HOW TO FIND THE MISSING MIDDLE IN HOUSING: Those aging suburbs around your town are likely not changing from an aging generation whose children have grown up because nobody is selling, even if there were young couples trying to buy. There are reasons for that, especially public tax policies that discourage empty nesters to put up For Sale signs according to the Institute for Family Studies (IFS):

“When seniors are locked into homes their children have long since left, those homes never reach the next generation of parents, and the neighborhoods where today’s adults grew up are closed to their own kids,” according to a deep-dive data analysis from IFS.

Why should anybody care?

“Unlocking those homes would do more than house young families. Aging owners freed to downsize could also move closer to their children and grandchildren, easing the hands-on caregiving that flows in both directions across generations—grandparents minding grandchildren, adult children looking after aging parents—and lessening the public cost of institutional care,” IFS reports.