Boomtown NYC: As Baby Boomer Population Ages, Challenges Abound

The last of the nation’s 76 million baby boomers will turn 50 in December of this year, and as America’s largest living generation ages, it faces exceptional challenges: a higher cost of living, shrinking retirement savings and the fact that while many will have to continue working long after the traditional retirement age of 65, a rapidly evolving job market and age discrimination can make it harder and harder to get hired.

For New York City’s 2.6 million residents age 50 or older, these problems are magnified by the city’s high housing costs and the highest utility rates in the continental United States. The city’s 65-plus population is projected to increase by 40 percent between now and 2040, but just half of working New Yorkers over age 50 say they are confident they will be able to retire at some point, according to a new report from AARP. And while two thirds of 50- to 64-year-old voters are currently working, 14 percent respondents to an AARP poll said they were unemployed and looking for work as of June 2013, a far higher rate than the citywide rate of 8.7 percent at the time.

“Perhaps more than any other group, the greatest recession hit the baby boomers hardest,” New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer said during a keynote speech before a panel discussion hosted by City & State and AARP this morning. “They’ve lost more earning power than any other group; their retirement savings and home values fell sharply at the worst possible time—just before they needed to cash out. Many took Social Security early, reducing their benefits by up to 30 percent.”

For those New Yorkers in this group that do think they will be able to retire, slightly over a third of them said they were confident they were extremely or very likely to leave the city, in a survey of 1,300 voters in the five boroughs conducted by AARP.

“Most of the boomers who plan to leave are in the middle class,” said Beth Finkel, AARP's state director.  “And when the middle leaves, the other social classes become even more polarized … New York must be a better place to work, live and age.”

Lesley Hirsch, director at the Labor Market Information Service at CUNY’s Graduate Center, said the shrinking of the middle class is mirrored by a shrinking of middle-wage jobs.

“In New York City what we’ve seen is what’s been called the hollowing out of our labor market … an awful lot of middle-skill jobs evaporating,” Hirsch said. “Everyone knows manufacturing shrunk a long time ago, but an awful lot of other jobs that would have been more than a high school diploma but less than a bachelor’s degree, they’re really shrinking. And what are really booming are these very low-paid jobs with low skill requirements … and also the very high paying, high-skilled jobs. … What we’re seeing is this really, really difficult period right now where we as the people who have institutional knowledge in our field may or may not have the technological skills, may or may not have the latest educational training.”

Hirsch pointed out that many jobs held by New York City’s older population are in retail, food service or education; home healthcare jobs, which also command low wages, are the fastest growing industry in New York’s economy, according to Hirsch.

Tom Wright, executive director of the Regional Plan Association, said that despite the outbound trickle of older New Yorkers to places like Florida and North Carolina, he is more concerned about diversity.

“What’s very important is that our communities remain diverse, [that] we have young people and middle age people and elderly people able to live in all of our communities and that we have people at the low, median and high end of the economic scale,” said Wright, who also pointed out that Ocean County, N.J., is the only county in the tri-state region to make consistent gains in the over-50 population. “Manhattan lost about twice as many people in this cohort from 1990 to 2000 than it did from 2000 to 2010, so there’s been a great reduction in the number of folks in the 50 and over cohort moving out in the last ten years than there were previously.”

Stringer said his office has already begun to plan for the challenges ahead, calling for safer sidewalks and transportation infrastructure, a new affordable housing plan, a strengthened retirement safety net (59 percent of New Yorkers lack access to a retirement plan) and more flexible work schedules so that the children of these boomers’ children can find the time to care for their parents.

“We recently announced in the comptroller’s office that our new chief investment officer, Scott Evans, will head a new advisory panel on retirement security this fall,” Stringer said. “One of the things we have to recognize is so many of our communities back in the day were not places that people necessarily wanted to live or where government would invest. A lot of the seniors today were pioneers in a different era, building up our communities. They built the schools, the daycare centers … but at the moment in their life where the first phase of their work is done, they’re the ones who are being pushed out of the neighborhoods.”

The full text of the report is available below: 

STATE OF THE 50+ IN NYC 2014 by City & State NY