That’s precisely what a team of University of Toronto planning students discovered last year when they surveyed seniors living in a pair of Scarborough communities. Both neighbourhoods are reasonably well served by transit and offered a range of necessary services within close proximity, but residents said they had to deal with all types of hurdles: ramps that were too steep, longish treks across mall parking lots, and of course awful suburban arterials. One eighty-one-year-old woman spoke of her reluctance to brave the traffic. “I may have enough time to cross the street,” she explained, “but I am too nervous to try.”
Predicting the future is always a mug’s game, but there’s a temptation to apply the standard baby boomer overlay to the aging story: the boomers, goes the thinking, won’t tolerate sluggish transit, inaccessible buildings, and crumbling sidewalks. Gridlock will abate, because fewer people are working. The development industry will figure out — already is figuring out, in fact — how to cater to a burgeoning market of downsizers. Indeed, the generational numbers will give rise to age-oriented innovations — seniors-only taxi services, perhaps, or covered motorized wheelchairs operating on their own rights-of-way — designed to eradicate mobility impediments.
There are plenty of examples of that kind of urban redevelopment, and where it’s taken root (typically in older, more affluent, neighbourhoods) it works well. But one doesn’t need to spend too much time in North American cities to realize that the lion’s share of development is going in the opposite direction. Thanks to skyrocketing downtown land prices, the high-rise condo, mostly packed with cramped one-bedroom apartments, dominates all other modes of new downtown housing. And most of these towers are marketed to young people armed with a starter mortgage and a cube van’s worth of ikea furniture.
Out on the periphery, meanwhile, traffic engineers continue to expand roads and highway access. Risk-averse developers and obedient municipal politicians ensure that new subdivisions remain isolated monocultures with scant housing variety and virtually no retail, apart from the desultory gas station/convenience store pod at every major intersection. And with the exception of a few older plaza revitalizations and a nod to better landscaping, mall design hasn’t changed much since the 1960s.
For all their aesthetic and environmental failings, suburban malls will almost certainly play a significant role in the way our cities age in the coming decades. They already are. About twenty years ago, seniors in many parts of North America began to congregate at covered regional malls to walk and socialize. Since then, a handful of malls — mostly in downtown areas with more population diversity as well as older post-war suburbs — have seen fit to lease space to such non-retail tenants as health professionals, daycare facilities, community agencies, and seniors’ drop-in centres. While mall owners may have been struggling to fill empty storefronts, the result points toward a repositioning of the shopping centre as a full-service hub better suited to the needs of an aging suburban society.
Planners who think about these changes observe that municipalities can easily add conditions to planning approvals, providing mall developers with incentives to market their properties to community agencies as well as retailers. “When we’re designing malls, we have to think about supporting the population that uses them,” says Kaegi. “You can do this so easily when you’re thinking about infrastructure to support people. You take service delivery to where the people are.” Her observation points to a more clear-eyed assessment about how we’ll have to retool our cities: it’s not going to be about form, but rather about function.
While seniors’ advocates say governments have to get back into the business of building subsidized supportive housing specifically for older people, the reality is that the supply will never equal demand. Moreover, the boomers, with their health and increasing longevity, will likely be inclined to stay put, either in their suburban homes or condo apartments. So when decrepitude and loss of mobility finally catch up to them, they’ll want the health, transportation, and personal support services to come to them.
It’s a sea change. In previous generations, many older people moved, either by choice or against their will, into seniors’ homes or isolated long-term care facilities when the time came. But the retirement apartment business is little more than a real estate racket, and the publicly funded but privately managed long-term care sector has suffered irreparable damage due to widespread reports of shoddy care, elder abuse, and dirty conditions.
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