http://www.fastcoexist.com
July 10, 2013
From http://www.fastcoexist.com:
There’s a new twist to aging in place. It’s aging in an interesting urban place.
It’s the idea that the city you live in or near–with all its buzz and diversity–just might be an ideal place to come of age as a senior citizen with equal amounts of grace and gusto.
Although there is no data that captures the number or growth of alternative senior housing located in the fast-pumping hearts of cities around the globe, there’s evidence of a stir. A smattering of highly specialized, highly provocative ways of living (including in Chicago what will be the Midwest’s first affordable senior housing that openly welcomes people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer) have started to pop up in very urban settings, targeted to the engaged senior for whom a retirement village set apart from the rest of the community simply doesn’t work.
As a whole, these citified developments are as diverse as the urban fabric itself and cover a range of living arrangements–from senior apartments to independent living and continuing care retirement communities. All of them, though, share the belief that communal living mixed with the energy of the city is a prescription for the loneliness, isolation, and focus on medical status that other elder communities offer.
In Montreuil, on the east side of Paris, there’s the Babayagas’ House for feminists of a certain age who manage the place as well. In Los Angeles, the Dana Strand Senior Apartments is an urban infill development (where land in a dense area is re-developed for housing) that gives low-income seniors affordable rental apartments and the ability to stay in their neighborhood in a LEED gold sustainable complex, no less. In Chicago, The Clare and The Hallmark are high-class high rises planted in tony neighborhoods that give moneyed seniors deluxe accommodations and easy access to the cultural attractions of the city (kind of like a vertical cruise ship).
But one of the most interesting projects breaking ground right now is also one of the most alternative in every sense of the term and a totem for this whole idea that cities and innovative senior housing go together.
It’s called Town Hall. It’s meant to serve–in an inclusive and welcoming atmosphere–anyone who is over 55 and low income. And not coincidentally, it’s located in Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood (a.k.a. Boystown), the heart of the city’s gay community. And it sits adjacent to the Center on Halsted (COH), a vibrant and comprehensive community center for the LGBTQ community that opened in 2007 and sees 1,000 people walk through its doors every day.
When it’s completed in fall 2014, the six-story apartment complex will offer 79 units (49 one bedrooms; 30 studios) and be the next logical step in supporting Chicago and the Midwest’s LGBTQ community. (Triangle Square in Hollywood is the country’s first and, to-date, only completed housing development meant for low-income LGBTQ seniors.)
