The death house

Why so many people plan to leave their homes “feet first”

Still from the Charli xcx video “House”

“I’ll only leave this house feet first.”

You’ve probably heard this phrase. Maybe your dad said it. Maybe you’ve said it yourself. Empty nesters, still living in the big home where they raised their kids, defiantly declare it when someone—often an annoying (grown) kid—suggests it might be time to think about downsizing.

Somehow, weirdly, the single-family home has morphed from a place to raise kids into a place to die. It has become the death house.

More than a generational attitude or personality tic, this has become a policy problem. “Older Americans are aging in place because it makes financial sense, but also because it’s human nature to avoid thinking about challenging scenarios such as needing help as you get older,” said Redfin Chief Economist Daryl Fairweather in this 2024 piece. “In reality, many homeowners and renters will need to move somewhere that better meets their needs as they age, like a senior-living community or a one-story home in an accessible neighborhood.”

She added that government policies don’t encourage these options for seniors. At the local, state, and federal levels, governments have effectively squashed the supply of the variety of housing needed to match the variety of human experiences. The vast majority of residential land in America is legally reserved for single-family detached housing, often on large lots. And it’s not simply a lack of variety—there’s just not enough housing overall. A dramatic inventory shortage has frozen seniors in place and diminished even the possibility of homeownership for everyone else.

A building, a house, a home

Once, the word “house” simply meant “building.”¹ Over time, it came to mean “home,” but that just pushes the question back: what makes a house a “home?” Humans have long been adept at making many housing types feel cozy and personal. The insistence that only a detached single-family unit can function as a “home” arose from a deliberate marketing campaign aimed at postwar America: To be an American means to live in a suburb, in one type of housing, which looked nearly identical from sea to shining sea.²

This illustration was originally created for the West Coast Lumbermen’s Association to sell wood (in the form of houses) in 1958. You can read about the illustrator and the “live better” campaign here: The source of this image is here.

Owning a house, preferably a detached single-family house on a large grassy lot, was proof that you had made it, that you were settled, that you were a fully-fledged adult, that you had converted the sweat of your brow into something tangible and permanent. Herbert Hoover’s Better Homes campaign in the 1920s and the entire apparatus of New Deal mortgage policy in the 1930s and 1940s actively promoted the notion that the good and proper American life culminates in a paid-off house with a yard.

So “home” became an identity. A house became a promise but also a bit of a trap, as the structure grew ever more entangled with the self—in particular, the past self. More than just a place to cook, sleep, relax, and do your private activities, a home (when thought of like this) slowly becomes a museum. You see ghosts of your children in every corner. Memories accrue of babies, baths, soccer in the backyard, and homework at a table.

Ask someone why they want to stay, and they’ll often reply, “my memories are here.” What they usually mean is: I am here. The house has become a sort of container for an ageless, immortal soul.

Losing the ability to live alone

That’s the nostalgic feeling behind the “feet first” house. The flipside is fear.

How to care for frail elderly people is not a new problem, but it didn’t used to loom quite this large. Before antibiotics and modern medicine, most people simply didn’t live very long. If you did reach old age and couldn’t live independently anymore, the usual solution was to move in with your kids.

That was my maternal grandmother’s story. She had a few years of solo widowhood (which, honestly, she seemed to enjoy) before a stroke made living alone impossible. So she moved in with my uncle, who cared for her until she died. This was, and often still is, a normal way of handling age and housing. Importantly, it also involves a move.³

That’s where denial kicks in. Most people who live long enough will eventually lose the ability to live entirely on their own; they’ll have to move to a place where support is built in. This has always been true. What’s new is the widespread refusal to acknowledge it and plan for it.

If a move is likely, it’s going to be far easier in your fifties, sixties, and even seventies than in your eighties or nineties. But try raising that idea with older relatives and you’ll probably hear some version of “I’ll die in this house.”

A big reason for that, I think, is that the only move many people can visualize is the worst one imaginable: to the nursing home.

Institutionalizing and medicalizing old age

As medical care has improved, it has kept people alive to deal with conditions that used to kill them off quickly.⁴ Those conditions may require constant medical attention, more than an adult kid with a job and other duties can manage. Institutions arose to care for that population. The Silent Generation (my parents’ generation) was among the first to face the decision of whether to place a parent in one.

If a parent’s medical condition was too complex for a non-professional to handle, then into nursing homes people went. For many families, on both ends of the decision, the nursing home could feel like abandonment. Now the generation that first had that option is confronting it from the other side. They are in the grip of not just fear, but guilt over the choices they made with their own frail parents.

The demographic wall

I’m not the only person who’s been watching this. Lloyd Alter, a Canadian writer and urban designer who is himself a Boomer, has been sounding this alarm for over a decade. Boomers are sitting in their suburban family homes with no plan for what’s next, he says. He points to a 2016 National Association of Homebuilders (NAHB) survey of Boomer housing preferences that found 78% preferred a cul-de-sac, with only 7% preferring a central city location. Only 8% of seniors surveyed thought being near public transit was essential.

Older Americans grew up well before the YIMBY “charming mixed-use walkable community” idea. For them, cities are dangerous: violent crime in the U.S. quadrupled between 1960 and 1991, which profoundly shaped how those of us raised in that era saw the urban environment. Despite a subsequent dramatic drop in crime, many people can only see “peaceful suburbia” or “inner-city crime-ridden hellscape.” Compact living is city living, and no thank you: they want a 2,000 sqft house, on one level, a double garage, and three bedrooms. And they want it somewhere “typically suburban.” They are indeed worried about changes in health or increased physical limitations, but not quite enough to do anything about it.

Which brings us to driving.

Housing choices always, always mean mobility choices: these things cannot be separated. The NAHB survey captures a generation that has not yet reckoned with what happens when they can no longer drive. Alter writes:

We have to recognize the physical problems that come with aging, making driving difficult and dangerous; I suffer from a few of them.

Vision is the big one; it deteriorates significantly as you age, especially at night. Peripheral vision shrinks. Medication has side effects; many over-the-counter drugs warn “do not operate heavy machinery,” yet that is what a car is. Reaction times can be four times as long as those of young people.

He predicts a “demographic wall” as 70 million Americans push into their eighties and face the consequences of the auto-centric, sprawling, land-gobbling world they built—and the atomized, separated, often lonely social world that goes with it. A housing crisis meets a transportation crisis meets a care crisis.

Fighting to ban the housing your future self will need

But the built environment, by definition, is a choice. The terrifying nursing-home scenario isn’t the only alternative to a suburban family house. Between a big family house and institutional care lies a huge range of possibilities:⁵

• Accessory dwelling units

• Cottage courts

• Mixed-use housing over shops downtown

• Senior cohousing

• Walkable neighborhoods with services nearby

• Assisted living that looks like regular housing, not a hospital

• Upscale compact condos

• Affordable senior apartments

Historically, a Mayberry-style town contained many of these options. Then we made all that illegal. Postwar zoning codes outlawed granny flats, ended residential uses downtown, banned attached housing, and imposed large lot sizes that effectively mandated the detached single-family home across huge areas of America. And we fight it still: To this day, senior citizens are the dominant demographic showing up to planning meetings to block the very housing they are someday going to need.

Lives are long, with many seasons

You know the riddle of the Sphinx: “What walks on four legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon, and three legs in the evening?” The answer, of course, is humans: crawling as babies, walking upright in adulthood, and leaning on a cane in old age.

The same idea applies to housing. Different housing types are appropriate for different life stages. My husband and I began our life together in the Gold Street Apartments here in Los Alamos. Later, it was a little casita in a walkable neighborhood in Santa Fe, then another rental. When it was time for kids, we bought a family house.

We never thought, “this family house will be the house we die in.” We always assumed it was a house for a certain season of life—a family house, for a family.

Most people become empty nesters in their early fifties. If you and your spouse live into your mid- or late eighties, you’ll spend more than three decades as a two-person household. The family home is already the wrong size by the time the last child leaves. You can spend your fifties thinking, “how long can I grit it out here until I’m forced into a nursing home,” or you can think, “Thirty years is a long time. Let’s move to an aging-appropriate house and make it home.”

Our kids are now grown and gone. Like many of our peers, the mister and I are still in our family-sized house. We’d like to downsize to a quality two-person home and free this one up for a family—but, because zoning has made senior-appropriate housing so hard to build, we haven’t been able to find the right place.

The death house and the idea of permanence

Aging denialism is packed into the idea of the death house. Declaring one house the forever house is a way of avoiding the passage of time itself. With that temporal terror often comes a kind of entitlement to permanence: efforts to stop the entire neighborhood from changing, a rejection of different arrangements, an insistence that nothing in a 10-square-mile radius ever look different. It all springs from the same place: a refusal to face mortality.

I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but time will win this fight. If you don’t keel over quickly, you’re going to fall apart slowly. (To manage the emotions that come with this reality, I recommend meditations like this one.) Refusing to plan for age and morbidity, refusing to think about where you’ll be living when the wheels start to come off the bus, just ensures it’ll probably be a lot worse than it might have been. A little planning goes a long way.

If nothing else, think about this for the kids. If you have kids, don’t make them deal with your lack of planning. If you don’t have kids, think about “the kids” more broadly: There are millions of young people in America who want to live in a family house in order to start a family, and they can’t. If seniors want to stay put, that’s one thing, but they also spend a great deal of time and money blocking new housing from being built. By hitting housing from both ends, they’re making life very difficult for their grandchildren.

We can do better. Many other countries have. And at other moments in American history, we too have built the kind of housing that serves people across a lifetime: accessible, dense enough to walk to things, small enough to maintain, rich enough in community to not require a car for every social connection.

The “feet first” generation didn’t build that. But it’s not too late to build it for the rest of us, and for them—if we can convince those who hold the political power to let it happen.

---

Discussion questions for readers: Do you know someone who uses this “feet first” language about their house? Do you have an older relative in a housing situation that worries you? Have you thought about where you want to live as you get older? What would it take to make downsizing feel like a choice rather than a defeat?

1. For a fascinating historical tour through the meaning of the word “house,” read this series by Jon Boyd.

2. Explore this topic more through Building Suburbia by Dolores Hayden; The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein; and Excluded: How Snob Zoning, NIMBYism, and Class Bias Build the Walls We Don’t See by Richard Kahlenberg.

3. And it involves imposing on your adult children. If this is at all the plan, have that discussion with your kids sooner rather than later. Don’t just assume it. Whether you agree with this or not, adult children feel less obliged to care for older relatives: “As I was treated, so I shall treat you,” is the idea. If your relationship with your kids is strained, work on repairing it or come up with a plan other than assuming they’ll take you in.

4. A must-read: Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, by Atul Gawande.

5. The AARP has done great work on thinking through housing for the elderly. See “Eleven Senior Housing Options,” for example.