By 2020, over 55 million people living in the U.S. will be over the age of 65, and many of these people will be racial and ethnic minorities and immigrants. This rapid aging of the U.S. population poses a unique public policy challenge for the nation as a whole and for individual communities. Despite media and academic attention directed at nursing homes, privately funded residential care facilities, and Sunbelt retirement migration, the overwhelming majority of elderly prefer to age in place. The extent to which their homes and neighborhoods can compensate for the declines that inevitably come with age will go a long way toward determining just how much stress population aging will put on the infrastructure of communities in the U.S. Sociologists and demographers have long seen residential location as an indicator of a group's relative standing in society. Where someone lives can determine health, job opportunities, quality of schools, exposure to pollution, and encounters with crime and disorder. In the context of an aging society, the implications of race/nativity status for the successful housing of the elderly need to be considered.;This dissertation provides a comprehensive analysis of the residential circumstances of older adults in the U.S. by race, ethnicity, and nativity status. Specifically, I use household data from the 2005 American Housing Survey (AHS) to look at the importance of individual and contextual correlates of housing and neighborhood quality for the residential attainment of older native- and foreign-born whites, blacks, Asians, and Hispanics who are aging in place. I find that the elderly as a group live in favorable residential circumstances compared to younger age groups, but considerable variation is present. Race and nativity status exert direct effects on the residential circumstances of older adults, net of household demographics, socioeconomic status, tenure, intrametropolitan location, and metropolitan location. Foreign-born groups often live in worst residential circumstances than do their native-born counterparts. Regardless of nativity status, blacks live in the worse residential circumstances, followed by Hispanics, Asians, and then whites. My results further indicate that homeownership and suburban residence are not always adequate proxies for detailed measures of housing and neighborhood quality. Instead, I show that a more comprehensive view of housing the elderly is appropriate, one that considers the nested character of places. In sum, this research identifies the characteristics of some elderly who occupy substandard housing and neighborhoods but also suggests many more are living in high quality residential environments.
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