New Alternatives for Elderly Housing Closing Generation Gap
Maggie Kuhn is 81 and the head of an advocacy group for the elderly, but she refuses to live with other old people.
“Retirement communities are glorified playpens where wrinkled babies can be safe and out of the way,” said Kuhn, co-founder of the Grey Panthers.
“The atmosphere is deadly, just deadly. There is little stimulation, and people regress. We’re building more of them, and the builders are making a lot of money. To get into one of them costs an arm and a leg, and if you don’t like it you’re stuck.”
Kuhn’s solution was to open her stone home in Philadelphia to three house mates, ages 29 to 39, who provide companionship, help her with certain chores and, in return, have a place to live at reasonable rent.
On a larger scale, Italian architect Antonino Saggio, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, won an award with a plan for low-rise apartment buildings to be inhabited by both young and old, with units that can be tailored to the needs of older people or adapted for other uses.
‘Becomes a Ghetto’
“The elderly don’t really want to live in a complex that is made up only of elderly, because that becomes a ghetto,” Saggio said. “But they want it to consist of a certain percentage so they can still retain control of what’s going on.
“In addition, we are realizing that people want to be attached to the land and want to take care of it, and that they feel more isolated in high-rises.”
Saggio’s plan, devised in cooperation with architects Luigi Prestinenza and Donatella Ozazi of Rome, won first place last year in housing competition sponsored by the Assn. of Roman Developers.
Crucial to its success is the requirement that 50% to 60% of the occupants be elderly, Saggio said.
The complex plan calls for common services, including a day-care center, a kitchen to prepare hot meals for those who can’t cook for themselves, meeting rooms and a social worker to supervise those services.
Advantages for Elderly
“An advantage to a young person is that the elderly are generally very willing to help in the care of children,” the architect said. “Another advantage is that such a complex allows some common services, and many outdoor spaces. And it should be a quieter environment.”
The buildings will be no more than four or five floors. There will be indoor and outdoor public areas for socializing and semiprivate “buffer” spaces such as walkway decks, shared balconies and yard areas. The buffer spaces are important to fostering a sense of community in the complex, Saggio said.
“The limitations of the high-rise are that basically each person lives in his own cell with no intermediate space between a single unit and the world,” he said.
“In low-rise, high-density complexes there are all types of buffer zones and outdoor spaces that mediate from the street to the communal space, from the communal space to the semiprivate outdoors and then to the unit. It’s a progression, a graduation of space.”
The apartments have about 480 square feet of floor space with a back-to-back kitchen-bathroom core in the center. That helps keep the cost down because the two rooms share costly plumbing fixtures.
Apartment Design
An apartment for a married couple or person living alone has a living room, dining area, bedroom and balcony or private garden. The unit’s “elderly feature” is a small all-purpose room that can double as an extra bedroom for a live-in nurse or as a den or family room.
Another apartment plan is designed for two people sharing separate bedrooms, such as a brother and sister, two friends, mother and daughter, etc.
Two recessed entrances, one on the far right and the other on the far left, lead down separate corridors to two large bedrooms at the rear, each of which has access to a private patio or balcony. There is no communal living room, but occupants share a dining area, kitchen and bathroom, all of which can be entered from each “side” of the apartment.
The cost of each unit, if standardized fixtures are used, is roughly $40,000, Saggio said.
The cost of the entire complex should be no more than a high-rise because it doesn’t really utilize that much more land, Saggio said.
“It’s not true that you need more land with a low-rise. It’s just a design issue,” he said. “If you build a high-rise, you need a lot of land around it because you generally cannot put one high-rise building very close to another.”
Enthusiastic Response
Many social planners and advocacy groups for the elderly are enthusiastic about intergenerational living.
“It’s the only way, and it’s the way I’ve lived for over 25 years,” Kuhn said. “It’s not for everyone. Some people are going to still loll on the beaches in Florida or go to Sun City, Ariz. But in a society as diverse as ours, we need options.”
Sallie Gordon, 30, of the Philadelphia-based National Shared Housing Resource Center Inc. shares a home with two young women and a 79-year-old man. “I have no interest in living in a segregated world,” she said. “It doesn’t reflect what’s really going on. I would much rather live with people who have a variety of experiences.”
Louis Sauer, a professor of environmental design at the University of Colorado and the designer of several housing projects, said Saggio’s plan bucks tradition.
“The trend has been to build high-rise buildings just for the elderly,” he said. “But the elderly who live in high-rises talk about the feelings of isolation, of not being wanted, of life passing them by.
“There needs to be different building types and zoning possibilities so they have more choices.”
Some Pessimistic
Not everyone is optimistic that Saggio’s plan will be well-received.
“It’s easier to go with the tried, the true, the boring and the homogenous,” said Andy Achenbaum, director of the Aging Society Policy Studies Center at the University of Michigan.
“Until society realizes that it’s going to have more and more older people and is willing to pursue a variety of different options, I suspect the market for this sort of innovation will be small,” he said.
The greatest obstacles may not be in finding interested tenants, but in convincing developers and financial institutions to back such a housing complex, planners say.
“The first hurdles,” Sauer said, “are the lending institutions. The next hurdle is a developer who will advocate the idea. And the third hurdle is to find land that will be properly zoned. Zoning influences the cost of the land and, therefore, the feasibility of the project.”
Saggio said also that “there is a bureaucracy involved with elderly housing because many of them are paid by some sort of federal money.”
Agencies Give Support
But Kuhn said some public and private agencies, particularly churches, are slowly realizing the merits of such housing and are willing to fund projects, at least on a small scale.
“We’ve gotten money from the U.S. Department of Housing, even under the conservative Reagan Administration, to fund shared housing projects (in which the elderly share a home with younger tenants) and we’ve had successful ventures with churches, which build many retirement homes. A few are even considering day-care centers for children.”
Saggio concedes that the life style he proposes may not be to everyone’s liking, but that is as it should be.
“The generation of the architect who tried to create a recipe valid for everyone is over,” he said. “We develop ideas not to conquer the world. They’re to improve and give more choices and opportunities.
“Right now it seems the elderly don’t have many options. And this gives them more options.”
