Where Will The Boomers Go?

From the Star Ledger:

Just don't call it a retirement home
BY KATHLEEN O'BRIEN

After decades in the insurance business, Gene Zielinski was used to crunching numbers.

As he faced turning 60, he did this calculation: If he and wife Becky moved to North Carolina, they could have 50 percent more house for 40 percent less money and 25 percent of the property taxes.

Zielinski is among the oldest Baby Boomers, those turning 60 this year. In New Jersey alone, 50,000 residents will hit that milestone each year for the next two decades. Will there be a giant sucking sound as they pull up stakes to flee the Garden State's high housing costs?
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With housing consuming the biggest chunk of household income, a lot of money is riding on where they'll want to live next.

"Baby Boomers are the 800-pound gorilla in the housing market. They always have been," said James H. Hughes, dean of the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University.

The housing needs of boomers have literally remade the landscape at every stage of their lives so far, he said. The Levittown-style housing tracts were built for their childhoods. When they were ready for their first apartments, New Jersey saw the garden apartment boom of the 1960s. When, as newlyweds, they wanted to buy real estate, the market responded with condominium construction.

Experts say they probably won't move lock step to one kind of retirement housing. Instead, those who do move may chose Southeastern states like Georgia and the Carolinas; age-targeted (but not age-restricted) developments tucked in nooks and crannies of existing Jersey suburbs; or the Hudson River waterfront, with its New York feel. (Think Jersey's boomer-in-chief, Hoboken resident Jon Corzine.)