downsizing

Once upon a time a majority of people followed this seemingly fiscally sound path: Buy a home, spend your working years paying it off, and then sell it so you can trade down once the kids left. Magically, all that built-up equity could fund your retirement.

What a fairy tale!

Today the baby boomers are discovering that selling their home isn't the golden ticket it once was, reports the Wall Street Journal. The Journal references a Harvard study that indicates that "mobility rates among seniors have posted the sharpest drop." When the costs of moving and selling a home at a loss are evaluated, it makes financial sense for some seniors to stay put. Others find themselves underwater due to the housing market collapse or natural disaster.

What happens to the retirement wishes of all those folks who anticipated heavy paydays with the sale of their home? And what can younger generations learn from this?

Kent Griswold hasn't turned his dream into reality – yet – but he's making a living blogging about it. His passion? Tiny houses. And he may have hit on something.

Griswold, 51, started his blog, Tiny House Blog, a few years ago just to have a place to put his assorted photos and links collected during years of fantasizing about owning a cabin home in the mountains.

Now, in just the past year, his blog is receiving triple the number views, from five to 6,000 unique visitors each day. Griswold tries to keep up a steady nearly-daily posting of interesting tiny home solutions, from build-it-yourself options that range from a 102 sq. foot number with a building plan that starts at $859, to a 16' x 20' Vermont cottages to micro lofts.

And there's an ever-increasing amount of readers who are more than happy to share their own stories. Griswold thinks the economic downturn is responsible for the building-small craze.

Most people register some kind of dissatisfaction with their home: not enough bedrooms; the outdoor space is too small (or non-existent); the boiler's on the fritz or the kitchen woefully lacks a restaurant-quality stove.

The problem with the Salwen family homestead was a little different: it was too big. Too nice. The kitchen was fantastic. It was, in fact, a 6,000-square-foot Atlanta mansion, purchased in 1999, ostensibly to please Kevin and Joan Salwen's kids, Hannah and Joseph, then 7 and 5. "We never asked them. And my guess is that if we had, they might have said what they told us later, which is 'We don't need it.'"

Like a growing number of Americans, the Salwens came to the realization that less can be more. But they have taken this insight to a level that few others have dared.

Housing is subject to the whims of fashion, too. So what will the stylish new homes be sporting in 2010?

For one, they'll be slimming down from plus-size to skinny model footprints, but in a way that you won't notice the downsizing so much. Green continues to be in. Homes will also be designed to appeal to older folks and, in deference to these recessionary times, slimmer budgets.

Those were among the fashion forecasts emanating from the National Association of Home Builders's annual conference last week in Las Vegas.