With the advent of senior housing and creation of special complexes with a multitude of facilities for the elderly, commercial real estate has been betting on the fact that older generations cannot comfortably live alone in their homes anymore.
In fact, real-estate investors have taken a special interest in the baby-boomer generation in particular, which includes 72 million people born between 1946 and 1964, or about one in five Americans. This implies a need for an extra hundreds of thousands of housing units within the next five years.
Housing developers added 21,332 new units in 2018 just for senior-housing. This is more than double the amount of units added in 2014, according to the National Investment Center for Seniors Housing and Care, or NIC.
However, at the same time as investors are placing bets on housing units, there is a another endeavor also taking root that could hinder the former: VCs are investing about $1 billion this year in "aging-in-place" technologies that allow seniors to have similar access and care as senior complexes, but in their own homes.
Such technologies include sensors designed specifically to address certain medical conditions, facial recognition for identifying visitors and houses with malleable fixtures that can be adjusted as residents get older. These would allow the elderly to remain close to their friends and family, instead of being put with other strangers.
"People don't want to go to a place where there's only a bunch of other old people," said James Crispino, head of health and wellness at design firm Gensler.
That said, these technologies would not be able to replace the fact that senior citizens can enjoy a community atmosphere in senior housing. In fact, Boston just welcomed its first LGBTQ+ senior citizen housing complex, catering to potentially 65,000 older LGBTQ+ adults.
"Beyond the establishment of this first housing development," says the LGBTQ Senior Housing Inc. website, "we would continue to look for opportunities to develop additional sites as well as providing a template or prototype for use in the development of any senior housing elsewhere."