Data from the first national Housing Survey, conducted in 1973 by the Bureau of the Census and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, are used to present separate information for elderly in urban and rural locations and in alternative living arrangements. Elderly-headed households on the average were found to be only modestly less well housed than the population at large, although significant proportions of the aged in both urban and rural areas live in dwellings with five or more defects identified as being particularly intolerable to most households. In rural areas the defects are primarily structural, while in urban areas undesirable neighborhood conditions are the primary defects.