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By 2025, 20.4% of Canada’s population will be over 65, making the country one of 21 in the world that is “super aged,” according to a report by ratings agency Moody’s in August. The aging of the global economy will “dampen economic over the next two decades” and increase demands on pensions, health care and proper accommodations, which is why so many people are interested in what the boomers will do.

But the tendency to talk about boomers as one big analogous group is also incorrect. “The diversity gets underplayed,” says Norris, who divides them into several different groups. “People like to try to generalize, oh the boomers are like this or that and are going to have this impact. Well, they are a big group and the numbers will have an impact, but exactly how may be in very many different ways.”

Of course, because there are so many boomers, even a small shift can have a big impact. Some boomers — say, those without grandchildren or those who put a higher priority on travel — will downsize in their 60s. But those are small groups. Norris says around 20% of people over 55 will move within a five-year period. Push that out 10 to 15 years and perhaps close to half of the generation will have moved over a 15-to-20-year period. The questions are where they are going to move and from where, and whether they are going to move less or more than the seniors of today. Norris is leaning toward more moving, but certainly not less.

If you’re going to downsize, you don’t want an 800-square-foot condo, that’s for a 20-something

For one thing, boomers are less likely to have spent most of their lives in just one house. This will be even more true of subsequent generations. But boomers also differ from their parents and grandparents in another way: they helped build up suburbia instead of staying in major cities. “The suburbs were largely developed in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s, large homes, large tracts of land in many cases,” Norris says. If their children stay in the suburbs, it’s quite possible they will want to stay nearby, possibly in condos, if they are built for that purpose, but perhaps apartments if they don’t want to go through the hassle of purchasing a new home. Such a trend hasn’t shown up in the data as yet, Norris say, but, anecdotally, he’s noticed seniors filling the new apartments that are going up near his home in Kanata, Ont., a suburb of Ottawa.