Hanging in the 'hood – a good option for boomers and beyonders and the economy

Say you’re happy in your ‘hood. The sights are familiar, the neighbors are okay, the comfort level is high. Now say you’re 70-something or 80-something and you need a little help now and then, bringing in the papers, getting to doctors’ appointments, changing light bulbs. Do you really want to pull up roots and move to a totally new environment, re-learn where everything is, make new friends among people who never knew your children (or your parents)? The latter is being chosen every day for or by seniors in America; the former is spurring a movement with an interesting variety of formats under the general heading of Aging in Place. I really want an umbrella acronym for this category, but I don’t really want to be an AIP.

On her New Old Age blog for the New York Times a few days ago Paula Span wrote about her dad’s life in a NORC.

In my father’s apartment building in South Jersey, the older tenants start drifting into the small lobby each day around 1 p.m., taking up positions on chairs and couches. The ostensible reason: The mail is about to arrive. The real reason: They relish a chance to schmooze.

“There’s a lot of discussion about the economy,” Dad reports. “And what the president said about the police and that fellow in Massachusetts.” Lesser issues arise, too. Whose daughter is coming to visit. What is on sale at the ShopRite supermarket.

Twenty-five years ago, a University of Wisconsin professor coined a great term for this kind of residence. It is a naturally occurring retirement community, or NORC. The place wasn’t built for seniors; its tenants are all ages, infants through nonagenarians. But a substantial number of residents have been there long enough to grow old together.

Since he still drives, my father heads out each morning to buy the papers, which get passed from one apartment to another. (God forbid you should squander 50 cents for your own copy and read the headlines before suppertime.) He ferries friends to doctors’ appointments. He benefits, too: his pal Manny comes by several times a day to check on him, and neighbors stock his fridge with soup and strudel.

NORCs exist all over; probably half of Miami Beach, Fla., was a NORC at one time. Watching this little community cope with shopping and banking and constant medical visits, I have wondered why services can’t be brought to these residents. Wouldn’t it be more efficient to have a nurse visit weekly, instead of each person making a laborious trip to a doctor’s office? For the senior van to schedule regular excursions to ShopRite? For the high school orchestra to give concerts in the community room, since so few older residents go out after dark?

A number of NORCs do offer this kind of help. Twenty-five states have NORC supportive service programs, according to the queen of NORCs, Fredda Vladeck, who runs the United Hospital Fund’s Aging in Place Initiative. New York leads the list with 54 NORC programs operating in high-rises, garden apartment complexes and neighborhoods of single-family homes; Indiana comes in second. The common mission of the programs, Ms. Vladeck said, is “transforming communities into good places to grow old.”

NORC’s and their cousins the Village aging-in-place concepts are multiplying, but they’re nothing new. They’ve been around for more than a quarter of a century (if you discount the automatic NORCs that small towns and Native American communities offered in ancient America afforded. And they’re proven effective. “Numerous studies have documented the benefits and potential of NORCs, including a Senate report (PDF), a foundation grant report and a graduate thesis,” Span writes.

So why, after 25 years’ experience, are there not more support programs for the millions of older Americans already living in NORCs, and the millions more to come?

Ms. Vladeck, accustomed to lobbying and testifying and organizing, sounded philosophical. “It’s incubating,” she said. “Sometimes, innovation takes a long time.”

If you want to keep your parents out of nursing homes, or want to stay out of a nursing home yourself, learning about how these alternatives work isn’t a bad way to start the plan.  There may not be a long time left, at the rate America’s getting older.

When the Neighborhood Is the Retirement Village – The New Old Age Blog – NYTimes.com.

Watching Idols and Icons Die

An article in yesterday’s New York Times chronicled the recent “funereal season” that has seen the passage of such players on the national stage as Walter Cronkite, Les Paul, Farrah Fawcett, Michael Jackson, Ted Kennedy and Patrick Swayze. Add to that the death this week of singer Mary (“Peter, Paul and Mary”) Travers. Although Times writer Sarah Kershaw noted that no more celebrities died this summer than in summers past, a couple of other elements are in play: the particular folks who departed the stage in recent months did so just as Baby Boomers are hitting retirement age, and they were the people who “defined (the Boomers) as a tribe, bequeathing through music, culture, news and politics as a kind of generational badge that has begun to fray.”

Generational badge-fraying is not necessarily a bad thing. As long as one wears the badge lightly on the pocket and occasionally notices which threads are coming loose, in fact, I maintain it is downright healthy. Contemplation of our terminal condition could do most of us a lot of good.

(Specifically, a few of those Boomers who have been putting off getting their advance directives done (OK, I see your eyes glazing over, but stick with me here) will start thinking about doing so. Or at the very least, have a little talk with their significant others about how long they’d like to be kept on life support if they have a stroke tomorrow. Getting this done today leaves tomorrow for enjoying everything else. Plus, it encourages calm; see below.)

Walter Cronkite wound up a long and happy life at 93. But Ted Kennedy was 77, one year older than yours truly. Farrah Fawcett was 62. Patrick Swayze, 57; Michael Jackson, 50. DJ AM Adam Goldstein was 36. The reality is that we’re all terminal; most of us terminate before we’re quite ready but it does happen. Acknowledging that fact can be ridiculously freeing.

The Boomers are reportedly worried not only about the finiteness of their lives, but also about their legacy. The Times article quoted a survey of 1,000 Americans age 44 to 79 conducted by AARP, which found that 55 percent believed they would leave the world worse off than they found it. That prospect can turn you gray in a hurry. But these near-retirees are not planning just to sit around getting gray.

Loss of their legends, according to Marc Freedman, author of “Prime Time: How Baby Boomers Will Revolutionize Retirement and Transform America, has created in this generation a sense of both the “expansion and compression of time,” and they are looking toward second careers doing good. “I think this is the first time so many have simultaneously had an awareness of death and the prospect of a whole new act,” Mr. Freedman says. Many of those new acts may turn the above expectation around, so the world might be left a little better off than they found it.

To which the post-Boomers say, Go Boomers.

More on the Housing Choices Dilemma

This week’s earlier post about the multiplicity of housing choices for the post-Boomers (and often Boomers ready to downsize or make other shifts) touched on just a few of the possibilities out there. The staying put option is one that many, including my friend Berta whose current consideration of home changes was cited, would choose. The question is addressed at some good length in today’s New York Times:

Stay put or sell?

That’s the question many older people ponder as they move into their 70s and beyond.

Most older people settle on staying put, according to a recent survey by the Home Safety Council, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preventing home-related injuries. (From the source of the survey, you can see where this column is heading, right?)

Staying put makes economic sense. It is not only more comfortable to live out your life in your own home, it’s much more affordable.

Those posh retirement condos and assisted-living facilities might seem easy-living and attractive, but crunching their numbers can take the shine off their attraction fast.

The average annual fee at an assisted-living facility — a place where older people live independently but also receive a host of services like medication monitoring and meals — is $34,000. And in the nation’s most expensive metropolitan areas, including New York, the costs may be closer to $70,000.

The Times article goes on to cite the case of octogenarian Catherine Fisher, who chose to adapt her New Jersey home to her own needs rather than take those needs elsewhere. Sooner or later, countless Americans will face similar choices.  Guidelines to what is becoming “an entire service industry… taking shape around the goal of letting people age in place” are worth a quick study now, for whenever “later” comes.

via Patient Money – Cost-Effective Ways to Make Homes Safer for Older People – NYTimes.com.