Housing issues are a real concern for young people trying to work in Vancouver and attempting to find a place to live that does not eat up everything they earn. But there is the other side of the population cohort experiencing similar pressures, seniors who are retired and on fixed income with housing that because of the real estate market is often insecure and unstable.
Dan Fumano touches on this in his article on the Grey Tsunami and the challenges seniors have when being asked to leave rental accommodations they have lived in sometimes for decades. Duke of Data and Simon Fraser University Director of the City Program Andy Yan observes that renters in Vancouver that are seniors “are more likely than younger renters to face what Statistics Canada calls “core housing need.”
With a third of Vancouver renters being senior, census data shows that 60 per cent need stable affordable housing, and are not in the position to pay more if displaced from their current tenancies. As the baby boom becomes senior citizens, Andy Yan describes the lack of available and affordable seniors’ accommodation as “a province headed into uncharted demographic territory, with an aging tsunami barrelling toward infrastructure and housing ill-prepared for it.”
Today there are more people over the age of 65 than there are young people under 14 years of age. That is 16 million seniors. And in just over a decade seniors will be 25 percent of all the Canadian population.
That will have profound impacts on how we design streets, parks and access to be universally useable by a geriatric generation that will need to age in place in order to keep health insurance costs low. Isobel Mackenzie, the B.C. seniors advocate is already speaking about the fact that nursing homes will not be able to accommodate the range of people needing care, and that it will be standard for people with active dementia to live and function in apartments in the downtown areas of cities.
It is important that we think of cities and spaces for everyone but especially for the elderly, and prepare for this major sea change in the services and accommodation that will need to be provided. Andy Yan calls 2016 “an inflection year where the working population supports more people over the age of 65 than under the age of 19 — a pattern that has never occurred.”
How do we house and how do we design space in Vancouver for the very young and the very old?
Images: RetiredAmericans.org & The Star
