Marin County has long been one of California’s most expensive places to live.
Its coveted coastal views, proximity to the Bay Area’s tech economy and a formidable resistance to new development have created an extremely tight housing market in an already-pricey region.
But there’s another key factor that’s become increasingly important in conversations about housing here and in many other parts of California: the aging population.
“Household sizes are shrinking as kids move out and as spouses die,” said Jenny Silva, executive director of Call Marin Home, a coalition focused on affordable and sustainable housing. “What was a household for four or five people is now a household for one.”
Marin County — where more than a third of residents are 60 or older, a share expected to rise to 40% by 2040 — may just be the most extreme example of how California’s ballooning senior population has created another challenge in the state’s housing crisis. As a large share of the state’s population ages, homes increasingly are accommodating fewer people. Even when new housing is built, it’s not having the outcome many expected because of this “spreading-out effect,” as one housing expert called it.
California, across the board, has struggled to keep up with growing demand for housing, especially affordable options. Slow and limited new construction has driven steep competition and rising prices. But exacerbating the state’s housing crisis is this aging generation that has little incentive to leave their longtime single-family properties, originally designed to house more than just one or two people.
Many seniors, even if they would consider downsizing, have few viable options, experts say, and now, neither do their adult children, who may want to live nearby but can’t find anything affordable. It’s an issue that’s particularly pronounced in Marin County.
“I feel like we’re kind of a preview to the future of what happens when you don’t build housing: You get a very rapidly aging population,” Silva said. “It’s part of the housing crunch that many people don’t think about.”
Other parts of the state have spent the last few years racing to build more housing. Yet across the board, California has still experienced low vacancies and high housing costs — even as the population essentially plateaued or even dipped in some areas.
While aging baby boomers play a big part in this, housing experts say a similar phenomenon is occurring with young and middle-aged adults, who are having fewer children later in life, or not at all, which also is keeping households smaller among that demographic.
“The number of people per unit has been going down,” said Eric McGhee, policy director and senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California. “It’s not necessarily an unhealthy development, we just have to understand … we’re going to have to build more housing than the population numbers might otherwise expect.”
McGhee was among the authors of a new analysis that found the average household size in California fell from 2.89 in 2019 to 2.77 in 2024. That drop helps explain how the state added more than 650,000 new housing units during the period yet there was a relatively limited effect on housing availability and affordability, McGhee said.
Instead of causing vacancy rates to rise and housing costs to dip, the authors believe Californians simply started to spread out.
“More units are needed to house the same number of people,” the report said. “Sustaining the pace of construction — and directing it toward the types and locations of housing that meet evolving household needs — remains an urgent policy priority.”
And so far, the market has struggled to respond to those needs, said William Fulton, co-director of UC San Diego’s Center for Housing Policy and Design.
“What we’re building has not kept up with who we are,” Fulton said. “Our households are smaller than ever, our houses are bigger than ever.”
The majority of home construction across the state continues to be single-family homes — with increasingly large footprints — or the classic four- or five-story apartment building, usually for rent, Fulton said. Accessory Dwelling Units have become much more popular and feasible in recent years — often considered a good option for aging family members, as indicated by their “granny flat” moniker — but experts say it’s still not clear just how frequently the units are being used for seniors.
“It’s hard to know what people want when they only have certain options,” Fulton said. “There have to be more options in between, what is often called the missing middle … more different types of houses at more different price points.”
Without enough viable, smaller options on the market, there’s little reason for seniors to leave their longtime homes, said David Garcia, deputy director of policy for UC Berkeley’s Terner Center for Housing Innovation.
“You have less turnover in the housing market as a result, which is exacerbated by the state’s property tax structure,” Garcia said, referencing Proposition 13, the 1978 tax cut that dramatically limited homeowners’ tax bills, particularly for longtime owners.
This cycle has helped make it so difficult for first-time homeowners in the state, a milestone that doesn’t occur for the majority of Californians until age 47, according to another PPIC report, up from age 36 in 2009. Nationwide, more than half of residents own a home by age 36.
Fulton called the dynamic between demographics and housing a type of “chicken and egg” situation, because as families spread out and live with fewer people, it limits the housing units available to rent or buy. But without enough housing options scaled for these smaller households, families feel limited to their too-large homes, minimizing a healthy churn in the housing market.
In California, nearly 10 million people — roughly a quarter of the population — will be 60 or older by 2030, the state estimates, and that share will only increase as time goes on.
About 20% of these 60-and-up California residents live alone.
Nationwide, the country also is grappling with a huge aging population. But the effects of that population in California are particularly pronounced because of the state’s backlog of housing needs, McGhee said.
“We have lower vacancies and we have higher people per household to begin with,” McGhee said. Even if families weren’t spreading out more, it would take a larger uptick in housing construction to make any significant difference.
In Marin County, there have been efforts to help match seniors with roommates to encourage cohabitation within the existing housing stock, but experts say the only surefire solution is building more diverse housing — and fast.
“Even if we had a lot of seniors downsizing, that would help, but we are missing any entry-level housing for young families right now,” Silva said. “The No. 1 thing is building more housing that is accessible and affordable.”
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