Demographic trends that will shape future housing demand

Four important demographic influences will shape housing demand in the United States: (1) the population's changing age profile, which foreshadows significant shifts in the composition of future housing demand, (2) the tendency for young men and women to remain single longer than they did in the past and to establish households in nonfamily living situations as primary individuals, (3) the widening mortality differential between the sexes, which has increased the tendency for women to outlive men, (4) a reversal of long-standing migration trends, which has brought about a redirection of settlement patterns within and outside the nation's metropolitan areas.Together, these trends will influence the type of housing people seek, and where they seek it, in three distinct ways: (1) by governing the rate of change in population of prime household-formation age, (2) by influencing the manner in which people group themselves into social units for housing purposes at different stages of the life cycle, (3) by concentrating specific socioeconomic or age strata of the population in certain places.This paper is the first in the 1975–76 series of Congressional Seminars on National Urban Growth Policy, organized by the National Planning Association and held at the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. This seminar was held on October 15, 1975.