I’ve been meaning to write this one for awhile and it just hasn’t gotten to the top of the list, so the news item is kind of out of date.

But here’s the original tweet which inspired it, from 2023. It’s a video from the New Jersey Democrats, about something called the StayNJ program, which reduces the property-tax burden for seniors.

My parents live in New Jersey, and so do most of my old friends’ parents, and the property taxes are in fact a big reason a lot of older people move. It seems kind of crazy to me that after living in a place and investing in it all your life, with no kids in the schools for years or decades, you can’t sit back and live out retirement or semi-retirement and just, like, start keeping some of your money. So my reaction to this news item would be something like finally.

That’s my natural view, anyway—or perhaps that’s me mistaking my (or my parents’) interests for my ideas. I don’t think I would have thought about this much or really considered that there could be an alternative view. Who would want to eject old people from their communities except, maybe, the kind of people who are greasing the slippery slope towards euthanasia? Hmm…..

So, these are all folks I follow (or followed, when we were all on Twitter a lot more) and who I typically agree with on housing/urbanism stuff, and these were their reactions.

Now that’s interesting. Having been made aware there are multiple views and that these folks are not old-people-haters, I suppose in some way I see a program for old people as a program for the future me. But maybe that’s like the old crack about every working man thinking he’s a future billionaire.

This characterization of tax relief for seniors as generational theft does definitely trigger a certain residual distrust I have of mainstream/left-leaning urbanism as kind of positioned against community, or even, frankly, positioned against people. How can you go on about building places that are worth living in and loving, and then cast out people in their golden years? I have to argue myself into not seeing this as a heartless position.

And yet, why do I identify with old people more than with my own generation, in this case? Maybe because I’m comfortably housed and not short on money. Ideas, interests. Maybe what I would have once completely understood to be my own moral solidarity with the elderly against the selfish, entitled, old-people-hating “housing” people would have been along the fact that housing has never been a critical difficulty for me.

On this point, the Central NJ YIMBY fellow wrote later down in the replies something germane: “New Jersey is a very expensive state for families to raise kids in, and the Census 2020 data shows that it is working-age adults who are leaving New Jersey at a disproportionate level.” In other words, someone like me—a young urbanist with retired parents in a very expensive state—in some ways has to choose between my family’s interest and the interests of the broader population. What are we to make of that sort of choice?

But also, because of my family’s relative good fortune, the general trend was never visible to me. A little by the lady who supposedly asked how Nixon could have won when nobody she knew voted for him.

This kind of dovetails with my piece recently about whether moving—rather than staying in place—enhances community. It’s this interesting hypothesis that maybe a lot of NIMBYism and negative feelings and sense of decline come from just kind of living too long in the same place and feeling like nothing is constant around you. Moving, the idea goes, resets that counter in your head keeping track of all the little meaningless bits and pieces that can start to be your entire world. Maybe that’s good.

Another element of this—which is entirely overlooked if we get stuck on the “you don’t like old people” thing—is that seniors don’t need to stay in their large single-family homes on pieces of land in order to remain in their general communities. But for that to be true, we need to build a lot more different kinds of housing: senior housing, sure, but just lots of smaller types of homes, which typically will be multifamily. Or maybe small, small-lot detached houses. Or townhomes. All of it. And that will also meet a lot of resistance—often from precisely the same people who want the tax relief!

So in a sense, giving seniors property tax relief so they can stay in disproportionately large homes long after their kids are gone is kind of very poorly reverse-engineering a situation where seniors can downsize without having to leave their community. And I don’t mean they don’t “deserve” to live in their big houses; sure, but lots of older folks want to downsize, and find that downsizing requires moving far away.

This is one reason why it’s wrong to think of apartments as having anything to do with a permanent renting class or immaturity or childlessness or whatever things people allege. I wrote about this with regard to my hometown, which is working on a big apartment/hotel/restaurant project on Main Street. Someone commented and said he’d love to live in a small-ish apartment in the middle of town in his old age. These are not just for young people. And they’re not for young people for their whole life. They’re a waystation for lots of different people at specific moments in life, and when we take those options away, there are all sorts of downstream consequences.

The big point here is that arguing about old people and tax relief is failing to get at the issue at its most fundamental level: that we lack a sufficient abundance of housing options that anyone at any age in any household size can just own or rent a home and not have it take up so much mental and political and financial space. The fact that housing is the way it is and not, say, a little bit closer to buying groceries is a choice we make to impose artificial scarcity on ourselves and then treat it as a fact of nature.

Related Reading:

About That Avocado Toast

Prices Aren’t Metaphysics

The Housing Famine

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