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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   23844 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 8, 2026

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Another aspect not many people talk about when discussing this issue is that the elderly are currently sitting on hundreds of billions of dollars of underused real estate. Downgrading from a 3 bedroom suburban home with a quarter acre of property to a 2 bedroom condo in a lower cost of living area can finance a hell of a lot of health care. The boomers need to sell their fucking houses and get some of that wealth working again. Social security and medicare payments should be halved for every spare bedroom in your home.

Downgrading from a 3 bedroom suburban home with a quarter acre of property to a 2 bedroom condo in a lower cost of living area can finance a hell of a lot of health care.

No, it really can't. You'd think so, but transaction costs are high, condo fees are high, and healthcare is hellaciously expensive.

Also ridiculous carveouts in the current pension system. Australia doesn't count the house you live in towards mean testing for public assistance, pension and healthcare so there's a lot of instances where elderly are deliberately sitting on premium real estate (that they don't maintain at all) solely to potentially give it as future inheritance.

I'm reminded of an elderly couple near me growing up where their kids lived an hour away since the suburb had massively appreciated who made their own retirements significantly worse (due to transit and rarely seeing grandkids) by refusing to leave their literally rotting home

Old age social security benefits in the US are not means tested. This is a weight-bearing component of the system -- it's funded by a special tax on all workers, and provided to all those who paid into it. That's what keeps it from just being considered plain old welfare, and what makes it the "third rail" of politics.

As for occupied houses literally rotting in Australia... isn't the country generally rather dry for that? Even in my wet area of the US, if you avoid being flooded from below and keep the roof from leaking, and don't set it on fire, the house will be OK structurally for a very long time.

Also, a couple holding onto a house to keep the health care system from getting it rather than their children goes against the narrative of greedy elders who don't care about their children.

If social security is so smart and inevitable due to self funding by everybody why are they struggling to fund It?

Most of the bits of Australia with significant human presence aren't desert. I just recall going into the local elderly couple's house when I was younger and their roof was being barely patched together due to mold which they didn't have funds to rectify despite the lot being worth about 2.5 million AUD due to location. The house was about 100 years old though.

If they all start selling then prices will drop because people don't have the money to buy the real estate absent inherited real estate wealth.

Which solves another problem! Win/win!

Ohno. Premium real estate drops a bit in pricing and transit issues get mitigated.

The point is that it isn't a good source of funding. Much of the value is illusory.

Not in that sense. There's a potential haircut but the great grey migration has to go buy somewhere else which is likely better adapted to their needs. You're confusing this with liquid companies

to a two-bedroom condo in a lower-cost-of-living area

Or to a 500-ft2 ADU in the backyard.

Seriously. Unleash the granny flats! Make multi-generational households great again!

Exactly. I've moved from a nuclear family society to a clannish one and the elderly tend to have better QOL through granny flats and staying inside the home

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