The aging problem of suburbia
As the number of seniors in Canada swells, they face a challenge - the suburbs weren’t built for grandma
Erin Anderssen and Hayley Mick - Globe and Mail
TORONTO — Six months ago, Irene Feuer left her first-floor apartment in east Toronto to attend a party. She returned home and hasn’t left since. Everyone else comes to her.
Each day, a van rolls by and someone drops off her meals. Once a week, a cleaning lady comes to vacuum. Another woman helps with her bath. Every visitor, including the friends that stop by, is younger than Ms. Feuer who, at 101, spends most of the summer day reading on her porch. That’s her routine - dressed by 8 a.m., in bed by 10 p.m.
“As early as I can make it,” she says with a chuckle. “Because I’m most comfortable in bed.”
There will be a lot more Irene Feuers in Canada’s future, hoping to spend their last years in their own homes, relying on outside help to keep them from being lost and forgotten on their living room La-Z-Boys.
According to the first findings of the 2006 census released yesterday, there are now more than one million Canadians over 80, and swelling numbers of seniors heading for that birthday milestone.
But they may not be as lucky as Ms. Feuer, who has easy access to a city’s worth of services, when they need their meals delivered and the tub filled.
Experts say that a growing number of seniors will be aging in their homes in suburbia, where fewer support services exist and it’s easier to be isolated in a grid of residential streets.
And as the suburbs get more crowded, it’s putting a strain on existing resources and on a limited pool of volunteers, many of whom are aging themselves.
The suburbs weren’t built for grandmas - and that’s a planning problem for sprawling cities, experts say, when one in five Canadians will be old enough to be a grandparent by 2021.
“We have an environment that we have designed for people who drive cars, and people who have no real health issues,” says Bonnie Hallman, an associate professor with the department of environment and geography at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg. “It was designed for the nuclear family - two adults, two kids. So the infrastructure expects those are the only people who will live there.”
Glenn Miller, director of education and research at the Canadian Urban Institute, called it the “demographic tsunami” at a recent conference of the Canadian Institute of Planners in Quebec City - a problem that will only get worse as the baby boomers, who are used to being mobile and expect to be independent seniors, suddenly find themselves without car keys.
“People will hang on as long as possible and then you end up in crisis,” Mr. Miller says. “People will end up trapped in their homes.”
Most suburban neighbourhoods, he points out, don’t have sidewalks. Or if they do, he says, they aren’t designed for seniors. In Niagara Falls, Ont., for instance, urban planners have reported people on scooters suffering injuries by falling off curbs.
A Toronto study found that residents at a seniors complex were being forced to pay $4 to take a meandering bus ride to the shopping mall across the street - the traffic lights on the six-lane highway didn’t leave them enough time to cross.
Even the six steps up to most suburban front doors create a barrier for creaking legs. If you are spry at 85, Mr. Miller says, you still need the stamina to walk long blocks to the nearest drugstore, or at least the nearest bus stop. In this scenario, the suburbs start to look as isolating and confining as a rural small town.
Ozel Mack, 86, lives in her Toronto home with her husband, William, who turns 90 next month. Ms. Mack is wheelchair-bound, and Mr. Mack uses a cane. Between them they get 15 hours of outside help a week, including meals, bathing and help with the cleaning. They also have plenty of visitors.
“This is the problem with getting old,” Ms. Mack says. “You lose so much of your independence. And if you’re lacking in your mental capacities, you really become dependent. So I’m grateful to God that I have that.”
But, she says, they’re much better off than some of her friends who live in the suburbs, where there are fewer services available for people who still live at home. One friend in Brampton, Ont., she says, only qualifies for one or two hours of outside help a week.
Creating communities that are friendly to seniors, urban planners say, can make the difference between a slow death and a long life.
For Jean Holt, a 91-year-old former newspaper reporter who lives in her own apartment in the Old Strathcona area of Edmonton, being a senior means spending her time as she chooses - if a bit more slowly.
It takes her an hour door-to-door to travel by bus for a bag of milk, but the buses lower their doors, and she says the drivers are always thoughtful. Once a month, she gets a ride to the grocery store, and twice a month, a housecleaner handles the bigger chores. Her children, who live out of town, take good care of her. The library drops off book orders at her apartment building, an endeavour she helps organize. She belongs to a seniors club and a theatre group that takes in matinees.
“I don’t like to be going out and coming home in the night.”
Now, she has time to do all the things she wanted to when she was struggling to raise four kids on her own after her husband died.
Sure, she says, her eyesight is failing, her hearing is going, her joints creak and her sense of smell has vanished. But even with those limitations, she says this is her time to what she wants.
“When I am making my morning coffee, how I wish I could smell it,” she says with a sigh. “But that’s a very little thing to give up to keep going.”
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