Retirement Communities

Statistics about all the various kinds of retirement communities are not precise because of the diversity of sponsorship, geographical spread, and the types of housing provided. However, the following are some statistics that are approximate and provide benchmarks for the retirement community market at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is the only federal agency that gathers statistics on retirement communities that are part of the public housing programs. The HUD retirement communities are subsidized, rental communities that are organized under eight different federal programs. In 1998 there were approximately five million housing units that were HUD sponsored and approximately eleven million persons lived in all these projects. Approximately one-third of the households had elderly residents and thus about four million persons lived in this type of retirement community.

The American Association of Homes and Services for the Aging estimated that at the end of 1999 there were approximately 2100 CCRCs in the United States. If one assumes that each CCRC has about 350 residents, the number of older persons who lived in this kind of retirement community numbered about 735,000.

Assisted Living Facilities, a type of retirement community, vary considerably in size, services, and costs. In September 1999 the Assisted Living Federation of America offered a broad estimate that there were twenty to thirty thousand facilities in the United States. If one assumes the midpoint of the estimate and makes the additional assumption that there are about forty residents in each assisted living facility, then this kind of retirement community would house about one million residents.

The number of LORCs and the number of residents living in them are difficult to estimate because they are not licensed like CCRCs or Assisted Living Facilities. Thus there is no central statistical gathering organization—federal, state, or private—to provide estimates. A considerable proportion of LORCs are in unincorporated areas of the states, thus many residents of this kind of retirement community would be counted as rural dwellers, but have a somewhat urban lifestyle.

In November 1999 HUD published a detailed report on the housing conditions and needs of older Americans. The report to Congress was a special supplement to the American Housing Survey of 1995. The survey reported that approximately 6 percent of the elderly persons (sixty-two and older) lived in manufactured homes, mostly in rural areas. A considerable number of these elderly residents lived in retirement communities, and it is estimated they may constitute about one million persons.