Cohousing-L Mailing List: Chances of Finding Members with Children

[Sharon Villines (sharon]

I worked on the numbers for realistic expectations of households with children. 
The upshot is that if you are building 30 units and all other things are equal, 
you can’t expect to have more than 6 or so units with children under 18. And 
that may be generous. The figures I used are below and may be totally wrong — 
please check them before you panic.

Sharon

CAUTION: These are rough numbers, hard to find exact comparisons. And I’m a 
pictures person not a numbers person so I can mess up things very easily. 
Please check these numbers!

Population as of 2018 (wikipedia)

0–17    61,175,933      18.73%
18–24   43,351,778      13.27%  
25–54   128,863,172     39.45%
55–64   42,179,856      12.91%
65+             51,055,052      15.63%

One problem with these statistics is that the 25-54 includes age range of 29 
years. 55-64 only includes a range of 9 years!

Combining 55-64 and 65+ is 93,234,908 people. The expected lifetime is ~80 so 
combining these two groups to 55-80 would be 25 years for 28.54% of the 
population. Since the expected home buyer is expected to be in the 24+ age 
group so we can forget the 0-24 age groups.

That results in 2 groups of a comparable range of years 

ages 25-54 would be 39.45% of the population
ages 55-80 would be 28.54% of the population

If a cohousing community has 30 units, the proportion of units reflecting these 
percentages:

25-54 age group would be 16-17 units 
55-80 age group would be 13-14 units 

The total of all households with children 18 or under living at home is 40%, 
but how many of those are in the under 25 age group?  I think it is reasonable 
to assume that few households headed by adults over age 55 include children. So 
we can use the 40% figure but it is probably generous.

 40% of the 16-17 units for the age group of 25-54 would be a maximum of 6-7 
units with children. 

The largest number of people planning to move or downsize for one reason or 
another is probably in the over 55 age group and many of those widowed women.