We’ve all heard the story: With their children out of the house, millions of baby boomers across the country are downsizing their lifestyles and moving from the large single-family home in the suburbs they called home for decades to a tiny little apartment downtown.

Or are they?

According to a recent report from Fannie Mae, the leading source of mortgage credit in the United States’ secondary market, the percentage of baby boomers who lived in detached, single-family homes did not change between 2006 and 2012.

This finding seems to refute a widely held — and widely reported — belief that people born between 1946 and 1964 were packing up their belongings and moving to a place where it would be cheaper and more convenient for them to live.

“Contrary to the downsizing perception,” wrote Patrick Simmons, the director of strategic planning with Fannie Mae’s Economic and Strategic Research Group, “the proportion of a population residing in a single-family detached home has yet to decline.”

Earlier this decade, news media outlets were awash with reports about how baby boomers no longer wanted to be in the same large homes where they raised their children once those children grew up. Experts commented on how this situation could have a huge impact on the country’s housing sector simply because it involved a generation of more than 78 million people.

“It is a growing trend among baby boomers,” reads a CNBC Reality Check blog post Simmons quoted in his report. “Many of them are putting their big suburban homes on the market again (and moving), after waiting out the housing crash.”

Simmons noted two common themes that were present in the boomer-downsizing story.

First, most news reports claimed boomers did not need the extra space in their single-family homes and were willing to trade it for having easy access to restaurants and other city amenities.

The stories also suggested that because boomers were getting ready to retire, they wanted to live in smaller homes with lower property taxes, utility bills and homeowners association fees.

But Simmons found boomers seem to be staying where they are — at least for the time being.

The detached single-family home occupancy rate for all baby boomers fell by 0.3 percentage points between its peak in 2009 to 2012, according to Simmons’ report.

For the boomer generation as a whole and younger or trailing boomers (born between 1956 and 1965), the rate actually increased between 2006 and 2012. The single-family home occupancy rate for the older or leading boomers (born between 1946 and 1955) fell during that time period but by less than one half of one percentage point.

“One explanation is that boomers simply prefer to remain in their current homes despite their changing life circumstances,” Simmons wrote before citing an AARP report that nine of every 10 boomers want to stay in their homes as long as they can.

Simmons also speculated boomers aren’t leaving their current homes because they simply can’t afford to.

He said the value of an average single-family home fell by 13 percent between 2006 and 2012 and argued that people were delaying their plans to move out of their larger homes so they could recoup this loss in equity.

“Declining home values and the recession-scarred economy have suppressed boomers’ residential mobility,” Simmons wrote in his report. He then cited a statistic from the U.S. Census Bureau that found the percentage of boomers who moved in the past year fell from 10.2 percent in 2006 to 7.9 percent in 2012.

— Reporter: 541-617-7816, mmclean@bendbulletin.com