I saw a news report last week that said that a majority of women now live alone without a spouse. Now I know enough about the warping that can occur in the collection of statistics and I know that writers love to grab something sensational for a headline, but this one interests me.
First, it appears that the study included widows who live alone. That certainly warps the result, by which I mean that you weren’t thinking about that possibility when YOU read the statistic. It also doesn’t mean that women in general aren’t getting married.
This is just a reflection one of the demographic changes underway in out society. Some are huge! How about the Baby Boomer Generation hitting retirement age? That’s a biggie. We also have young people deferring marriage until their careers are a little more developed. We also, certainly, have men and women who either don’t want to get married or who want to but it just won’t turn out that way for them.
What it does do, in my mind, is illuminate the fact that a "typical household" isn’t what we used to think it was: a man and his wife and two kids and a Cocker Spaniel. It turns out that that description fits fewer than 20% of households today.
But my perception of American homebuilders is that they are still building a majority of their homes for that family. It may be that they are right, that regardless of the difference in households, it’s that IDEAL family who shows up as homebuyers at the model home complex.
There are ways of meeting the needs of different segments of the marketplace. I can remember a homebuilder in Irvine, CA, pretty much a Yuppie town, who included some models whose floor plans include a two bedroom home with two identical master bedroom suites. They intended to sell to two homebuyers who didn’t want to face the issue of two adult homebuyers who had to say, "We’re buying this together but who gets the big bedroom and who settles for one designed for the kids?"
I thought that was innovative and I hope builders do more imaginative thinking like that.
I would especially like to hear from people who either haven’t found a floor plan that suits their needs or have found some creative builder who has done something different that did meet those needs.
Randy Johnson Randy is a Credit.com contributor and seasoned mortgage expert. He writes about home buying, mortgage laws and real estate finance issues. He has financed over $1 billion in properties, is the author of How to Save Thousands of Dollars on your Home Mortgage and he is a feature columnist for Savvy Borrower.
Follow Us
