I keep reading about Boomers hoarding America’s housing stock. Housing debates increasingly pit generations against one another. After reading countless claims that Baby Boomers are “hoarding” America’s homes, I wanted to step back from the rhetoric and examine what data and the history actually show. This two-part series looks first at housing ownership versus housing behavior, and then at the century of policies and planning decisions that shaped today’s housing market. –Susan
Are Baby Boomers Really Hoarding America’s Homes?
For years, a simple explanation has dominated conversations about America’s housing affordability crisis. Baby Boomers bought homes when prices were cheap, watched their values soar, refinanced into historically low mortgage rates, created scarcity with restrictive policies, and now refuse to sell. They’re “hoarding” houses, younger generations claim, leaving Millennials and Gen Z to compete over a dwindling supply of increasingly unaffordable homes.
It’s an appealing narrative because it presents a clear villain. It also contains enough truth to make it persuasive. Baby Boomers do own a disproportionate share of America’s housing. Many remain in homes that are larger than they need after their children have grown and moved away. Younger buyers, meanwhile, face historically poor affordability, record home prices, and a shortage of entry-level housing.
But does that make Boomers responsible for today’s housing crisis? Or are they simply the most visible beneficiaries of a housing system that has been evolving over many decades? The distinction matters because ownership and hoarding aren’t the same thing. To understand what’s really happening, we have to look beyond who owns America’s homes and examine what homeowners are actually doing with them.
“Boomers Own A Lot Of Housing.” That’s a fair statement.
Federal Reserve data for 2025 shows 83% of adults age 60 and older own their homes, compared with 76% of people ages 45 to 59 (-7%), or 58% (-25%) of those 30 to 44, and just 24% of adults under 30. A significant generational divide from top to bottom, but not unique to today’s market.
First, let’s address the largest gap; homeowners under age 30. It should come as no surprise that group has never held a high share of the market. They’re just starting out in adult life. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the homeownership rate for those under 35 years of age between 1940 and 1990 was in the low 40 percentile, and dropped slightly to 39% in the year 2000. The decrease is attributed to a mix of shifting social choices (marrying later, pursuit of higher education, rising economic hurdles, and changing housing markets).
As people age, partner and start families, the demand for homeownership increases. Millennials ages 30 to 44, are purchasing their first homes. The next group, Gen X, ages 45 to 59 are just 7% behind Boomers in homeownership rates. They’re typically on their second home and possibly own a rental property or vacation home as well.
Ownership is a stock. It tells us who possesses the asset at a particular point in time. Activity is a flow. It tells us what people are actually doing with those assets.
If we’re going to accuse a generation of withholding housing from everyone else, we probably ought to look at the flow.
Note: Even something as seemingly straightforward as “homeownership” isn’t measured the way most people assume. The term “homeowner” is defined and counted differently depending on the institution, agency, survey, or economic index collecting the data. A newer “people first” counts the individuals on title. The difference in these methods can substantially change our understanding of who owns housing. I’ve linked to an excellent explanation here.
The So-Called “Hoarders” Are America’s Most Active Home Sellers
The National Association of Realtors’ 2026 Generational Trends report shows Baby Boomers represent 55% of home sellers and are also the largest group of buyers, accounting for 42% of purchases.
That’s not a generation collectively sitting on its real estate and refusing to participate in the market. It’s the most engaged of any generational segment of the population.
And many of those transactions aren’t additional acquisitions. A homeowner sells one property and purchases another. Maybe they’re downsizing. Relocating. Moving closer to kids or grandkids. Buying a home better suited to retirement.
One home enters the market, another leaves it. That’s housing turnover, not housing accumulation.
Millennials Aren’t Exactly Sitting On The Sidelines
One of the most problematic aspects of the “Boomers are hoarding housing” claim is that it ignores what younger generations are doing.
Millennials actually made up the largest generation of homebuyers during much of the ultra-low mortgage-rate era. Today, about 55% of Millennials own their homes, and they still account for about one-quarter of all home purchases.
Generation X owns an even larger share of existing housing and continues to represent another quarter of buyers.
According to the NAR 2026 Generational Trends report, today’s buyers break down roughly like this:
| Generation | Share of Home Buyers (rounded) |
|---|---|
| Gen Z | 4% |
| Millennials | 26% |
| Gen X | 25% |
| Baby Boomers | 42% |
| Silent Generation | 4% |
Each generation buys homes as it reaches its prime earning years and builds wealth through ownership.
Boomers’ Buying Dominance Explained: They have equity.
Home equity changes everything.
A first-time buyer generally enters the market with income and savings while longtime homeowner, or one who has bought and sold for decades, is likely to enter it with hundreds of thousand of dollars released by selling or leveraging another property or properties. Those are radically different financial positions.
The divide we’re seeing may have less to do with being a Boomer than with something much simpler:
One buyer already owns the asset. The other is trying to acquire it for the first time.
None of this means that Americans aren’t staying in their homes longer.
We absolutely are. Redfin reports that the typical U.S. homeowner has remained in the same home nearly twice as long as we did 20 years ago (2005-2025).
Mortgage-rate lock-in is one reason. Federal Reserve researchers estimated that lock-in accounted for 44% of the decline in mobility among mortgage borrowers from 2021 to 2022. When someone has a 3% or 4% mortgage, selling that home and financing another at a substantially higher rate carries a real financial penalty.
Also undisputed is the claim that older homeowners occupy a disproportionate share of America’s larger houses. They do. Redfin found that empty-nest Baby Boomers own 28% of U.S. homes with three or more bedrooms, while Millennials with children own just 16%. That’s a striking mismatch. But people aren’t inventory.
A primary residence isn’t a warehouse item that becomes surplus because someone’s children grew up. It’s the center of a hub where lives were built, milestones were reached and memories are kept. It is surrounded by community, support systems and friends often deemed irreplaceable. A place where routine is associated with comfort and safety.
The practical question buried in all the demands that Boomers “just downsize” is: Where are they supposed to go?
Downsizing Isn’t As Simple As It Sounds.
Selling a mortgage-free four-bedroom house and buying a two-bedroom condo may sound like an simple financial decision, but it isn’t.
- The existing property must be prepped for sale. In cases where updating and/or maintenance have lagged, this can be expensive. Then there are the sale and purchase transaction costs.
- The smaller property may be surprisingly expensive. There are likely to be monthly assocation fees on top of property taxes and utilities, purchase transaction costs and taxes, moving and storage expenses. Some refurnishing is almost always necessary in a new space.
- The new home also has to be located somewhere the owner actually wants to live. The shortage of modestly priced housing affects older homeowners too.
Let’s not forget, too, that the cash-flush downsizing senior will now be competing with cash-strapped first-time buyers for those smaller properties.
Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies reports that the number of homes listed for sale affordable to households earning $75,000 or less was 60% lower in March 2026 than in March 2019.
If we want older Americans to leave larger homes so Millennial families can occupy them and pass their starter homes on to Gen Z, we need to build housing that gives those older owners somewhere appealing, as well as economically and socially sensible to go.
And then here’s the part housing statistics don’t measure.
Downsizing isn’t simply exchanging a large house for a smaller one. For someone who has lived in the same home for 20, 30 or 40 years, it can mean dismantling the physical record of an adult life:
- A longtime home represents independence, identity and continuity. Pressure to leave it can feel less like practical advice and more like being told you’ve outlived your claim to the space
- Downsizing means eliminating possessions as well as square footage. Family heirlooms, photographs, collections and memorabilia can represent decades of personal history
- Sorting through a lifetime of belongings requires physical stamina and an exhausting number of decisions about what to keep, give to family, donate, sell or discard
- Adult children often don’t want the furniture, china, collectibles, artwork, memorabilia and other possessions their parents spent decades accumulating. Resale markets are flooded with many of these things, and discovering that objects you valued have little monetary value can compound the sense of loss
- Physical limitations can make packing, lifting, sorting and moving increasingly difficult and even risky. What might have been an exhausting weekend project at 40 can become a months-long undertaking later in life
- Even pets can limit the choices. Some condo and HOA communities impose restrictions on the number, size or type of animals residents may keep.
Just thinking about all this can be overwhelming. Wanting to move and being ready to dismantle one life in order to construct a new one are two different things. Treating an older homeowner’s reluctance to begin the process as evidence of “hoarding” ignores an enormous part of what that decision actually involves.
Biting The Hand That Houses You
About 25.2 million Americans ages 18 to 34 lived with a parent in 2025, according to an analysis of Census data. That’s roughly one in three young adults.
Obviously, not all of their parents are Boomers. Many are Gen X. But with Younger Boomers now in their 60s, plenty of Millennials have Boomer parents.
And Redfin found something particularly relevant when it examined large homes. In addition to the 28% owned by empty-nest Boomers, another 7% of America’s homes with three or more bedrooms are owned by Boomers living in households containing at least three adults. Redfin notes that those households likely include adult children living with their parents. In terms of ownership classification, those are Boomer-owned houses. But from a housing perspective, they’re multigenerational homes.
Suppose a Boomer (single or couple) and their 30-year-old child occupy one house. If the parent(s) sell, the 30 year-old doesn’t cease to occupy housing, they either move with the parent(s) or find another home. If it’s the latter, one household occupying one housing unit becomes two households looking for two. Selling the house doesn’t necessarily increase net housing supply.
There’s a certain irony in accusing older generations of withholding housing from younger Americans when millions of younger Americans are currently living under their roofs. Call it biting the hand that houses you.
That isn’t a criticism of young adults living with their parents. High housing costs are one of the reasons many are there. It’s a criticism of an argument that counts the age of the person on the deed while ignoring everyone else the property is housing.
Speaking of, there’s a real problem with comparing generations as though everyone is at the same stage of life. Older Millennials are now entering their peak earning and family-raising years, while Younger Boomers are entering retirement. One group should be buying larger family homes (and they are) while the other increasingly relocates, downsizes or rearranges its housing (and they are, too).
Some of what gets described as generational behavior is actually life-cycle behavior.
Tenants Inhabit Some Of Those “Hoarded” Houses
There’s another category frequently swept into discussions of older Americans owning too much real estate: investment property.
Two things are true: An investor buying a starter home can compete directly with someone trying to become a homeowner. And moving properties from owner occupancy into rental ownership can reduce the number of homes available for purchase.
But America’s rental market looks considerably different from the image of giant institutional investors buying up entire neighborhoods. HUD and Census data show that individual investors own about 70% of the nation’s rental properties. Their share of rental units is only 38% though, because large apartment buildings contain many units under a single owner. In the small-property market of one-to-four-unit rentals, individuals own 15.9 million units, or 70% of the total. In the DC Metro Area, that number has recently increased as displaced federal workers became ‘accidental landlords.’
The properties are largely the single-family houses, condos, duplexes, triplexes and four-unit properties we think of as the ‘mom-and-pop’ rental market. A national survey by Zillow found the median individual landlord was 59 years old, and the typical landlord owned two rental properties. A hedge against dwindling earning power, 401k losses from the 2008 financial crisis, rising medical, insurance and living costs and an uncertain economic future.
Use is important to the “hoarding” argument. While an investor who buys or converts a starter home can compete with a prospective first-time buyer, reducing the stock available for purchase, the property hasn’t been removed from America’s housing supply. Someone is living in it. It moved from the ownership market into the rental market.
Then There’s The Housing Wealth That Doesn’t Stay With Boomers.
There’s one final problem with treating Boomer housing ownership as permanent generational control. Boomers won’t own it forever. Homes will be sold. Owners will die. Estates will be settled. Some properties will pass directly to children or other relatives. Others will be sold and their equity distributed to heirs.
One private-sector projection from Coldwell Banker Global Luxury, drawing on Altrata and Cerulli Associates data, estimates that Gen X and Millennials will inherit approximately $2.4 trillion in U.S. real estate over the coming decade.
That number should be treated for what it is: a private-sector projection with significant exposure to affluent households, not a Census forecast.
But the underlying demographic process isn’t controversial. A tremendous amount of housing wealth accumulated by older Americans will eventually change generations. That may create another housing divide we don’t talk about nearly enough.
The “Great Wealth Transfer” could narrow the wealth gap between generations while widening it within younger generations.
- A Millennial whose parents own a mortgage-free $1,000,000 house may eventually receive a house, part of one, or proceeds from its sale;
- Another Millennial whose parents rented, have little accumulated wealth, or consume their assets paying for retirement and long-term care, may receive nothing.
They belong to the same generation, but they don’t have the same housing prospects.
The increasingly important divide may not ultimately be Boomer versus Millennial. It may be families that already own real estate versus families that don’t.
“Hoarding” is a term that bundles staying in your primary residence, owning a vacation home, owning rental property, buying another home, and/or living with adult children with simply having accumulated a lot of home equity.
Different behaviors, different effects on housing availability.
Continue Reading: Those House-Hoarding Boomers PT 2
Understanding who owns America’s homes is only half the story. In Part II, we look at how America built the property ladder, the “Reddit Rant” and the outdated policies, planning decisions, and historical events that still impact today’s housing market.
Sources & Data
