“Baby chasing” baby boomers move south to be with grandkids
“Baby chasing” baby boomers move south to be with grandkids
It isn’t unusual for older Americans to move south; retirement and over-55 communities are prolific in the Sun Belt. But warm weather and golf aren’t the only things driving grandparents to migrate. They also want to be closer to their grandkids. In fact, there’s a term for it: baby chasing.
The housing research firm Zonda publishes a yearly Baby Chaser Index, ranking cities by growth in residents ages 25 to 44 and 60 to 79. Last year, Austin, Texas; Charleston, South Carolina; and Jacksonville, Florida, topped the list.
Heather Gillers, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, wrote about the trend. She joined Marketplace’s Amy Scott to talk about why boomers are relocating and where the trend is going. An edited transcript of their conversation is below.
Amy Scott: So who are these baby-chasing grandparents, and where are they moving?
Heather Gillers: So they are generally sort of the baby boomer generation, and they’re mostly moving south. And this is sort of the intersection of a bunch of different population trends that have been building. One is that we’ve seen sort of a 10-year growth in population of young families in the southern U.S.: Texas, Florida, the Carolinas. And then, you know, obviously these are traditionally places where older Americans have retired to warm weather, golf. And now there’s a new attraction, which is that a lot of their grandbabies live there. At the same time, the baby boomers are a generation that have accumulated a lot of wealth. Many of them, you know, have retirement portfolios that grew over a 10-year bull market. They have paid off or nearly paid off homes, so they’re sort of cashing out and moving south, where they don’t have to worry about high interest rates. Because they have this cash from selling their homes, they can buy a place and be near their grandkids.
Scott: I wanted to talk about some of the data behind this trend story. How do we know? I mean, obviously there are a lot of reasons people move. And you mentioned the South has been a destination for retirees for a long time. How do we know that a lot of this is motivated by being close to the grandkids?
Gillers: There aren’t census takers going from house to house saying to grandmas, “Did you move here to come see your grandbaby?” But we do have a lot of information from the real estate industry and a little bit of sort of like demographic data that sort of bears this out. So the National Association of Realtors surveys homebuyers, and the age of repeat homebuyers is at a 40-year high right now. And the biggest reason that they cite for selling their homes is moving close to friends and family. And then another trend in homebuilding that kind of bears this out is that 55-and-over communities within all-ages communities have become very popular. So there’s a clear trend of, like, older Americans wanting to live close, at least to somebody’s grandchildren, and potentially to their own families.
Scott: Or maybe their own children, even if they don’t themselves have kids. Talk a little bit about the economic impact of this group on the cities where they’re moving. As you said, these are folks that might might have some accumulated wealth, a little more flexibility.
Gillers: Yes, yes. So the fastest-growing city in the U.S. right now, the fastest-growing city over 50,000, is Georgetown, Texas, and about a fifth of its population lives in one giant retirement community, and it’s just been great for the city. I mean, this year it got a triple-A bond rating. I mean, these are people who, they don’t send their kids to school, so that’s a costly service that they don’t make use of. They pay taxes, they own property, they have a lot of spending power. A statistic I like to cite is that people 55 and over make up for 45% of personal spending in the U.S. So they’re generally like a credit positive, as a bond rating agency would say. They do use ambulance services, but, a lot of the other sort of services that cities spend a lot of money on, this population is not going to be a big user of those services.
Scott: Well, where do you see this going? Is there any way to know how lasting this trend might be?
Gillers: You know, another really interesting piece of this is that someone like that may be doing a lot of child care, but, as kids need less child care, these grandparents are also getting older, and the U.S. has a real shortage of care workers for older people. So as these grandparents age and the grandchildren no longer need care, they may find that they are happy to be close to their children because they themselves need help.
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