The Rise of the Death House

John Laudun
3 min readDec 17, 2024
Photo by CHUTTERSNAP on Unsplash

We live in a fairly average, and by average I mean beyond bland, suburb in the South, whose signal strength, apart from the zoning for local schools, is that it is the highest spot for quite some distance in a small city prone to flooding. The houses that make up our immediate neighborhood are probably best described as second tier: they are larger, and more expensive, than what the market sees as starter homes. With square footages ranging from 2000 to 3000 square feet, these houses were once either the focus of more affluent first-time home buyers or, as was the case for us, the focus of people with growing families needing that extra room, or two.

There are still plenty of these houses being used in this way, as a place for growing families, but as younger generations find their ability to reach the current prices for such homes, even in such a cheap market as Louisiana, it seems that Baby Boomers are finding a way to flex their long-standing financial clout by buying these houses to die in.

If you were to draw a circle around our home to include just one house in all directions, you would find two houses that have been recently purchased by an elderly couple looking to downsize from a more extravagant (but now largely empty) house or to move back to where other family members are located. That is, two out of nine houses are now, as their new owners call them, their “forever” home, the last place they plan of living. Put another way, these are the houses in which they intend to die. They are death houses.

What I find fascinating by this development, and I am hoping readers can tell me if they are witnessing anything similar in their part of the world, is not only the choosing of a house in which to die, but also the sheer amount of effort in getting the house just right. In the case of the two houses near us, the number of work crews that have traipsed through has been impressive. These things have created something of a neighborhood construction boom.

The new owners appear to believe they know exactly what they want and to have the money to make it that way. There is no sense of a living, changing house here. There isn’t the sense of buying a house with any number of oddities or awkwardnesses and fixing it as time and/or money become available. Everything has to be done upfront. (Because, I guess, they can afford it.)

But this also takes some of the joy out of living in a home, of you and the house being in a relationship of mutual accommodation: some of the house’s awkwardnesses seem less awkward as days, months, and years accumulate. That electrical switch that was awkwardly placed? It’s not so much trouble any more. You are now in the habit of making that weird loop that takes you to it so that you can come back and put things down on the counter. (It’s always kitchens that accumulate weird switches, isn’t it?)

Houses inhabit us as much as we inhabit them.

And that is how it should be, and so it strikes me that by declaring upfront how a house, a home, should be what these older couples are doing is declaring themselves dead already. If my interactions with my new neighbors are any evidence, I don’t think this is a gross mischaracterization. Unlike other neighbors, they seem far uninterested in being a part of the neighborhood and much more judgmental about how things should be done. (Is this a sign of HOA escapees?) It’s as if they don’t see any point in “putting down roots” in the neighborhood because they won’t be here long enough for it to result in meaningful relationships.

Have we have moved, then, from the era of McMansions to that of McMausoleums? What does this mean for neighborhoods and our sense of neighbors? Have others experienced this? What’s your sense of what’s happening?

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John Laudun
John Laudun

Written by John Laudun

Cultural Informatics Researcher focused on Stories, People, Networks

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