January 8, 2020 by Daniel Herriges
Rrrrrrrrrring goes
the rotary phone affixed to the dark wood-paneled kitchen wall on a warm
early-fall Saturday evening. A gray-haired woman who has just finished enjoying
a plate of spaghetti squash with her housemates—her adult daughter and
son-in-law—and with the 8-year-old girl who lives two doors down, shuffles to
the phone and picks up. "Hello?"
"Martha? Hi! Hey, question. She wouldn't happen to be
over there again, would she? It's just that it's almost bedtime and I haven't
seen my child in ten hours! Could you send her on home soon?"
"Oh, yeah, she's here," Martha would respond, and both would laugh. "Just
popped in again and we figured she could stay for dinner. Not to worry."
“I always just made friends with the old folks," my
wife explained to me one day when describing her childhood escapades in a
neighborhood of quietly dignified, faded Victorians and a smattering of
duplexes and apartments in a small Northeastern city.
For a kid, a neighborhood with this kind of range of ages
and walks of life is a rewarding social opportunity, a series of lessons in
empathy and generosity, and a chance to learn about the world through others'
eyes. For my wife, some nights it was impromptu dinner with Martha and her
family. The older couple across the street and four houses down had a Japanese garden
with a koi pond in the backyard, and my future wife was swiftly enlisted to
help care for the fish. Other neighbors had memorabilia from foreign travels,
and no shortage of stories to share. There were always attentive eyes at
living-room windows providing free supervision for kid shenanigans, and usually
someone who could be cajoled into chaperoning a trip to the neighborhood diner
for an order of fries.
For those on the other side of the equation, a neighborhood
with a wide range of ages and walks of life also comes with its own very
tangible, even quantifiable, rewards. Longtime residents in their 70s and 80s
who might have struggled physically to keep up with the requirements of
homeownership got the assistance they needed—the kids were invariably drafted,
for example, to shovel elderly neighbors' sidewalks and rake their leaves, and
were strictly forbidden by their parents to accept payment (except in the form
of cookies). It was not at all uncommon for neighbors to pick up and drop off
medication or meals for each other. The adult children of aging empty-nesters
can derive no small amount of comfort from knowing that familiar faces are
keeping an eye on their loved ones from day to day.
This safety net and support network are, perhaps, even more
important for those without a flock of their own—maybe they never had children
or a partner, or those people are no longer around or able to help. Our
neighborhoods need varied living arrangements to accommodate those who
don't fit the nuclear-family, detached-house mold—and old,
established urban neighborhoods often provide those arrangements, if
informally. Think of the single, older renter who lives in a basement apartment
or backyard ADU with a longtime landlord who has become a close friend. These
scenarios aren't the normative model of what an idyllic American neighborhood
is thought to be, but they are very present around us—and more so where the
built environment is allowed to openly and easily accommodate them.
My own childhood neighborhood had some of the above
characteristics, but the sheer amount of neighborliness and mutual cooperation
that my wife describes from her childhood struck me as a "Sesame
Street"-esque fantasy at first. Now I just think it sounds wonderful. And
essential for our society as we move forward into times that will challenge our
institutions and support systems around aging.
What Makes "Aging in Place" Work?
As the Boomer generation hits the crest of its retirement
wave, much is going to continue to be made of "aging in place." Surveys consistently show a strong desire among seniors
to remain in their communities, but there can be formidable obstacles to doing
so as you age and your physical mobility declines, along with your capacity to
keep up with such things as home maintenance.
The way most human societies have dealt with this is through
the kinds of informal, neighborly support networks described above. When people
of different ages and abilities live alongside each other, they can look out
for each other and pick up slack. My wife and I were just in her childhood
neighborhood for the holidays. She pointed out the homes of people in their 80s
and 90s whom she remembers from years ago. Without the support of the
neighborhood, it's likely that many of these people would have years ago found
a formal retirement community a more manageable option.
The Rise—And Fall?—of Senior Living?
The appeal of 55+ communities is understandable. They offer
built-in amenities, and ample social opportunities with those similar to you.
They make it simple to access the services you will begin to need. There is a
general lack of friction to all of this. Some residents also prefer to avoid the
noise and disruption that can come with having many kids and families around.
Places like The Villages, Florida are the apotheosis of
this trend—a whole city built from scratch just for seniors, who have thus
freed themselves of the burden of even paying taxes to support a school system.
These places are still booming now, riding the demographic wave. But what
happens to them when that wave crests and starts to subside?
“OK Boomer, Who's Going to Buy Your 21 Million Homes?”
the Wall Street Journal asked provocatively last November, in one of a
growing genre of articles about the impending market tsunami that’s expected
when the bulk of the retired homeowners of the generation that still defines
American homeownership no longer want to or are able to “age in place.” This is
a challenge for individual households, but its impact is going to be tectonic
when it comes to entire neighborhoods where most homeowners are of a similar
age and situation—because they were built all at once, on a cookie-cutter
template, and marketed from the start to people of a very narrow demographic,
lifestyle, and income profile. This model of community is efficient and
expedient, but likely ultimately very fragile.
The coming demographic shifts—both the near-term need to
accommodate aging-in-place (or out of place) for the largest wave of senior
citizens in history, or the ensuing need to secure a future for the places
we've built for them that they'll be vacating—are going to strain the
resilience, maintenance, and social fabric of many of our places.
The extreme examples of the senior-living trend—think Del
Webb planned communities, or places like The Villages—are the opposite of
adaptable. And they're not built with an eye to their long-term costs. The
Villages is already a Growth Ponzi Scheme avalanche waiting to
happen, as the Orlando Sentinel foreshadowed a few months ago
with an article about the specter of sudden, massive tax increases to pay for
the still-growing community’s infrastructure binge hangover.
I have to wonder about the future of the senior-living
apartment clusters sprouting in suburban America, too. These are often built on
the handful of oddball sites where it's still possible or expedient to build a
large apartment complex, with the result that they're isolated islands on unwalkable stroads and your tether to the rest of the
world comes in the form of family visits or scheduled bus trips to the pharmacy
and grocery store.
Both of my own grandmothers lived in places like this for
years after my respective grandfathers passed away. They found friends there.
They were comfortable. It wasn't a bad option. But when I hear stories of
neighborhoods like where my wife grew up, where many of the
"amenities" and "services" bundled into these places were
not “amenities” at all but just an organic part of the fabric of life and
community, I do suspect we've lost something by making these far more
institutional arrangements, increasingly, the societal default.
So the next time you hear "age-friendly community" or "aging in
place," don't picture the senior housing complex on a pond at the edge of
town. Picture the well-worn neighborhood where you leave all your family photos
up on the wall a few years longer, the curious, precocious 8-year-old girl down
the street pops in often for dinner and to hear your stories, you provide her
parents with a bit of free child-care and she shovels your walk every time it
snows and makes sure you’ve got medicine when you’re sick.
The organizer of a presentation I recently gave for an AARP
group began his opening remarks with a reminder that, "You only get old if
you're lucky." The luckiest among us deserve places to live that can age
gracefully with us, because those are places where we can age gracefully.
No comments:
Post a Comment