Non Senior Living

It’s been a tough journey, but my friend Linnea has finally arrived at the difficult juncture of life before memory loss, and today’s reality. She’s a people person, well educated and widely traveled, but finds herself in a very lonely place. That place is her beautiful sprawling home in single-family suburbia where she knows no one except the people she greets as she walks her dog.

Linnea bought her home in the beautiful corner of Florida visualizing a more active life than she could enjoy in her upstate New York wintery climate. Shortly after moving here, she realized that something was not quite right. She would lose her way to places she thought she knew well. Although she’s only 65, she has been diagnosed with early dementia, and realizes that she has to make some hard choices.

This column is not about memory loss or dementia, it’s about the way that we baby boomers of all descriptions want to live out our lives.

After visiting many upscale senior living enclaves, Linnea was more than discouraged. She wants to have friends and neighbors of all ages. The places she visited were of course age restricted and felt very one dimensional to her. She’s physically healthy and active and wants to be near others who are.

In a conversation just last week, she said, “Someone needs to develop a community that is designed for us boomers.” I agreed, and totally understood that at 65, she just wasn’t ready for the mantle that “senior living” holds in our culture.

As if reading our minds, an article reprinted from the Arizona Republic addressed this very issue as I read my newspaper today. Scottsdale based DMB Associates is opening an age-restricted community within a greater community. Called Victory, and scheduled to open mid year, it will meet many of the needs that the developer has discovered that baby boomers are looking for.

Just as my friend Linnea expressed, DMB realized that his potential buyers didn’t want to live with people just their age who look just like them. They prefer work out spaces, hiking trails and communal opportunities over golfing. I found it interesting that this development offers 6 holes of golf for people who don’t want to invest 4 or 5 hours on an 18 hole round. This leaves more of the day to do other interesting things like knowing their neighbors.

The great places I’m reading about in other parts of the country are in Arizona or the Northeast. They sound so inviting. Some of the features include: wider doors and hallways; better lighting and bigger windows; first-floor bedrooms and bathrooms; easy to maintain exteriors and landscaping; technology structured wiring; home office space, and vetted service providers recommended by concierge services.

What I can’t figure out is why Florida isn’t on this bandwagon. We have traditionally been the retirement destination for the past two generations, and yet we are lagging behind. I want to stay here, and I would like to find a place with all these amenities. Equally important is the opportunity to be a part of a community. We boomers like interdependence. We don’t want isolation. Most of us went to college and had roommates and later housemates, and we learned to like that lifestyle. As I look back on my 20’s and early 30’s, the housemates I had became some of the best friends I ever had.

So, where do my friends and those of you who can identify go from here? We start asking for what we want in housing just as we’ve always done. Let’s not forget that as more of us get older, we are closer to reaching that critical mass that will allow us to demand what we want.

By the way:

•Four million 50+ women live in US households with at least two other women of similar age.

•There are now “aging in place specialists” so designated through the National Association of Home Builders.

•One third of we boomers will face old age as a single person.

•One in four of us is childless.