Is someone wealthy just because the house they own has grown in value? Practical wealth is how much you have relative to the cost of living. Someone in a $1M house is not necessarily more wealthy than when their house was $100K if all their other living expenses have also grown 10x.
Because the increasing trend is that it is not financially viable for younger families to buy a home. So they would thus not have a mortgage to reverse in the first place.
Rather, they would be stuck paying rent and hopefully have enough savings/Social Security/other income to cover it as long as they needed.
There is also the issue of population growth rates.
Future generations CANNOT keep growing like that. Be it by directed reproduction limits or global resource wars/pollution/plagues/extinction from the preceding the population will shrink.
Great question. I don't know the answer, but you can imagine what some of the considerations might be...
Population growth in the US is slightly declining and generally remaining flat, although life expectancy is increasing.
So it seems likely the older people will need their homes longer than previous generations. When they die they might pass them along, but that certainly doesn't happen to everyone, and in many cases they might be sold, increasing supply.
That said, home value distributions are interesting. Jobs are stagnant or disappearing throughout much of the country, and it is primarily the cities where people are increasingly moving due to availability of jobs. This means those cities are much more desirable, and there is still too little supply, even with people turning things over to children.
Realistically though, the vast majority of the population has near non-existent savings. Many of these Baby Boomer retirees will need to downsize, reverse mortgage, or do something to tap their home for cash as that is still by far and away most families biggest investment. This might point more to the house being sold.
Still won't be enough to meet demand though in big cities since that is increasing, not decreasing. And if fewer are living in places without jobs, those homes may not be options for many families.
I think the idea is that we won't have the option to help us support our parents, because we'll need to keep living in the house (and haven't finished paying for it so we don't have the equity to borrow from anyway).