Abstract

In many western societies the increasing share of elderly is a special concern for the future. One issue in this debate is housing for these elderly. A hypothesis in Sweden is that tomorrow's and today's elderly will increasingly demand an apartment in a central location in exchange for their house in the suburb. This assumption includes the idea that the elderly thereby change tenure form from homeownership to cooperative housing or rental housing. Rental and cooperative housing typically includes more service for residents. There are studies pointing to such a residential mobility trend among seniors but quantitative tests are wanted. We will follow the total cohorts born in the 1920s 1930s and 1940s and their mobility patterns between 2001 and 2006. What characterize the movers and stayers respectively and do the elderly movers compete for the same apartments as young entrants on the housing market do? Especially planning processes are to be informed by such an analysis. In this paper we analyze the residential mobility patterns among pensioners, and pensioners to be, using a register database, Geoswede, comprising the total Swedish population.

Work in progress together with Marianne Abramsson, N I S A L - National Institute for the Study of Ageing and Later, Linköping University, Sweden.

Publications

Andersson, Eva and Abramsson, Marianne (2012), Changing residential mobility rates of older people in Sweden. Ageing & Society 32(6), 963-982. http://journals.cambridge.org/repo_A864nvar