More kinds of housing would help Seattle residents age in place

Back in the 1990s, some friends came up with the idea — probably after a couple of beers — of purchasing an apartment building and converting it into an old folks’ home, but just for us. Our parents were beginning to age out of their homes, and we were anxious that someday we might end up living with strangers who might not share our taste in music. We even got as far as identifying a building on Capitol Hill before more rational minds prevailed and we abandoned the plan.

Long-term care costs are staggering in Washington. In 2021, the median annual cost for assisted living was $72,000 for a private room and nearly $80,000 for in-home care. That does not include the cost of medical care. My mother lived to be 100 and spent her last years in an adult family home where the yearly cost was more than $96,000.

My mother had owned a home, which she traded for a condo when the upkeep on the house became too much. She eventually sold the condo and moved into a retirement home, and later into the adult family home. The savings from the sale of her home allowed her a degree of independence and dignity until the end.

In the absence of long-term care insurance, many of us will fund our later years this way, through the equity in our homes. In 1986, my husband and I were able to purchase a home in Ballard for $78,000 using an FHA loan. It was a stretch for us at the time, even with our two salaries. Adjusted for inflation, that home would have cost us $225,000 in today’s dollars. The median home price in Seattle today is around $900,000, out of reach for most young families.

Today, my home would sell for over a million dollars. Did I “earn” that equity? Not by any improvements I made to the home itself. Land value has skyrocketed in the last few years as the demand for housing in Seattle has far outpaced the building of new homes.  

Part of the reason there are so few homes for sale is that older homeowners like me, who want to downsize from our three-bedroom single-family homes, have limited options. The mayor’s One Seattle Comprehensive Plan allows for the building of more middle housing types, including duplexes, triplexes, townhomes, row houses and stacked flats. But our current zoning laws and regulations tend to incentivize the building of townhomes, which are usually three or four side-by-side multistory homes and are inappropriate for people who want to age in place.

A much better option would be condos, or stacked flats, both of which tend to have one unit on a floor, but current regulations make these disadvantageous to build, and relatively few have come to market in Seattle in the past 20 years. 

As seniors, we should be advocating for middle housing options that will allow us to age in place, instead of being locked into our existing homes. This will require changes in zoning and housing policies that allow for increased density and different types of homes in more neighborhoods. My friends and I may not have realized our dream of the 1990s, but we don’t have to be chained to our homes, draining our savings on repairs until our kids take away our car keys and move us into senior living. We could be living in a slightly denser neighborhood where we could walk to the grocery store, restaurants and coffee shops, and hop on public transportation to move around the city. It just takes a little creative planning and some significant changes in housing policy.