Older people and big homes: the challenge of downsizing to smaller homes in a housing crisis

She’s fit and active, and has a busy routine to keep on top of; there’s the cleaning, including regularly vacuum-cleaning, dusting, washing curtains and tending to her flower beds.Dooley knows she is lucky to be in the good health to be able to keep on top of all this work, but even so she has in the past considered moving to a smaller, more manageable place.

It’s not quite so straightforward. Take Edward Doyle, a regional development officer for Active Retirement who lives near Straffan in northwest Kildare with his wife Bernadette.“I’m of an age here where I have this house with a big garden, a lot of hedges to be cut, and in another four or five years I might not be able to cut the hedges,” he said.

Moving to less expensive parts of Kildare, such as Newbridge, would be affordable, but would leave Edward and Bernadette slightly cut off from the community they have lived a large portion of their lives in. “That’s what it means to be part of a community and it’s natural for people to want to stay where they are.”

“My concern is about the search for quick solutions to the housing crisis – and there aren’t any,” O’Connor said. On a personal level, Hickey was reluctant to leave a house she has lived a large chunk of her life in. As far as Kelly is concerned, the problem isn’t one of under-occupied houses but of a lack of suitable supply in the wider market.

The paper found that there was a substantial degree of resistance to the idea of downsizing, concluding that “most mature homeowner households prefer not to downsize”, citing “an emotional attachment to the home” in more than half the cases.

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