standing trends: Houses keep getting bigger, while households keep getting smaller. This latter trend is particularly relevant when we think about big cities like Chicago or Boston, where there are fewer residents than there were 70 years ago—but more households. Americans are having fewer kids, and waiting longer to have them. This means that American cities must build new buildings just to maintain a steady supply of people on sidewalks, customers for shops, and kids in schools; if the neighborhood looks like it did 70 years ago, its population does not.
But there is also a “Thanksgiving mismatch” in the housing stock: The bigger homes don’t belong to the bigger families. Nearly 20 percent of all owner-occupied homes consist of a senior person or senior couple with two or more spare bedrooms (this might be where your Thanksgiving or Christmas holiday will take place, in the style of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections). Younger married couples without kids also have loads of spare bedrooms—a trend bolstered by the remote-work effect. In contrast, just a third of households with children have a spare bedroom, and another third have kids doubled up.
The planner Bill Fulton, who highlighted this data in his newsletter this week, introduced an even more amazing statistic: According to research by the Minneapolis Fed, the majority of bedrooms in this country are owned by people between 50 and 70 years old.
Unlike the nation’s millions of vacant houses, which tend to be in places people do not want to live, these spare bedrooms are often in places people would very much like to live. Once, they might have been rented out to boarders, but that model has unfortunately fallen out of fashion in spite of platforms like Airbnb, perhaps because the owners often don’t need the money.
Today, adult children cycle in and out, but few young married couples want to cohabitate with mom and dad. Intergenerational living might be more popular if the shoe were on the other foot—if bigger houses were more evenly distributed.
Cities are often portrayed as unfriendly to families because of the shortage of family-sized units, but this data suggests that the problem may be more with a misallocation of those units than with their number. How do you get boomers to give up those extra bedrooms for good, and achieve a bedroom redistribution that lines up with people’s needs?
The obstacles abound. As if locked-in mortgage rates and property tax abatements weren’t enough to keep aging households in place, the prevalence of single-family zoning ensures that neighborhoods have no building stock besides large stand-alone houses. Give the owners of those homes a place to downsize, and you might put some of those 137 million spare bedrooms into everyday use. A full house, and not just on Thanksgiving.
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Publish date : 2024-11-26 23:23:00
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