
As they have since they first started coming into it, baby boomers are having an outsized effect on the world, including the world of design, particularly residential architecture design.
Just 12 years from now, in 2030, people 66 and older will comprise 21 percent of the population of the United States, compared with 15 percent today. And the vast majority of people 65 and older — 87 percent, according to the AARP — want to remain in their current homes and their current communities. They want to age in place.
There are a lot of reasons for that, from sentimental to strategic and particularly financial: The average cost of a semiprivate room in a nursing home is $6,844 a month, more than $82,000 a year; the average cost of a one-bedroom unit in an assisted living facility is $3,628 per month, almost $44,000 per year.
Residential architects in Arkansas say their clients are increasingly requesting designs that make it easier for them to remain in their homes as they age.
Most of her residential design work — even in new construction and even for people who are 20 years away from needing in-home care — now incorporates features that make it easier for her clients to remain in their homes, said Laura Stanley, an associate with Polk Stanley Wilcox Architects of Little Rock. The common sentiment, she said, is “We want to make sure we can stay here.”
For Little Rock architect Ellen Yeary, it’s a little different. “We are doing more and more empty-nester kind of homes, and when we’re doing those, very frequently we’re asked” to incorporate aging-in-place design elements, she said.
Those elements range from low impact and low cost — grab bars in bathrooms, handrails at exterior entry points — to more expensive features like wider hallways (to accommodate wheelchairs and walkers), bigger bathrooms and kitchens, even entire suites built to house in-home care workers.
Aging-in-place design includes the commonsensical — a one-level home with few or even no entry steps, lever handles instead of knobs on doors and bathroom and kitchen fixtures — to less obvious features like contrasting color or texture on flooring to indicate a change in surface levels.
This type of design, also known as independent living design, has become so popular that the National Association of Home Builders website provides an aging-in-place remodeling checklist. And the NAHB Remodelers, working with Home Innovation Research Labs, the NAHB 50+ Housing Council and the AARP, has developed the Certified Aging-in-Place Specialist program.
In new construction, Stanley said, the cost differential is negligible, with the exception of adding a full suite for an in-home care worker. “Really, it’s about planning,” she said, about engineering flexibility into a home plan.
Debra Buckner and her husband, Joel, a disabled veteran, built their home in North Little Rock with an eye to its long-term livability.
Features include:
- A large garage, 25 feet by 28 feet, to accommodate, if necessary, wheelchairs, walkers and a van with a wheelchair lift.
- A wide, open, landed staircase to an open attic to avoid having to negotiate pull-down attic stairs.
- Additional lighting in the garage, stairwell and attic.
- Exterior entries with flat doorsills to prevent stumbling.
- Pocket doors throughout the house, eliminating the need to maneuver around doors.
- A walk-in shower without a door or shower curtain.
- A “porthole” in the exterior wall of the shower to provide natural light in the event of an outage.
- Grab bars in the master bathroom.
The Buckners, who moved into the house in May 2015, designed it themselves. “At the time, we were just thinking, ‘We plan to die here. We’re not going anywhere,’” Buckner said. And they had seen some of the challenges faced by their elderly parents. “It’s just a common sense, where are you going to be in 20 years-type thing,” she said.
The one-level, 2,000-SF home cost between $350,000 and $400,000, Buckner said, a sum that included the cost of the lot, the home that sat there and tearing down that structure.
Buckner said that aging in place was as much about the “place,” the neighborhood, as the house. “We chose this place specifically … because we are four blocks from our church. We are less than a mile from the grocery store, less than a mile from the pharmacy,” and so on.
Thomas Moore, an architect with Cromwell Architects Engineers of Little Rock, distinguishes between “aging in place” and “aging in home.”
“Aging in place to me is a little different than aging in the home,” he said. “Aging in place in the profession means where you age in the same facility. There’s a progression of care from independent living into assisted living and then into a skilled nursing facility.”
In the 1990s and early 2000s, Moore said, there was a spike in demand for assisted living facilities, “and I think we’re kind of seeing that again now with the baby boomers aging. I think there’s going to be a huge, huge spike, not only in quantity, but in the quality that providers offer.” The operators and developers of senior housing are increasingly demanding independent living options that attract younger residents, Moore said.
“We’re starting to design a lot of independent living cottages,” he said. These units, about 1,200 SF, provide the advantages of having a home with the benefit of a menu offering different kinds of care, such as help with medication or the yard or laundry, maid and food services.
Moore is working in conjunction with P. Allen Smith, the garden designer and lifestyle expert, on a $22 million, 20-acre development in Sterlington, Louisiana, that has a farm-to-table concept. “It’s going to be attractive to the mid to older senior with a healthier lifestyle,” Moore said.
The 150 Most Profitable Nursing Homes in Arkansas, ranked by net income for fiscal year ended June 30, 2017. Download it in either PDF or XLS formats.
Stephen Luoni, director of the University of Arkansas Community Design Center and a professor at the Fay Jones School of Architecture & Design, has thought a lot about residential design for older Americans. In 2017, the center published the book “Houses for Aging Socially.” It was an outgrowth of a housing master plan the center did for the city of Freeman, South Dakota, where the average age was 50.
Maneuvering in one’s home will be far from the biggest problem faced by older Americans, Luoni said.
A third of the doctors in the U.S. will reach retirement age in the next 10 years, and the country will face a nursing shortage of 500,000 to 1 million nurses, he said. The U.S. health care system won’t be able to handle the needs of an aging population.
In addition, 80 percent of long-term care is currently provided by a family member, usually a wife or daughter, and “our changing household structure won’t make that kind of care-giving option available in 20 years for a lot of different reasons,” Luoni said.
Housing in facilities that offer medical care is “becoming unaffordable and there are huge wait lists for them,” he said. At the same time, there’s a dramatic rise in the number of single-person households.
“We need more cooperative arrangements in living in order to meet these challenges,” Luoni said. “We’re going to have to come up with real estate products that facilitate more cooperative ways of living. Co-housing does this. Pocket neighborhoods do this. A lot of our strategies were based on those premises of shared housing.”
The center suggests “inverting” single-family housing by taking familiar features like porches, garages and patios and “blowing those up to infrastructure scale. So we take a porch, which is usually super-added to a house, and we make the porch a block long. That gives us an instant kind of social infrastructure, sort of like a ship’s deck.” Such a device maintains the privacy of a single-family house but encourages sharing.
Encouraging such informality makes “the delivery of care-giving services more efficient,” he said. “A nurse can visit 20 homes and take on those 20 homes.
“What we’ve done as a society is decouple health care or care-giving from real estate products,” Luoni said. “What this suggests is that we couple that, that we’re not just designing housing; we’re designing housing for the delivery of home care services with the participation of neighbors. And hopefully this makes the housing much more resilient in handling people’s challenges. It keeps them out of the health care system longer.”