Below is an article from today’s Minneapolis Star Tribune where Ecumen CEO and president Kathryn Roberts discusses how the age wave is an opportunity for the Twin Cities and other communities to create liveable communities that promote successful aging.

You can feel the winds picking up. Last week’s cover story in the newspaper of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis asked: “The Age Wave is Coming, Are We Ready?” Saturday’s Star Tribune discussed the explosive growth in parish nurse programs. And soon the Department of Human Services, which has a wealth of statewide research, will hit the road with public forums that compare our coming age wave to Hurricane Katrina. The inherent message: We’re not ready for what we know is coming.As the Twin Cities metro area sprawls, rows of homes rise like islands, with inhabitants needing wheels to leave them. Many area cornfields have been replaced with housing that pretends people don’t grow old.

But we’re aging in record numbers. As state demographer Tom Gillaspy says, “These things usually creep along at the speed of a glacier. Not so with aging. In demographic terms, this is a tsunami.”

Soon the G.I. Generation will disappear. Behind it is the misnamed Silent Generation, born between 1925 and 1942. The Silents mark the beginning of the most educated, technologically connected, discerning seniors we’ve ever seen. And much of the metro area isn’t ready for them or for how they want to age.

They don’t want to live in isolation. They want to be near family and friends. They want easy-access transportation. They want housing that’s near health care, learning, exercise, shopping, worship places and other gathering hubs that feed the mind, body and soul. And when they die, they don’t want to be in a sterile cinderblock room bunked with a stranger.

Some places get it. St. Louis Park long has viewed aging as an asset. Dakota County just developed a significant aging plan. However, we need to share information and plan together, because there are some pretty cavernous gaps throughout the metro area. Our collective response has to be about more than determining where sewer lines go; it must be about creating vibrant communities for a lifetime.

Atlanta, often derided for its missed foresight on transportation planning, learned from its mistakes. Its regional commission’s mantra is ensuring that “Greater Atlanta is Great for a Lifetime.” It formed Aging Atlanta, with more than 50 public, private and nonprofit partners, to plan for the age wave.

Aging Atlanta is digitally mapping its region’s senior housing, community services and transportation hubs to identify gaps, overlaps and potential partnerships across counties. It surveyed residents 55 and older to generate county-specific data that outline emerging seniors’ work plans, housing desires, volunteer patterns, preventive-care use and awareness about paying for long-term care.

Out of this knowledge, several metro Atlanta counties have new zoning ordinances that provide more universal design and low-maintenance single-level homes. They see senior housing opportunities that can be part of existing neighborhoods or new neighborhoods connected to churches, community centers, college campuses or shopping areas.

We could borrow from Atlanta. But we could also add our own components, such as design charrettes that show how we can better integrate senior housing and age holistically with existing infrastructure.

While health and housing have been combined in the private sector, in the public sector they reside in separate silos, largely funded by fragmented jurisdictions crossing multiple agencies and regulations. The Twin Cities area has a number of government-run independent living apartments that don’t have health services that could help people age in community.

Aging in community minimizes expensive assembly-line care while maintaining valuable social networks. In Detroit Lakes we’ve found an entrepreneurial way to keep seniors in their apartments by working with government. We deliver mobile 24/7 assisted-living services to public senior housing. This could just as easily be occurring in metro-area counties.

The Twin Cities area isn’t ready for the age wave. Nor is Atlanta, but it is preparing now for tomorrow. Aging isn’t partisan. We all do it. And, if we do this right, we should all benefit from it.

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This entry was posted on Friday, August 10th, 2007 at 9:21 am and is filed under Age Wave, Blogroll, Changing Aging, Vital Successful Aging, senior housing development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.