Cooperative Aging

How it feels to be old

Generations United, based in Washington, D.C., focuses on promoting programs that enhance intergenerational cooperation and understanding. One such program is run by the Macklin Intergenerational Institute in Findlay, Ohio, which operates a childcare center within a continuing care retirement community.    

Macklin has gotten a lot of press recently for its Xtreme Aging simulations -- sensitivity training programs that offer participants an opportunity to experience the deprivations of aging. Two reports by program participants are here and here.  

Staying put

Another story about Staying Put in New Canaan.

Retiring to a college town

  There's an interesting trend of retirement communities being developed by, in conjunction with, or just near university campuses. The concept is that the target market of baby boomers is one that is looking for lifelong learning, and cultural and intellectual stimulation.

    This formalization of association with the college town echoes an existing informal one.  College administrators and college town realtors have known for years that alumni are frequently drawn back to their college setting in retirement.   In many ways a college community is perfect in offering intellectual and cultural stimulation, often in conjunction with a bustling college center. 

    At Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, for example, retirees can find a small but charming downtown, along with senior discounts on film series, concert series, and local repertory theatre performances.  In addition, Dartmouth runs the Institute for Lifelong Education at Dartmouth (ILEAD), a program of peer-led continuing educaiton programs for adults, where it's not unusual to find a seminar on international diplomacy being taught by a former ambassador, who the following day may be a student in a class on the history of ballet taught by a retired ballet company manager.

    Dartmouth is also home to a continuing care retirement community, Kendal at Hanover, which counts retired Dartmouth alumni and professors as the largest single proportion of its population.  Increasingly, other university/developer partnerships are developing their own retirement communities.  Here's an article, and another one, about this trend.

 

Technology & independence

The New York Times recently had an article about high-tech gadgets that can provide peace of mind to frail but independent seniors and their families.  The motion sensors and remote monitoring systems enable concerned family members who may be thousands of miles away to ascertain whether their elderly relative is moving around normally and taking their medication.  The story noted that the U.S. is substantially behind the European Union in the development of technologies to support and sustain independent living for the aging.   In Dublin, the Irish government is partnering with Intel on the Technology Research for Independent Living Centre (TRIL) to develop and test such technologies.

Just do it

My interest in the idea of cooperative aging is rooted in a trip my family took to Europe when I was a pre-teen in the late 1960s.  In Denmark we happened to visit a community where the nursery school and senior center had been deliberately placed adjacent to one another to encourage cross-pollination.  The idea that growing older could be socially engineered made a lasting impression on me.

Later, in the early 1970s, my father proposed the idea that his extended family should buy some affordable land -- I think he was advocating North Carolina, which would have been an unpopular choicer for all the Jewish relatives living in Queens and Long Island -- and install all the great-aunts and -uncles there, with teenagers in the family sent to spend a helpful year of service sometime while they were in high school. Since my grandmother had been one of ten children, just her siblings and their descendants would have been enough to generate a community of their own.

It never happened, of course.  The relatives didn't bite, and even my parents pulled back.  Later, after they retired, they considered putting down a deposit for a space in a Quaker-run Kendal continuing-care retirement community, but concluded that they were too private people to enjoy the sociability Kendal offered.

Now my dad is of the age where he would have been one of the people living on the North Carolina homestead with his cousins, perhaps with one of my children spending the service year there helping and getting to know the elders.  Instead he is living in the snowy Northeast in a detached hoe that he has thus far been able to continue to maintain.  In many ways he is lucky -- after being widowed he entered into a happy second marriage to a younger woman -- but if anything happens to his wife he'll suddenly be an eighty-four-year-old man navigating New England life by himself.  Observing his experience has heightened my interest in developing a plan for my own aging.

The Eden Alternative

    The Eden Alternative is a non-profit organization established by William H. Thomas, a geriatrician, and his wife Judy, to disseminate their theories regarding aging.  The premise of the Eden Alternative is that most long-term housing ignores residents' key problems of loneliness, helplessness and boredom, focusing on seniors' physical needs without adequately addressing their psychological needs and thus creating a track where seniors' implicit focus is downhill, towards death. 

    The Eden Alternative advocates a cultural change in senior housing, promoting a community focus and hearth-like approach through what it calls Green Houses, designed as private rooms for six to ten seniors, centered around an open kitchen and dining area. The Green House is intended to look and feel like a home, containing few medical signposts.  The goal is to provide a place where elders can receive clinical care and daily support without the assistance and care becoming the focus of their existence. 

    Although the concept is interesting, the Eden Alternative's website is dense and not reader-friendly.  This article on the National Real Estate Investor website may provide an easier introduction to the organization.

Christian leaders' community

    Pilgrim Place, "a senior community for those called to careers in Christian service," is a continuing care community for retired Christian leaders in Claremont, California.  Pilgrim Place offers a continuum of living arrangements:   independent living, assisted living, and skilled nursing care.   Residents are encouraged to be involved with the Claremont School of Theology, located just a half-mile away from the Pilgrim Place campus.  Applicants to Pilgrim Place must show substantial professional experience in a church or a Christian institution such as a YMCA.

Liberals aging together

    Sunset Hall in Los Angeles is a non-profit assisted retirement home for free-thinking elders --or, as one resident put it,"The home for the old lefties."  Sunset Hall was the subject of a 2003 PBS documentary entitled Sunset Story.  You can read more about Sunset Hall here.

GLBT options

    There is substantial activity in the area of gay and lesbian (GLBT) aging.  For example:

General

    Nina Pratt moderates a Google Group called Graying Gayly and Gracefully that focuses on lesbians living in community as they age.

    Stonewall Communities has various programs in Massachusetts and the Northeast, including the Stonewall Connections member services program that assists members of the Boston area GLBT who wish to age in place.

    The Gay Retirement Guide is a website that has state-by-state links.

Retirement Communities

    My sister Margaret is a lesbian who lives in Vermont with her partner, Mary Carol.  Mary Carol is a big fisherwoman who would love to see them retire to a southeastern state with great fishing.  But my sister will not consider moving anywhere that does not recognize her union with Mary Carol -- which would eliminate three GLBT retirement communities that have been developed in states that are traditional warm-weather retirement magnets: Palms of Manasota and The Resort on Carefree Boulevard in Florida, Carefree Cove in North Carolina, and Rainbow Vision in New Mexico.

    Margaret's position makes sense to me. Retiring in a state that does not recognize gay unions would seem to present aging couples a myriad of potential problems down the road.   So here I'm going to list retirement communities or networks in U.S. states  that do recognize GLBT marriages, civil unions, or domestic partnerships, and in Canada:

California:

• Rainbow Vision

• Triangle Square
  

Massachusetts:

• Paradise One

• Stonewall Audubon Circle
  

That's all I've gotten to so far -- will do more research later on GLBT retirement alternatives in Oregon, Washington, New Hampshire, Vermont, New Jersey, Connecticut, Maine, and the District of Columbia.

Cohousing and cooperative housing

    Although the terms 'cooperative housing' and 'cohousing' are frequently used interchangeably, there are distinctions between the two.

    Housing cooperatives are structured so that individuals share ownership  of and responsibility for the whole.  Although an individual has the right to use a given unit, the individual's ownership is not linked to that specific unit. Housing cooperatives may, but need not, include the community focus that is an integral element of cohousing.   

    Conversely, even though the concept of cohousing grew out of the housing cooperative movement, cooperative ownership is not an integral element of cohousing.  In fact, most cohousing communities in the United States are not formally structured as housing cooperatives, tending instead to be structured in the form of a condominium association, where the individual's ownership is tied to a specific unit of the whole.  Alternately, individual cohousing residents may not have any ownership at all, but may instead be renters, with the property owned not by them but by a non-profit organization.

The nuts and bolts of creating a community: Usonia

    In the 1940s a group of young couples in New York City banded together to pursue a dream of cooperative home ownership.  They hammered out an organizational structure for their community, which they named Usonia after a term coined by Frank Lloyd Wright.  They purchased ninety-seven acres of land north of the city, engaged Wright to prepare a site plan and design some of the homes, and organized weekend work parties to get the first homes built.  Nearly all of the community's forty-seven homes were built between 1948 and 1956.

    Over time the Usonians weathered financial crises and were forced to make many adjustments to their original plan.  Cooperative ownership of the individual homes, for example, proved unworkable.  But the social fabric of the community remained strong:  In Usonia's first forty years, only twelve homes changed hands, six of those to children of original owners.

    I grew up a couple of miles away from Usonia, and several of my best friends lived there.  I was always in awe of their connection to the other families in the community.  A Usonia kid  could walk into any home in the community and feel welcomed, safe and secure. But until I read Roland Reisley's  2001 book, Usonia, New York:  Building a Community with Frank Lloyd Wright, I had no comprehension of the vast amount of planning, discussion and negotiation that went into the creation of Usonia.   

    The originators of Usonia were diligent in documenting the group's discussions and progress.  With the benefit of these decades worth of records, Mr. Reisley's book provides a fascinating and detailed window into the immense time and effort, as well as the concessions, involved in the process of building and sustaining a community.

What is cohousing?

    Cohousing is a housing movement that is also called intentional community, or small neighborhoods, or ecovillages.  The concept of cohousing originated in Denmark in the 1960s and was brought to the U.S. in the 1980s by Kathryn McCamant and Charles Durrett.   Quoting from the website of The Cohousing Association of the United States:

Cohousing is a type of collaborative housing in which residents actively participate in the design and operation of their own neighborhoods.  Cohousing residents are consciously committed to living as a community.  The physical design encourages both social contact and individual space.  Private homes contain all the features of conventional homes, but residents also have access to common facilities such as open space, courtyards, a playground and a common house.

    The same website lists six defining characteristics of cohousing:

1.  Participatory process.  Future residents participate in the planning of the community.
2.  Neighborhood design.  The site plan is designed to encourage a sense of community.
3.  Common facilities.  The community includes a "common house" or "common room" designed for daily use (but not as a substitute for the community's private residences) and interaction by residents. The common house might include such areas as:  recreation facilities, guest rooms, a children's playroom, and a kitchen and dining area for group gatherings. 
4.  Resident management.  Residents develop and maintain the community's policies and procedures.
5.  Non-hierarchical structure and decision-making.  Decision making is by consensus.
6.  No shared community economy.  In other words, 'cohousing' does not equal 'commune.'

    In the U.S. right now there are hundreds of cohousing communities either completed or in the development phase, typically structured as condominium associations, with the majority to be found on the two coasts.  Well-known cohousing communities include Muir Commons in Davis, California, Doyle Street Cohousing in Emeryville, CA, Winslow Cohousing in Bainbridge Island,Washington, Nyland Cohousing in Lafayette, Colorado, and Sunward Cohousing in Ann Arbor, MI.

    Elder cohousing is cohousing built specifically to provide continuing independence and accessibility for residents as they age.  Common areas may include living quarters for shared home health aides.   The Elder Cohousing Network links efforts to build elder cohousing.  Numerous developments are under way.  Three that have already opened include Glacier Circle in Davis, California, Silver Sage Village  in Boulder, Colorado, and the ElderSpirit Community in Abingdon, Virginia.

Alternative living for the aging

    Alternative Living for the Aging (ALA) is a Los Angeles non-profit that runs two interesting programs that, according to its website, "allow older people to remain independent through their interdependence."

    ALA's Cooperative Apartment Communities program places seniors in affordable collective housing in one of five different Los Angeles-area rental apartment complexes run by ALA. The communities have different structures  -- in one, residents come together regularly for meals cooked by the community's cook;  in another the residents live completely independently --but they share an ethos that has residents relating to one another as an extended family or community. 

    The second of ALA's programs, the Preinterviewed Housemate Matching Program, matches seniors with potential housemates(senior or younger) who either pay them rent or assist them with services such as shopping, transportation or companionship.

Aging in place

"Aging in place" is the term describing a movement to enable elderly people to stay at home, rather than move to assisted living facilities, when they grow frail.    Banding together in neighborhood economic communities, elderly people -- or those who will one day be elderly -- plan and negotiate to obtain sharable services, such as transportation, home health visits, shopping, and home repair.   

Two recent New York Times articles featured groups of neighbors in Boston and Washington, D.C. who have joined together in non-profit organizations to obtain services and look after one another.  Similar efforts are under way around the country. 

The prototype aging-in-place community is the six-year-old Beacon Hill Village in the Boston area, which serves a group of members living around the Beacon Hill neighborhood.  Also in Boston is  Cambridge at Home,  a group of those in the Cambridge neighborhood, and the Stonewall Connections network, which works specifically to help gay and lesbian members age in place.

In Washington, D.C., a group of neighbors have recently organized Capitol Hill Village with the same intention.  And, in Connecticut, Staying Put in New Canaan  is another new network that enables retirees to stay independent for longer by connecting them through a "virtual village" .