I’m Single. I Have No Kids. Is My Home Ready for Me to Get Old Alone?

I never imagined that I’d be coming out again at the age of 38, much less doing it for the sake of my home, but I must speak my truth. I’m a solo ager and am ready to admit to myself (and the world) that I am not going to get old in the way that my house expects.

"Solo ager" is a newer term for people who are getting older and living alone, without kids or a spouse. The passé label for this group is "elder orphans," a phrase that conjures a hard-knock life and illustrates the kind of condescension people in this group have to deal with. To some, we are selfish, choosing ourselves over potential kids; to others, we are pathetic freaks, unable to find a mate and forever lost wandering the deserts of Hinge. It’s similar to the judgment and pity that comes with being queer, and I think that’s why us solo agers need to bust out of our closets and wear our lifestyles with a little more pride.

You’d be right in thinking that I’m a little young to be taking on this mantle now, but I’m planning ahead for architectural reasons. My home is not designed for me to live in while I get old—it’s on the fifth floor of a New York City walk-up with stairs that threaten to give way with every other step. Though climbing the five flights every day is a great glute workout now, it might not be so cute in 20 or 30 years. A neighbor of mine managed it into her 80s, but thankfully she and her son moved out to an apartment complex with lots of elevators. With a history of neurological illness in my family, I can’t be sure that I’ll be as resilient as her. Even with rent stabilization, I know that I cannot live in my apartment forever, but I don’t know where I should go.

American homes are generally not designed with old people in mind. Younger people are usually the target customers, and they can choose between any number of setups. Elders, though, are usually relegated to cloistered developments designed for the frail and dying. Those kinds of places aren’t very enticing, but I know that a typical home may be just as poorly suited to a solo ager’s needs as my walk-up. A single-family tract home could turn into a prison if I have trouble walking or navigating steps, not that I would want to move to the suburbs anyway. Retiring to a cabin in the woods is more attractive, but it could be a death sentence come my first medical emergency. Life in an apartment building is probably the most logical, but the idea of being so far from nature is a bummer. I have no clue what kind of home I should be preparing to spend my later years in.

There are a lot of people in my position. More and more of us are single with no kids. AARP says that there are 24 million solo agers in the USA, and that number is only growing. Yet there is no housing market catering to us.

Just trying to own a home, regardless of the type, may not be a great plan. "Between 1989 and 2022, the share of homeowners 65 to 79 with a mortgage increased from 24 to 41 percent and the median mortgage debt shot up over 400 percent, from $21,000 in 1989 to $110,000," reports Jennifer Molinsky, director of the Housing an Aging Society Program at the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University. I don’t want to be drowning in debt should I also need to pay for some kind of long-term care.

"You have to sit down and do the work of, What do I want and what don’t I want?" Ailene Gerhardt, a patient advocate and founder of the Navigating Solo resource network, tells me. She supports my impulse to plan and encourages people to be more proactive and less reactive so they can build the community they want to age in. "When you are somebody who identifies in a way as a solo ager or however you want to frame it, you get to choose who is a part of your world, as opposed to feeling you are obligated to include," she says. Because there is no default setup for us, we have more freedom to be creative.

The questions that solo agers have to face force us to reconsider the world: How do I want to live? Who is taking care of me? How do we take care of each other?

Despite solo aging’s sitting at the intersection of a variety of hot-button issues, like the rising tide of loneliness among older Americans, a broken healthcare system, and the housing shortage, there’s not a lot of attention paid to it. That means that though there are a lot of potential solutions out there, there are still too few places that people can move to, unless they’re blessed with a billionaire budget. But it also means that no one is really pushing a dogmatic solution on solo agers and that people are experimenting with a lot of different setups to see what works.

Figuring out what you want is part of the challenge. The questions that solo agers have to face force us to reconsider the world: How do I want to live? Who is taking care of me? How do we take care of each other? These are questions that everyone should be contemplating in our dyspeptic society, where social ties beyond nuclear families have been largely digested by colonial regimes, leaving us to drift around alone in the muck. Creative answers include seniors’ cohousing projects sprouting up across the country, which let solo agers find common cause in shared spaces; a platform called Nesterly lets elders with extra space in their homes rent rooms to younger people at decent rates in exchange for help around the house; ADUs open up opportunities in friends’ backyards; Molinsky tells me about Treehouse Foundation, which develops intergenerational communities where older adults help families raising kids who have been in the foster system—orphans of the world, unite!

I’m still not sure what I want, but the benefit of starting the search early means I have some time to figure it out. A friend’s aunt who lives full-time in a beach house off the coast of Long Island and has made a go of it well into her 80s is one inspiration. More immediately, I’m focusing on finding more solo siblings so we can figure things out as a group. The most exciting idea is that home is not really about a physical structure but the people and nature where you find yourself most supported. Home is not something you can buy, but a community that cares for you.

Not to channel the over-the-top optimism for existence of Auntie Mame, but there’s a whole new way of life out there waiting for us. Something more like Comrade Mame may be more the ticket, though: There’s a whole new way we can get old alone, together.

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