Yesterday was a 12+ hour day spent listening to people in neighborhoods very different from mine talking about great senior housing. First was a group around 6th and Walnut in Bronzeville, later a group in Sherman Park. In both cases, the idea was a densely build "campus."
And while
the approaches a group of talented architects offered for the neighborhood sites were wildly different, there were a couple ideas worth considering for Wauwatosa.
1. Forget the golf-course ghetto approach to housing for the aging. This is Wisconsin, not Arizona. People here have lives.
2. Build a place people want to go. Doesn’t matter whether it’s a mini park, a library, a health club, a community center. Then fit the buildings around that.
3. Mixed use is the way to go, and not just because it’s in vogue. The more you bring services and products to seniors (or any of us, for that matter), the easier it is to live in a community. Cafes and clinics are great business components of a senior housing center. But a grocery store—that’s the bomb. A grocery store that sells fresh food, not just boxes and cans.
4. Put the parking underground. You can’t have a great looking, walkable development if more than a third of the space is devoted to the automobile, in motion or stationary. The city should require this—and subsidize it, if necessary.
5. Build everything to better than American with Disabilities Act standards. Moms with little kids love grab bars, too. But use the
Michael Graves ones, not the put-me-on-the-ice-floe-now ugly ones.
6. Transportation, transportation, transportation.
7.Expect things to change, so build to bring help and services in rather than shipping people out. People will hide a problem rather than getting help if they think that would result in exile to another place, even if it's just down the block.
8. And how about providing places for caregivers to live, too? Even, dare I say it, families. Caregiving's hard, but it's harder from a distance. And some of us would prefer being together.
Descending from soap box and signing off, while we're both still young. . .
