The great wave of downsizing baby boomers has been predicted for years.

Yet longitudinal census data from 2016 to 2021 suggests that the wave looks more like a gentle ripple. Most boomers aren’t downsizing. They are happily staying put.

The mythical army of downsizers

The housing-crisis argument feels very familiar by now.

Australia has lots of young millennial families desperate for larger homes. At the same time, lots of older couples and singles live in homes with three or four bedrooms. The solution seems obvious: Boomers downsize, families move in, everybody wins.

Newspapers (including me in this column), property developers, and governments have all argued we should encourage boomers to downsize.

This is where we encounter a problem. Real people don’t behave like pieces on a planner’s chessboard. They have their own preferences, memories and free will. Survey after survey tells us that older Australians want to age in place.

Longitudinal census data lets us follow the same people over time and compare their housing in 2016 with their housing five years later.

There are many ways to define a downsizer. For today’s column, we use a definition that is easy to extract from census data: A downsizer is somebody who lived in a dwelling with fewer bedrooms in 2021 than in 2016.

Granted, this definition isn’t perfect. Imagine an older couple moving from a two-bedroom house on an acreage in rural Queensland to a compact two-bedroom apartment on the Sunshine Coast. Anyone with common sense would call that downsizing. Census data, however, sees the same number of bedrooms and declares that nothing happened.

Downsizing can also refer to reducing the value of one’s housing rather than its physical size. The Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute found that financial downsizing (moving into a cheaper home to release equity) is somewhat more common than physical downsizing, but neither is the usual pathway for older homeowners.

Even among older Australians, downsizers only slightly outnumber upsizers. Take the 75–84 age group: 14 per cent moved to a home with fewer bedrooms, while a surprisingly high 11 per cent moved to one with more bedrooms – this includes older people who moved in with their adult children.

The dominant experience of ageing in Australia is therefore not downsizing. It is one of ageing in place.

Who actually downsizes?

Downsizing isn’t triggered by age alone. People don’t wake up on their 65th birthday, glance at the spare........

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