Whoever chose the site of last week’s conference “Redefining Retirement Communities” was clearly inspired. This two-day meeting, organized and conducted by Chellis Silva Associates Senior Housing, was held in Newton at Lasell College, the location of a new kind of retirement community, perhaps unique in the nation.
This residence opened in July, 2000 under the name Lasell Village, a continuous care retirement community with fourteen buildings and 162 independent living areas. Already the Village houses 205 people whose average age is 79, and has almost one hundred others on its waiting list.
These statistics in themselves will not surprise anyone familiar with the world of retirement housing. What does astonish most people the first time they hear about it is one of its entrance requirements. Those admitted to the Village must sign an agreement obliging them to “create and complete a personalized learning plan of 450 hours a year.” That means committing themselves to courses, lectures, surveys, and collaborative planning.
As Thomas DeWitt, president of Lasell, explained, “The dominant culture is learning, and learning is seen as not just a requirement, but an opportunity.” He admits that the venture was a gamble and he feared for what it might do to the young undergraduates in the college. In fact, the number of students has soared to some 1900 and many of them are engaged with their elders in the Village.
Paula Panchuck, the Village dean, says that the educational program created “almost instant community” among the residents. That’s because the structure of the program encourages people to interact with one another. Residents can choose among 33 courses this semester. Education is “the heart and soul of our community,” according to the dean.
To make sure that what the president and dean told the conference was not simply hype, I asked questions of an old friend and colleague in human services, Hilma Unterberger, formerly of Cambridge, now resident in the Village. Her immediate response was, “I’m absolutely crazy about it.” She loves the location, the classes, and the academic level of her peers. Summing up, she enthuses, “I’m busy as hell.”
In addition to demonstrating, through the Lasell site, new thinking about retirement communities, the conference offered an array of speakers with fresh ideas. Robert Chellis, a distinguished planner and veteran advocate for creative elder housing, skillfully summarized the 2000-year history of senior housing and then posed a series of challenges for current planners. The main challenge, he said, is “to create a retirement community with such a wide range of resources and attractions that, like a favorite camp, or college, people can’t wait to go there.”
The message delivered by Marc Freeman, author and president of an agency that promotes community involvement on the part of older people, was similar. He thinks that the Baby Boomer generation will revolutionize retirement and transform America. Current retired people have been spending half their time watching television, he claimed, thus wasting one of our society’s extraordinary resources – their experience. But, he said, we have arrived at a turning point: people now want meaning in their lives and wish to form a legacy to leave behind them.
Another speaker, Dr. Kenneth Minaker of the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard University, provided fascinating details of an unprecedented collaboration between Harvard and the Accor Health Group. Accor operates 2465 hotels in 126 countries and receives 150 million travelers a year. The chief idea behind this partnership is health education, delivered in the hotels through printed materials, exercise facilities, healthier restaurant menus, and many other activities. This will make travel for older people and others into an experience of ways to improve their health.
Among the other speakers, Richard Pais, an environmental scientist based in Scranton, Pennsylvania, registered highest on the applause meter. His slides showing the badly designed landscapes of retirement residences were devastating. But he also demonstrated what creative planning can accomplish to improve the environs.
Pais works with a landscaping principle radically different from the conventional approach. He believes in focusing on what residents of a building see when they look from the inside out and ensuring them the pleasure of watching birds, butterflies, and other features of friendly and inviting landscapes.
Despite the exciting ideas that retirement housing evoked in this conference, I have a problem: most professionals address themselves to housing that only the wealthy can afford. To buy a place in a continuing care retirement community, for instance, you need considerable assets and income. As Tom Dewitt says, “The problem of retirement living facilities is that they serve the wealthy and middle class but not the poor.”
To the credit of conference planners, they scheduled presentations by two Boston-based leaders who have developed innovative programs in low-income retirement housing. James Seagle of the Rogerson Communities and Ellen Feingold of Jewish Community Services explained how innovative housing with an impressive array of services can be developed for older people of modest means. It is not easy to do, they will tell you, but much needed.
Richard Griffin