What happens when the young-old get old-old

There are a whole lot of us who are just a few years behind Joe Biden, and society isn't ready for it.

I was thinking about getting old this weekend, and not just because of Joe Biden.

I was at a friend’s 75th birthday party on Saturday, which got me thinking again about aging baby boomers (a subject I wrote about for years at the Mother Nature Network) and what a shitty profession architecture is. Here is a guy, in partnership with his wife, who can’t retire; you can’t live on the Canada Pension Plan and there is no architects’s pension plan. I ran into another older architect on the street yesterday and asked if he was still working; he said, of course, he has one project that took six years to get through a rezoning, and he has to finish it. Like so many architects I know, they are all going to work until they drop. They don’t have a choice.

Simon Kuper of the Financial Times worries about this, and he is only 54. He describes how he and his friends are in their “final stretch of the career race” and is wondering, “what did we learn about jobs, life and money that might benefit someone starting now?”

“First, whatever career you choose will quite likely implode before you finish your race. I trained with local journalists in 1994. Do any of them still work in what remains of local journalism? Friends who became academics, architects or civil servants have seen their salaries and status fall remorselessly, relative to other professions and sometimes even in absolute terms. With hindsight, we should all have gone into tech.”

Sheesh, I did a trifecta here, going from being an architect to a journalist to an academic. And I wanted to go into tech!

Notwithstanding my unfortunate choices of professions, I am lucky; I chose a successful father, and a mom with good genes- short of stature, but long-lived. I am still able to lift my boat in and out of the water and row for an hour every morning. But every summer it gets harder, and I don’t know how long I will be able to do this.

Five years ago I pitched a book about this, but nobody was interested, because really, nobody wants to think about it. This is what I wrote then, and given current events, it seems relevant today:

The coming boomer bust

Baby boomers today are what gerontologists are now calling the “young-old”, and which others call the “new middle age”.  80 percent of  baby boomers  live in nice houses in nice suburbs, drive private cars to work or play,  don't much like paying taxes, and think that they can keep living this way forever.

They can’t. In about 2025, the first baby boomers will hit 80, when they become the “old-old.” They then are joined by 10,000 other boomers every day, until by 2029 the entire baby boomer cohort is over 65 and compose a whopping 20 percent of the population, with well over half being old-old.

The Canadian demographer David Foot wrote that “demographics can explain two-thirds of everything.” That may have been an underestimation. If you look a decade down the road, what you have are pretty close to still 70 million baby boomers, most of whom are going to keep going for another twenty years, going through the “great boomer die-off,” which runs pretty much to 2050. In the meantime we have a series of related crises, any one of which would be serious problem.

The most obvious is the housing crisis, with millions over-housed, thinking that they can “age in place.” But this isn’t a matter of whether they can get in and out of the tub or up the stairs. The real problem is “how do I get out of this place”- the ability to drive is one of the first things to go, and most do not live in walkable communities, they are car dependent. Some will try to sell, downsize and move, but where to? Fully half will have too much money for subsidised housing and not enough for retirement housing. One study from Harvard concluded:

We project that by 2029 there will be 14.4 million middle-income seniors, 60 percent of whom will have mobility limitations and 20 percent of whom will have high health care and functional needs. While many of these seniors will likely need the level of care provided in seniors housing, we project that 54 percent of seniors will not have sufficient financial resources to pay for it.

There is a transportation crisis, where we won’t be able to cope with the number of people who can’t drive. Currently seniors transportation services can cost as much as fifty bucks a ride; Imagine when untold millions are trying to get around.

There will be a health care crisis, because older people account for half of health care spending now, and the proportion will continue to grow.

There will be a crisis in the streets, where sidewalks are too narrow to accommodate the numbers, the mobility devices, the walkers, where every intersection will turn into a death zone.

Coincidentally (although some blame the boomers and would say it’s no coincidence at all) a decade from now is also about the deadline the IPCC says we have to cut our carbon dioxide emissions by 45 percent or we will have a temperature rise of over 1.5 degrees C and possibly run into serious runaway climate crisis. To keep the temperature rise below 1.5, we have to make radical changes in the way we live, the way we get around, and what we consume.

To top it all off,  we have a crisis of governance, with baby boomers voting to elect conservative and populist governments who promise to keep thinks the way they are, who won’t do anything about climate change,  who won’t raise the taxes needed to fix what we have, let alone plan for the future.  We have baby boomers who fight every bike lane or transit line because it might slow down their driving or remove their parking. Who don’t think about how they will get around when they are old-old and can’t drive anymore. Who don’t think about who will care for them when all the drawbridges are pulled up.

This is our crisis scenario, about a decade from now when we have 70 million seriously ageing baby boomers, mostly alone, trapped in their suburban homes that they cannot afford to keep cool or dry because of a rapidly changing climate, possibly in the middle of an intergenerational political war.

More to come….