Century Lives

Capably Aging in Place

By 2030, every Baby Boomer will be 65 or older. Many of these older adults will live alone and on limited incomes, and many will have mobility and other health challenges. This so-called “silver tsunami” is here to stay, and the math is ominous. The nation already has a housing shortage—and a senior-care shortage. On the plus side, many of these older folks will be healthier and more active, engaged, and tech-savvy than their peers in prior generations. But since their housing needs and preferences will also differ from those of their predecessors, new questions and challenges will arise. On Century Lives: The Home Stretch, we explore signs of hope and inspiration in communities where housing innovations for older adults are already afoot. The ability of older adults to age in place at home and their community can be threatened by a single fall or mobility challenge. But sometimes the difference between a house that’s manageable and safe and one that’s not comes down to small things, like a grab bar, a hand railing, a rug that’s tacked down, or a robotic vacuum. Fifteen years ago, a nurse at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore came up with a unique, low-cost approach to making these kinds of changes in seniors’ homes, and it’s now a nationwide program called CAPABLE. The savings they’ve proven in hospitalizations and nursing home costs are astounding. As they like to say: Home is where the health is.

Over the Rainbow

By 2030, every Baby Boomer will be 65 or older. Many of these older adults will live alone and on limited incomes, and many will have mobility and other health challenges. This so-called “silver tsunami” is here to stay, and the math is ominous. The nation already has a housing shortage—and a senior-care shortage. On the plus side, many of these older folks will be healthier and more active, engaged, and tech-savvy than their peers in prior generations. But since their housing needs and preferences will also differ from those of their predecessors, new questions and challenges will arise. On Century Lives: The Home Stretch, we explore signs of hope and inspiration in communities where housing innovations for older adults are already afoot. Older adults are the fastest-growing age group falling into homelessness: The population of unhoused older adults is expected to triple from 2017 to 2030. We discuss its roots in the shortage of housing in the U.S. and visit San Diego to learn about some solutions to the growing crisis of senior homelessness.

Beyond Four Walls

There is nowhere near enough housing available in the U.S. for low-income older adults. Even people who qualify for government subsidies often cannot find a place to move (and what is available often lacks the support services an aging community needs). In episode 3 of Century Lives: The Home Stretch, we visit 2Life Communities in Boston, a developer that has developed low-income housing for older adults for decades. 2Life is held up as a model for what low-income housing for older adults can be: attractive, safe, engaging, and even joyous. We visit 2Life to learn how they can create low-income housing for older adults when so many other developers struggle. 

The Forgotten Middle

The forgotten middle—seniors with too much money to qualify for the government-subsidized housing offered to low-income folks, and too little to afford market-rate housing accessible to the wealthy—is a growing population. In this episode, we travel to Minnesota to explore housing solutions for the forgotten middle. Can we make housing affordable to this group of older adults—or will they have to figure out creative solutions for themselves?

5 O’Clock Somewhere

Age segregation in housing is a relatively new phenomenon in human history. Until very recently, people aged with their families in intergenerational communities. Today, we visit two very different places: the age-restricted community Latitude Margaritaville in Florida and Gorham House in Maine, a retirement and assisted living facility built around the concept of different ages living together.