Of the 78 million baby boomers in the United States, most appear to want to retire in a nice big, single floor house on a cul-de-sac. Having seen too many of my parent’s generation do that and be totally miserable, I’ve tried to make the case that boomers should be doing the opposite, and should be looking to live in walkable communities where they won’t be trapped when they’re forced to hang up the car keys.
Alex Bozikovic, who covers architecture for the Globe and Mail, looks at three projects that show how boomers are staying in their houses in those walkable neighborhoods, noting:
My wife Kelly and I are one of the families studied, and the article opens embarrassingly:
That’s one of the very few untoward events we have experienced since we had what I called on TreeHugger a radical decluttering and downsizing; you can take the tour there.
A much more interesting project is the Grange Triple Double house by Williamson Chong Architects. It’s a new house built for a much younger couple in their 30s with a young son who are seriously planning ahead. It’s designed with a main three-bedroom unit and two other units that can be rented or used for family as things change, “a bespoke house that would accommodate them all together with rental income – and then change, multiple times, as the family’s needs evolve through the decades.” Bozikovic writes:
Then there’s the house that Janna Levitt and Dean Goodman of LGA Architectural Partners designed for themselves over a decade ago, when their kids were teenagers. Planning ahead, they built it with a high basement apartment and even buried a stair for an exit which they can dig out. (“We thought, if we give the kids their own door when they are 14 or 15 years old, we’ll never see them,” Goodman explains.)
Like my wife and I, Dean and Janna are not worrying too much about stairs. Alex wondered about this, given that the conventional wisdom about aging in place is that people should live on one level with everything wheelchair accessible. Alex writes:
This is not a solution for everyone. Building or renovating a house to make it multi-family is not inexpensive, especially if you want good sound isolation. However the rental income can more than cover the costs. And as Starre Vartan noted on Facebook, “Brilliant idea for those families who like each other! Unfortunately, most people I know don’t even want to be in the same state as their parents.” In our case, we are lucky that way. We’ll see how it goes down the road; if nothing else, we will never be lonely.
