Graying of America
GET READY for the golden age of the baby boomers. It probably won't be a nostalgia-drenched era of elders patiently accepting the increasing limitations of old age. It's much more likely to be a high-concept, high-tech revolution pushed by people who are staying healthier and living longer -- and getting used to new-fangled products that make logistics easier and lives fuller.
It's a world that governments and businesses have to start preparing for now.
Governor Romney recently hosted a conference on aging that offered a glimpse of this bustling future, including a look at new housing ideas.
One example is the ''naturally occurring retirement community," the phenomenon of people aging in their homes along with other aging neighbors. Community organizations have responded by delivering services to people in these communities, often in apartment buildings where it's easy to place nurses, lawyers, and financial advisers, and easy to use word of mouth to let people know what's available.
Last fall, Jewish Family and Children's Service opened programs in apartment buildings in Brookline, Malden, and Salem, heavily guided by the principle of asking people what they want. So in addition to practical things like nutrition, mental health, and exercise classes to help prevent falls, the agency runs workshops on topics like how immigrants can relate to their Americanized grandchildren. In Brookline, a program that's especially targeted to men who fall prey to isolation and malnutrition focused on celebrating the end of World War II. This led to a discussion on baseball, including the experience of still-living African-American players who were barred from white teams, which will culminate in a trip to Fenway Park. The overall goal is to vastly improve quality of life, build a community in which aging residents are resources for each other, and avoid the need for expensive options such as hospitalizations and nursing home care.
The challenge is fund-raising. As humane and cost-effective as these three programs are, they are federally funded: $800,000 over three years. Jewish Family and Children's Service also raises private money and gets in-kind donations. The agency wants to develop long-term economic stability, according to Rimma Zelfand, who runs the programs in Brookline and Malden.
Baby-boomer demands could also mean that one-size-fits-all homes may slip slowly into the past. MIT's architecture department is experimenting with ways to revolutionize home design. Instead of watching rats in a maze, researchers watch volunteers living in a one-bedroom condominium called PlaceLab. A key question, according to the project website: ''Can technology and architectural design motivate life-extending behavior changes?"
Researchers are looking at how to enhance quality of life to discourage sedentary living, keep people on their medication schedules, and detect health problems quickly by tracking and responding to changes in behavior.
Through its OPEN Prototype House Initiative, MIT is also looking for ways to quickly manufacture affordable prefabricated homes with flexible interiors that can be tailored to meet residents' needs, turning an experiment into a practical idea as quickly as possible.
It's a considerable shift from hoping for sunny, pleasant housing to expecting cutting edge, life-enhancing innovations in services, design, and home construction. These trends dovetail with many people's profound desire to age at home instead of a nursing care facility. Such sweeping change could be part of the baby boomer legacy, good for their ranks and for the spinoffs that could benefit everyone else.
