Move on to the housing market: ‘You have to tempt the elderly to leave their big house’

After half a century in their single -family home in Schagen, Seventigers Trudy and Wiebe van Huizen recently moved to a senior home two kilometers away. Ans Beerens (72) from Tilburg exchanged her spacious owner -occupied apartment for a rental suite in a luxury home for the elderly. An 85-year-old widower is satisfied with his Amsterdam senior home and speaks twice a week with peers who are of Turkish descent twice a week. And sixties Peter and Rita van Hese said their Ridderkerkse Single -family house Goodbye and now live in an elderly court around the corner.

‘Model burgers’ are, if you ask policy makers. Model seniors. Because: they make way for younger generations on the stalled housing market. And they also went to live in so -called ‘life -course -proof’ houses, which increase the chance that they will never have to move to a nursing home, for which there are long waiting lists. They are houses without thresholds, so with a smaller risk of falling. The bedroom is on the same floor as the living room and the bathroom, so that they do not have to go to the upper floor if they will soon have difficulty walking. There are wider doors that a walker or wheelchair can pass through.

You just have to look ten years ahead

The Netherlands has to deal with ‘double aging’: the number of elderly people is increasing and they are getting older on average. The expectation is that in 2030 More than two million people Being 75 or older (12 percent of the population). In 2018 there were about 1.4 million. This also increases the demand for elderly homes.

Zoomt in a five -part articles series NRC In on moving elderly. Suppose you are ‘too good’ for the nursing home, but you are doing to leave your old, trusted house: where can you go? And how do you like the new home?

Hole in the housing market

The biggest problem: the elderly have to deal with a ‘hole’ in the housing market, say experts and politicians. The old retirement home was largely cut back ten years ago, you only end up in the nursing home if you are very needed; Only 120,000 people live there and there are more than 20,000 elderly people on the waiting list. So the elderly get stuck in spacious university homes, from which their children left years ago.

To close that ‘hole’ and to stimulate the flow on the housing market, the Rutte IV cabinet presented a plan in 2022 to have 290,000 elderly homes built up to and including 2030. Both rent and purchase. But that does not run smoothly, concluded the Court of Audit last May. There is no concrete plans and construction is delayed by, among other things, the nitrogen crisis.

Apart from that: only with more houses do you not pull many people over 65. Many are hard, living in the same house for decades, have raised their children. Their houses are decorated and adapted to their taste and living ease, they attach to the chat with the neighbors, on the neighborhood, the walk to the shopping center. Of all households aged 75 and older, only 2 percent release annually, the Economic Institute for Construction calculated in the report Housing for the elderly (2024). Compare that with households between 25 and 35 years old: one in five moves annually. The mortgage of the elderly is often paid off, so they often live cheaply, many bought their houses in the Gulden Age: the price of a new house scares them. And a rental apartment almost always leads to higher monthly payments.

Even a deteriorating health does not overtake the elderly, Recently it was apparent from a poll by the Anbo-PCOB elderly association. Suppose the question was for over 3,500 people who live at home, you need more care due to old age complaints, you do not have a partner and you are still ‘too good’ for the nursing home: what would you do? Only a narrow majority (53 percent) considered moving to an apartment where care would be available on call. 18 percent answered ‘I do not know’ and preferably 29 percent like to live in their own trusted house and make a greater appeal to home care. Only when things really go home, after another fall or the announcement from home care staff that the work is becoming too heavy for them, many elderly people close the door behind them. If there is room elsewhere, at least.

Look forward

Ridderkerker Peter van Hese (67) initially did not look ahead. He lived well in the single -family home where his wife and he had been retired and the children had raised. For his brother Fred three years younger, a few blocks away, the cards were shuffled differently. His wife is struggling with MS and always walked stiffer, looking for a more practical home was a must. « You just have to look ten years ahead, » Fred told his brother.

Fred moved to an elderly court at the end of 2023. Peter followed in April 2024. The brothers never want to leave.

Living groups, ‘kangaroo houses’ with a home for your old parents, ‘student houses’ for people over 60, ‘duo-homes’ in the pouch for your old parents

“You have to have the elderly to tempt to leave their big house ”, says founder of the Knarrenhof Peter Prak Foundation, who has placed twelve courtyards since 2018, including those in Ridderkerk. It is affordable, maintenance -poor houses embedded in a small residential community. The concept is catching on, there are nearly sixty thousand elderly people on the waiting list. Prak is a foreruns, municipalorations, municipalorations also came in the golier. Living groups, ‘Kangaroo homes’ with a home for your old parents, ‘student houses’ in the pouch for people in their sixties, ‘DUO homes’ in which the elderly splits their half-vacant house cadastral so that there is room for a young person who can provide informal care.

Each time it turns out: the elderly are certainly interested as soon as such forms of living are realized. In fact, when Corporation Wooncompagnie recently had six lifelong -proof houses built in Schagerbrug, there were one hundred and fifty interested people, including Trudy and Wiebe van Huizen. The couple moved: in such a new, life -course -proof home, it is simply more pleasant to grow old. They left the heart with pain, though. Goodbye big house with your large windows, goodbye dear neighbors, goodbye garden of twenty meters deep, time for a jump in the deep. « We still have to integrate a little in the village, » says Trudy, « but that will come. »