Baby boomers own the most family-sized homes in these 5 U.S. cities — and aren't moving out

Older homeowners rarely give up large homes easily. Redfin ranked 50 metros using 2024 Census data to find out where empty-nest boomers own the most

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The bedroom that once held a crib now stores holiday boxes. The dining table that seated six now seats two. For millions of empty-nest baby boomers, life has contracted, but the home around them has not. Across the U.S., this disconnect plays out on a massive scale: boomers whose children have grown and left own a far larger slice of the country's family-sized housing stock than the younger generations actively raising kids in cramped quarters. The gap is not a rounding error. It reflects years of accumulated wealth, deeply rooted neighborhood ties, and a housing market that has yet to produce the affordable smaller homes that would make downsizing financially worthwhile.

The strain this creates falls most sharply on millennial households with children. Millennials are the largest generation of parents in the U.S. and also the biggest cohort overall, and yet they own a relatively thin slice of the three-bedroom-plus homes the country has. Gen Z adults raising kids barely register in the data at all. The shortage isn't purely a matter of preferences. Mortgage rates remain elevated enough that more than one-quarter of millennials say they aren't planning a home purchase in the near future. One in five cannot even save for a down payment. Meanwhile, nearly three in five baby-boomer homeowners carry no loan balance at all, removing the financial incentive to sell and taking those properties off the market.

Redfin analyzed 2024 U.S. Census data on three-bedroom-plus homes across the 50 most populous metro areas, measuring what share of that housing stock each generation and household type owns and occupies. Empty nesters were defined as boomers living in households with one or two adults and no minor dependents. The data found that empty-nest boomers hold 28% of the country's large homes while millennial families with children hold 16%. The metros below are the five places where that boomer concentration is most pronounced.

1. Memphis tops the country for empty-nest boomer ownership

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Memphis stands at the top of the national list, with empty-nest baby boomers owning 31.2% of the metro's three-bedroom-plus housing stock. No other metro in the Redfin analysis posted a higher boomer share. Millennial families with children, by contrast, own just 15.3% of large homes in the area. The gap of nearly 16 percentage points separates the generation that holds the space from the generation that most needs it.

The depth of that gap reflects conditions common to aging industrial metros in the mid-South: a large cohort of long-tenured owners who purchased decades ago, often with no loan balance left, and little reason to enter a market where smaller, move-in-ready homes at accessible prices are scarce. Nationally, 57.8% of baby-boomer homeowners carry no remaining debt on their properties. In a metro where the existing........

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