--- title: "The Nursing Home Wanted $130,000 a Year, So the Backyard Got a House" description: "Priced out of elder care, Americans are building ADUs, tiny homes and granny flats for their parents" author: "Inez Holloway" published: 2026-09-27T09:01:01Z modified: 2026-09-27T15:10:24Z url: https://rews.cc/a/the-nursing-home-wanted-130-000-a-year-so-the-backyard-got-a-15e29c language: en tags: ["housing", "aging", "caregiving", "dementia", "economy", "us"] publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)" --- # The Nursing Home Wanted $130,000 a Year, So the Backyard Got a House *Priced out of elder care, Americans are building ADUs, tiny homes and granny flats for their parents* By Inez Holloway · September 27, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/the-nursing-home-wanted-130-000-a-year-so-the-backyard-got-a-15e29c ## In brief - A Texas couple bought $37,000 and $43,000 tiny homes for three parents, plus caregivers, yet feel “drowning” in bills - CareScout puts an annual private nursing-home room at $130,000 in 2025, up from $111,000 in 2022 - ADU construction typically runs $100,000–$300,000 before architects, utilities and permits - A Long Island ADU was estimated at $450,000, with a live-in caregiver at $520–$550 a day - 75% of ADU builder Villa’s 2026 sales went to multigenerational households; states are eyeing looser permits Over the last few years, Linda Barton watched her mother and stepfather slide from active 80-year-olds into what she describes, plainly, as “children.” Her mother has dementia and can no longer care for herself. Her stepfather, whose health has also declined, “acts like he’s 6 years old.” The commute to see them ran an hour each way from her work, and her own house had no room. So Barton, 55, and her husband did the next best thing, which Business Insider reports is increasingly the thing: they moved the parents into the yard. A tiny home in their part of Texas, outside Houston, went for $37,000, then came months of septic system, electrical line, entrance ramp, indoor essentials. A year later they bought a second tiny home, for her father-in-law, at $43,000. Caregivers for the three parents now cost less than assisted living, and the arrangement is still not manageable. Medicare and hospice have provided little relief, and Barton describes herself as drowning in caregiving bills. “If we don’t pay for caregivers, we end up sacrificing work when they need something,” Barton said. “It’s exhausting, and we fear we won’t live to see our own retirement due to the stress.” The arithmetic behind the backyard boom is blunt. An accessory dwelling unit typically runs $100,000 to $300,000 before the architect, the utilities and the permits. But the service and insurance company CareScout found that a private room in a nursing home rose from $111,000 a year in 2022 to $130,000 in 2025 — one year of the institutional option, in other words, in the same price band as a small house of your own. Americans who cannot afford one are building the other: tiny houses, renovated sheds, trailers for aging relatives who need full-time care. When Shalini Karnani Bonjour’s father died in 2024, she moved her aging mother from Michigan to California. An apartment rental and a senior-living community were both weighed and both rejected; instead the family bought a home in the Coachella Valley with plans for a backyard ADU where her mother can live independently. The project costs $475,000 — cheaper, in that market, than a larger house. “The whole process has been difficult because there are so many things to manage,” Bonjour, 50, said. “You’re trying to keep the project affordable, keep your neighbors happy, and stay on track.” The industry has noticed. ADUs have become popular enough in California to draw politicians and housing advocates to the state’s housing crisis, and Rachael Reiner, director of pre-construction and project management at the Bay Area ADU company Villa, told Business Insider that 75% of the firm’s sales so far in 2026 have gone to multigenerational households, many for caregiving. “Building an ADU on an existing family property can allow these families to stay rooted in a neighborhood that they already know,” Reiner said, “without changing schools or their routines — especially for an aging family member, a routine can be so important.” Sometimes the motive is not financial at all. Lena Koropey is building a two-bedroom, one-bathroom, 750-square-foot ADU behind her Long Island house so that her mother, who has later-stage Alzheimer’s, can age in place. When it is finished — at an estimated $450,000, plus a live-in caregiver billed at $520 to $550 a day — Koropey, 48, will move into the backyard unit herself, leaving the main house to her mother and the caregiver. “Having everyone on the same property is enormously valuable,” she said. “You can’t really put a price on that sense of community, the bond of family, or the ability to support one another.” The record is less lyrical elsewhere. Most of the more than a dozen people Business Insider interviewed called the permitting a hassle; some found costs they had not anticipated, some feared shaving their property value, a few regretted the whole project when a loved one moved out soon after moving in. “ADUs are helpful for certain situations where the care need isn’t that great, or where somebody in the house has time to provide that greater care,” said Mildred Warner, a Cornell University professor of city and regional planning who has studied them. “There are other situations where it makes more sense to have people in older-adult apartment complexes.” James Richard Cornell, 63, gave up on an ADU after nearly a year of trying and built his mother a 1,000-square-foot house on his property from scratch — permit, foundation, plumbing, flooring, siding, through 2013 and 2014, about $110,000, 90% of which his mother paid. She has since had a vascular dementia diagnosis and lives in his main home. “Nursing homes are awfully expensive, and I promised her years ago that I would take care of her until her final days,” he said. “She’s done so much for me, so it’s fitting that I return it.” Statehouses have begun to circle the problem. In North Carolina, Representative Vernetta Alston co-sponsored legislation requiring municipalities to allow at least one ADU on lots with single-family homes. “I know all too well what it’s like to live in this sandwich generation, where you’re working and caring for kids and caring for older adults in your life,” she said. Alison George, 52, moved to a home with a guest house in Raleigh as her mother grew doubtful she could live alone, and put $45,000 into renovating it. For a few years the arrangement held; then her mother’s Alzheimer’s worsened, and George took more time off work, and the medication went untaken, and the social life went. Independent living followed, then memory care in 2021. By 2025 the care ran $7,800 a month, the savings ran out, and her mother moved into a Medicaid facility. The tiny home sits empty on George’s lawn. “Looking back, I recognize her declining steps, though at the time, I may not have wanted to admit that was what was happening,” she said.