| Motivating Home Modifications for Aging in Place

| Observations of a Newly Minted Older Person
| Louis Tenenbaum

Parts one and two in this series referred to articles about inertia and finances that should influence people to plan for their aging housing experience. This third column presents my ideas about motivating people to prepare their homes to age in place.

So, what will motivate people to plan ahead? I’ve been studying this for a long time. Telling people what’s good for them doesn’t influence their behavior. Many years stumping for home modifications as a contractor, a presenter, a writer, a thought leader, and an advocate on this topic give me little hope that the OLLI (Osher Lifelong Learning Institute) course I taught with Victor Rezmovic and Steve Gurney — which presented a welter of statistics and demographic data — is going to move the needle. 

My reading of the behavioral economics literature (I especially recommend Cass Sunstein’s Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, 2008)  pushed me to look for analogous behavior change. I am struck how tax credits opened the hybrid car and solar collector markets. People didn’t all of a sudden become incredibly eco-conscious. The market explosion came out of tax credits, not responsibility.  How can we get some of that for our industry?

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Tax incentives are, in many ways, an end run. If aging in place home updates become cheaper than regular remodeling, the techniques will become more familiar, then common, and then requirements, just as energy saving techniques became standard. By making home modifications cheaper, you engage the design, contractor, and manufacturing communities because they execute aging in place updates without having to pitch aging in place issues. The jobs are simply lower cost! Because homeowners over 65 were responsible for 27% of the $600+ billion U.S. residential remodeling spend in 2023, the market is already there. The goal, growth in the number of homes with these features will follow, not unlike hybrid cars and solar panels.

A new bill working toward this goal, the Senior Accessible Housing Tax Credit Act of 2026, has just been introduced. It follows on a similar bill I worked to introduce in 2022, The Home Modification for Accessibility Act of 2022. To make the tax credit ‘end run’ work, these incentives must not be associated with poor health, limited mobility, or economic straits. If they are cast as entitlements to compensate for these conditions they will be tainted, and avoided, not adopted by the general population of age qualified households. Medicare, Medicare Advantage, and supplements as well as Long Term Care insurers could also adapt incentives to reduce falls and to achieve other goals. Get on board, folks! There is money to be saved!

My senator, Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland, is one of the new bill’s sponsors. I just wrote to her, offering my support as an advocate and resource. You may want to advocate in your own way.

Louis Tenenbaum is a longtime advocate for aging in place, co-founder of the HomesRenewed™ Coalition, the HomesRenewed™ Resource Center, and HomesRenewed Ventures, LLC and a nationally recognized expert on home modifications that support independent living. Discover more columns in this series.