Affordable Housing Institute : US

Our home is not just where we park our body at night or on the weekends, it is also where our mind relaxes and our soul unwinds.  So it should be no surprise that the quality of our home life directly influences our health, not just physical but also mental, as revealed in this New York Times article:

 

BURBANK, Calif. — As hairdresser to the stars, Connie Nichols, an 86-year-old retiree (Apt. 225), has been on intimate terms with Olivia de Havilland’s hair, Ethel Merman’s hair, Doris Day’s hair and Natalie Wood’s hair, which she spritzed for her wedding to Robert Wagner.

 

Nice hair: who does it?

 

Ms. Nichols’s latest leading lady is her downstairs neighbor, Helen Miller (Apt. 125), who is starring, at 81, in “Bandida,” a new comedy about an old woman who robs a convenience store. The movie was written by Suzanne Knode (Apt. 406), who was inspired to take up screenwriting at 63 after moving into the Burbank Senior Artists Colony, the country’s first apartment community for creative older people — a sort of “Golden Girls” meets Yaddo.

 

At the level of dreams and daydreams we are all creative, and if creativity is measured not simply by its quality but also by its expressiveness, then there is a secondary benefit: the invigorated mind motivates the aging body to health.

 

“To expose myself artistically was terrifying, especially at my age” said Ms. Knode, whose past credits include raising two children as a single mother in Boston. “But it was safe here. It was gentle. I wasn’t scared.”

 

The home is our refuge, the place of our safety, and that safety includes emotional.

 

This is a place where amateurs discovering their inner Picassos in retirement can commune with working pros like Charlie Schridde, a painter in his 70’s from the “cowboy impressionist” school who resembles the grizzled trappers of his canvases.

 

Charlie Schridde in his living room and art studio at the Burbank Senior Artists Colony, home to writers, sculptors, actors and other artists.

 

For an owner or manager — or for that matter for policy makers and advocates — affordable housing properties succeed when they become healthy communities, when the people who live there become emotionally interconnected.  The mind is a muscle; when worked, it strengthens.

 

“We’re thinking beyond the problems of aging to its potential,” said Dr. Gene D. Cohen, the director of the Center on Aging, Health and Humanities at the George Washington University Medical Center. “What’s emerging is a very talented group of people who are an under-recognized national resource.”

 

If we are trying to provide longevity, health and wellbeing, among the elderly, we find that it is much better to bring the services to the people than make the people go find the services.

 

The colony, which was recognized last month as a model for creative aging by the National Endowment for the Arts, represents a profound shift in thinking about aging. In 2001, a study co-sponsored by George Washington University and the N.E.A. found that people 65 and older who were regularly involved in participatory arts programs reported fewer doctors’ visits and less need for medication and were less prone to depression.

 

Burbank Senior Artists Colony

 

Compared with making people hunt individually for wellness services, delivering services to the people works better in every way:

 

·         Lower cost.  It costs less because more people are served from the same general location.

·         Safety.  As people age, travel becomes more dangerous due to rising risk of accident, theft, or assault.   All these risks decrease enormously when the customer need only take an accessible elevator.

·         Availability.  Service delivery within a complex can be available evenings, weekends, and on short notice.

·         Amenities.  Clustering people in a location enables them to share use and costs of specialized amenities.  At Burbank, for instance, the property has:

 

·         A resident-run internal cable TV station and the following amenities for artists in their second 50 years of creativity:

·         45-seat Theatre & Screening Room

·         Arts Studios & Classrooms

·         Computer Media Arts Center

·         Digital Filmmaking Equipment

·         Digital Video Editing Bay

·         Read Aloud Library

·         Outdoor Performance Areas

·         Art Gallery & Sculpture Garden

 

·         Support networks.  If some of your neighbors face the same aging and health issues you do, they are much more likely to notice change than you will on your own — and to intervene helpfully, for your wellness.

 

There’s a mountain of evidence — to say nothing of our instincts — to demonstrate that mentally alert and engaged people live longer, are happier, and are healthier. 

 

I know it’s in the literature somewhere

 

The key to happy aging is keeping the brain’s lights on and its circuits working.  Unsurprisingly, that happens better when you are surrounded by others like you, who have lived and experienced and who understand that age is more than just a number.

 

(The street I live on is peopled with numerous writers and teachers, virtually all of whom appeared for for last weekend’s block party, most of whom have lived here for a long time, and there was a striking correlation between mental activity and great age.  Our friend Kitty, who’s ninety, daily walks down the street and back, and gave a fond remembrance of the snowy night when everyone went to bed thinking Dewey beat Truman.  Eighty the new sixty, isn’t it?)

 

There’s only one snag: most apartment properties, even those built for the elderly, lack the common-area space to make service delivery easy.  Some complexes have adopted the continuity-of-care model, with multiple phases, each distinct but contiguous, offering:

 

·         Apartments for independent living.

·         Congregate living, where residents take one or two meals a day in the dining room.

 

Congregate properties tend to be one large building with long corridors and wide elevators

 

·         Assisted living, with support for dressing, bathing, regular prescription drugs.

 

Because movement is difficult, assisted living apartments are very small and compact.

 

·         Nursing homes, with full-time nursing on-site.

 

Even if the body is enfeebled, the mind can be engaged

 

Multi-phase single-use complexes are a clear improvement over single-phases, but even the relocation within a complex means resident movement and emotional stress. Even better, if it can be done (it’s hard), is incorporating all the alternatives into a single building.  Hence the importance of designing new facilities with these features built in:

 

In a city that worships youth, the colony is the latest spin on late-life living. With the understanding that not everyone wants the old-school model of golf course retirement, the colony offers artful self-expression: a digital film editing laboratory, a theater, drama classes and studios open for inspiration 24 hours a day.

 

Other complexes with which we have been involved have had facilities that include:

 

·         Exercise pools and rooms.  Water-borne aerobics enables muscles to work without stressing aged and possibly arthritic joints.

·         Dining halls and light kitchens, or at least space for meals brought in.

·         Medical areas, whether simply for nurse-practitioner wellness, or even more for in-apartment patient care.

 

Everybody looks pink in the pool

 

These new occupancy and living models are still in the early development phase, meaning we are in a stage of ongoing experiments:

 

The colony was one of 15 programs cited by the N.E.A. Among the others were the National Center for Creative Aging in Brooklyn, which places older artists as mentors in public schools; the acclaimed Levine School of Music’s Senior Chorale in Washington; and the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange in Takoma Park, Md., a Washington suburb, where the virtuosity of youth is balanced by dancers staving off arthritis.

 

Experiments require experimenters, and experimenters require vision:

 

The [Burbank] colony is the brainchild of Tim Carpenter, the founder of More Than Shelter for Seniors, who grew up near Yaddo, the New York artists’ community. Mr. Carpenter recruited an advisory board sprinkled with actors to hone the concept and drew an initial core of tenants, ages 55 and older, through local arts organizations. No tryouts or portfolios are required, but the artistic ambitions of residents transcend the flutophone or macaroni-glitter-and-glue crowd.

 

Adding social services increases the money affordable housing costs, so all of this costs money, often lots of money:

 

The colony is a block from downtown Burbank. Seventy percent of the 141 apartments rent at market rate, from $1,430 to $2,125. Thirty percent are reserved for low-income residents, renting from $500 to $650, with 2,000 people on a waiting list.

 

It takes many hunks of the four kinds of money:

 

 

The complex was built by a private developer and financed in part through federal low-income tax credits …

 

Soft equity.

 

… and a $3.25 million low-interest loan from the city.

 

Hard debt.

 

The colony provides no assisted-living services, but its arts programs are free, provided by More Than Shelter.

 

In effect, free delivery is a form of income subsidy.

 

More Than Shelter is the resident and social service affiliate of Recap alumnus client Century Housing of Los Angeles, a successful affordable housing lender in Los Angeles County.  More Than Shelter, in turn, raises its funding partially via grants (another form of income subsidy) and charitable contributions.

 

Mr. Carpenter and John Huskey, the president of Meta Housing, the developer, plan to take the concept to other cities.

 

If they can find the money.

 

To Marc Freedman, the founder and president of Civic Ventures, a nonprofit group that promotes meaningful second careers for older people, the colony represents the next frontier of a movement that began in the 1970’s, when leisure retirement typified by golf and shuffleboard gave way to the lifelong learning exemplified by the Elderhostel program.

 

Growth of the enriched-living model is constrained by only one thing: money.  So far no one has yet found a business model whereby the enriched-living element pays for itself.  Donor finding is a great vehicle for demonstration programs, for experiments and learning, but to take enriched living to scale, the dominant funder will have to be the government; directly through appropriations, or indirectly through tax expenditures. 

 

For that to happen, we will have to dissolve the formidable statutory and administrative silo barriers between housing assistance and Medicare … but that is a difficult and complex subject to be covered in future posts. 

 

It’s hard even to get them to talk to each other

 

For the moment, let our hearts be warmed by the health that brings happiness:

 

The colony, Mr. Freedman said, “is a new hybrid that moves beyond that to actual creativity, to growth.” He added: “It’s not just writing memoirs and harvesting the past. It’s about producing new insights and work that is not only personally interesting but enriches the lives of neighbors.”

 

 

Home isn’t just where the heart is.  It’s where the mind is.

 

Keep the lights on in the house of your mind

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