Housing options in retirement

 Senior care and housing that allows seniors to age in place are crucial to help our economy. We do not need more nursing homes. Rather than "ageing in place the idea that people should stay forever in the family home where they raised families. U.S. gerontologist Stephen Golant makes a strong case for  Aging in the Right Place.

Population ageing is a product of two good things, increasing life spans and control over our fertility. And while healthy ageing may improve with medical progress, experts have shown that even where it has been tried, policy to encourage significantly more births has not been successful.

In BC the government believes there are only the following four housing options for older adults.

·       Owning a Home

·       Renting a Home

·       Living in a Group Setting

·       Living in a Nursing Home

By making sure older people have housing that can be adapted for factors such as reduced mobility and easy in-home care, governments can effectively increase the availability of family homes.

What is interesting to me is the concept of co-housing is not on the list. Back in 2014 Margaret Critchlow who is an expert on Cohousing spoke at the 2014 John Friesen conference, “Housing Alternatives for an Aging Population” held at Simon Fraser University’s downtown Vancouver campus May 28-29, 2014. Here is some of what she said:

Fear arises easily when I look at the options available to our parents and realize that I don’t want those options and, worse, I couldn’t afford them. Baby Boomers had fewer children than previous generations so our potential for being a “burden” is spread among fewer offspring, and for those without children, where do we turn for family-like support as we age? We live 25 years longer than people did in 1900, so the prospect of outliving our savings increases especially as our generation has saved so little for retirement. Beyond the level of the individual, the “system” worries about everything from Baby Boomers’ potential demands for medical care, to our history of degrading the health of the planet.

For this conference, a central question becomes, how can housing support flourishing through a social connection in an ageing society? Harbourside Cohousing in Sooke, BC, is a prototype.  It is the second senior cohousing in Canada, after Wolf Willow in Saskatoon. It is the first, however, to include (1) a suite for a caregiver in the common house, and (2) an emphasis on the development of “co-care” or voluntary, neighbourly support. (3) Harbourside is the only cohousing in the world, as for as we know, to have a required course weekend for membership.

As I see it, the demand for senior cohousing is limited by three barriers: (1) affordability. Cohousing is basically market housing. People need equity to buy into senior cohousing under the current model of strata-titled homeownership. (2) scarcity of project management capacity. It is limited to the energy and skills of a very few firms, concentrated in BC and California (3) inertia. People want to age in place.  They are wary of change. They are “not ready.”

Working to soften these barriers, CSCS believes that senior cohousing can be a major social innovation if we focus on the “software” – i.e., adapting cohousing principles to a wide range of housing forms and potential demand – I said we would be lucky to build senior cohousing for 0.1% of the senior population. So what happens to the other 99.9% of the elderly population? This is where we get really inventive. How about retrofitting the culture of existing buildings and strata councils, neighbourhood houses for seniors, and housing co-operatives with the values (e.g. co-care, participation, shared leadership, social connection, reduced energy use) already developed in cohousing? In this way much closer to 100% of the elderly population can benefit from what co-housing has to teach us.

 

This is another option for Boomers and it is one worth considering.