Looking Back to Move Forward: Our Towns

There is a solution to many of our modern problems. Reinventing small towns for our growing elderly population is a solution that deals with many social, welfare, economic, health, housing, political and design issues that inter-relate with each other on practical and logical levels. Finding ways to form partnerships with not-so disparate groups, as well as finding common themes within the most important issues of our day is essential to the development of a successful reinvention that has few, if any precedents.

The problems that may be solved by in-filling elderly housing in existing small towns are gaining significance with the displacement of thousands of people due to recent natural catastrophes, and the looming oil crisis that will force us to rethink the way we displace ourselves from centers of commerce. We have in our small towns, a reserve of resources enmeshed in the fabric of the town itself. The embodied energy contained in the infrastructure, housing and building stock, parks and public amenities is valuable and extremely expensive and inefficient to build from scratch. This could be a large-scale example of adaptive re-use, a model of conservation, an efficient use of man-made resources, and an economic renaissance of small towns in decline whose inertia has shifted out of town. It would also be an example of design for resilience in community and a natural, unforced dispersion of the wealth of the elderly, ideas expressed by environmentalist David Orr.

On a non-physical level, the embodied energy of community assets such as social connections, political, civic and religious institutions, volunteer groups and welfare agencies exist and can be augmented. Multigenerational communities that sustain children, families and the elderly can be found in our existing core communities that have seen population decline, and are just waiting to be in-filled with new homes and people. This plan can restore and revitalize communities that have once seen vibrancy and life that we still recall as the quintessential small town.

In a way, the genius loci of our existing towns is the community that we are missing in new developments today. We can awake a sleeping giant in each of our existing towns by changing development policy to place elder care services and housing, and include urban growth boundaries around each town, hamlet, borough or city, and focus redevelopment close to historically important centers of commerce which includes every small town in decline in America today, that have proven, historically, to be locally self-sufficient. This can, and will, occur again. It has to. Our current practices are not sustainable, and are inefficient.

We should look at each town as an opportunity to review regional planning policy and even national planning policy to stop current practices of elderly housing and care, and refocus on our existing assets; that is our towns, civic institutions, natural buffer borders and productive green space. As our population grows, density increases, and energy supplies get redirected to China and India, it will be imperative to look at our patterns of living as it was before cheap energy, and begin to live in a smaller, but more connected, radii, focusing on local food chain supply. As David Orr suggests, the Amish make their lives less complicated by limiting their ability to travel to eight miles in a day, or the distance a horse can travel. Our historic towns once accomplished the same function, relying on the surrounding eight miles of resources, that provided sustenance for the local population.

The existence of each town is proof of historic self-sufficiency. At one time, a local resource was in demand, and a town prospered around that resource. But in many cases, that resource, or economic inertia, has changed or disappeared, and many towns have suffered. Today, an aging population could be the next great American resource. This is a talented, successful population that should not be discarded to elderly 'warehouses.'

As each town has lost its economic viability to more centralized commercial activity, we need to find a new use that will provide a new viability. The elderly are a logical source for a new kind of retirement asset. It is illogical to move the elderly from their community to a suburban retirement establishment with no spirit of place. A town with no economic base can be revitalized using the accumulated assets of an elderly population. As a population, the elderly have already earned their incomes, and most can live on what they have earned. But because people are living longer and the cost of health care is rising at 4 and 5 times the rate of inflation, even those with accumulated assets will find it difficult to pay for their own care.

Small towns and creative collaborations with non-profit home care providers can make care more efficient, and therefore, more affordable. Those who cannot live by their own means can be provided with affordable infill housing, subsidized in the same or better ways, as low-income elderly housing projects currently being built. These will be mixed within the redevelopment of our historic towns. No new jobs are needed because the population is already retired. However, with a new population, new service requirements will be demanded that can provide a multitude of service based businesses that are needed to provide and care for a population that will need service for a longer period of time.

In addition, local construction outfits that normally have only a small base of customers, can now count on a building boom. All at once, money will be spent in, and stay within the local community. In this way, the elderly become a new resource for a dying town. They reinvigorate community by giving their skills and assets, and nurture a multigenerational population that can help to ease some of modern society’s greatest ills, such as the lack of intergenerational contact and supervision, and children who rely on inefficient transportation to become socially and physically active.

For-profit and non-profit partnerships must be created that will produce the incentives necessary for this logical redevelopment to occur. Municipalities need to be an initiator in the process by permitting the re-zoning of existing towns to accommodate this rebirth. They can also initiate by assembling land, offering tax incentives, tax increment financing and finding tax rebates. Buy-downs of assembled land will make it easier for large-scale redevelopment to occur and attractive incentives should be provided to local hospitals and health-care providers so that longer term care will be provided once the development of independent housing units has occurred.

It needs to happen now. We have a 30 year window to deal with the baby boomer population explosion. After that, the current system of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Sucurity will be in a better balance. New methods of financing the entire package of health care in reinvented small towns should be created that combines elderly housing with elderly health care, two currently separated issues that are completely connected. A reallocation of Medicare and Medicaid funding should be developed, with an emphasis on using small towns and neighborhoods as new retirement communities.

Regionally, this redevelopment could lead to a reintroduction of mass and rail transit. By increasing the density of existing towns and placing growth boundaries around these towns, we will inevitably create a more European development pattern that is more conducive to centralized bus and rail spurs. Strip malls, essentially just a one-sided town, can become complete towns filled with the elderly. We could create the situation for more efficient travel by placing our elderly in our existing small towns.

We are facing a societal collapse if we don’t refocus on our existing assets, and produce more efficient living conditions that are economically and socially sustainable. Instead, we continue to build from scratch and rebuild where nature tells us not to rebuild. As Spock would say, "This is highly Illogical." Local banks need to reinvest into this new kind of retirement community and state and federal subsidies should secure this local interest by providing tax payer money to rebuilding existing communities first. Any idea that reduces the mining of new resources, reuses existing town fabric, and recycles existing community and building stock should be given precedence, as a matter of local, state and federal policy.

Money should be redirected where it will provide the most logical social initiative, affecting the greatest number of people, solving the largest number of problems with the smallest input of natural and government resources. Killing two birds with one stone is no longer enough. We need to kill entire flocks with the diminishing resources that we have. In a plan that revitalizes a town, solves a housing and social crisis and makes sense environmentally, funding should be provided as a social necessity. Policy needs to reflect such initiative. Placing our new elderly housing and retirement communities in our existing small towns is a logical place to start.