Washington Moves on Housing as the Aging Math Hardens

Sarita Mohanty of the SCAN Foundation argued in Governing on June 22 that every state should adopt a multisector aging framework now. Within the decade, she wrote, U.S. adults 65 and older will outnumber children under 18, accelerating demand for health care, long-term care, housing, and transportation faster than middle-class families can afford it.

Washington moved on one piece of that the next day. The Senate passed a bipartisan housing bill 85-5 that bars corporate investors from buying single-family homes and aims to boost supply and lower prices, the UK Times reported June 23. The bill heads to the House, though it dropped a provision that would have required investors to sell newly built homes within seven years.

Earlier this week the cost of elder care read as a private filter, deciding which aging Americans could afford dignity and which could not. The SCAN call and the housing vote move that question from the family budget to the statehouse and the Senate floor, where the shelter a fixed income cannot cover and the care it cannot cover begin to look like the same squeeze. Whether the House takes up the housing bill, and whether any state builds Mohanty's framework before the demographic crossover arrives, is still unsettled.