The IDEA center recognizes the tremendous challenges faced by individuals who experience PTSD, particularly active duty soldiers. Our collaboration with Clark Realty Capital on the Wounded Warrior Home Project at Fort Belvoir, VA sought to improve the quality of life for these individuals.
The AAA invited some of the worlds’ foremost design gurus to reimagine the relationship between our older selves and the built environment. Jeremy Myerson, Helen Hamlyn Professor of Design Royal College of Art, opened the session by pointing out that the majority of older people will not move into specialist housing or retirement villages. Most will be obliged to make do, adapting, and retrofitting their existing properties where possible.
As soon as my parents became eligible for Medicare, my siblings and I started nudging them about planning for their future. They were healthy at the time, but we found ourselves looking at their house with a fearful eye. It had lots of steps, narrow door frames and uneven floors, and it was a hundred miles from my sister, their nearest child. We could easily imagine a nightmare unfolding.
As more new senior housing is delivered every year, more evidence piles up that the generation expected to move into it has other ideas.
Universal accessibility in architecture refers to the capacity that all people have to access and inhabit a space regardless of their cognitive and physical capacities, and it is a subject that cannot be dismissed.
Between 2010 and 2040, we predict the nation’s 65-plus population will grow by roughly 90 percent. This ballooning number of seniors will impact industries as diverse as health care, technology, and, especially, real estate.
Older people have the highest rate of home-ownership in the country — about 80 percent. The great majority live in single-family homes, most of them poorly suited for the disabilities common in later life.
Our greying generation is embracing aging and retirement with high expectations, and home is their preferred place to enjoy this aging journey.
On January 13, 2016, police found the body of a 31-year-old man, who had been dead for “at least” 12 hours, in a car parked on Pike Street in Capitol Hill, Seattle. He had died from a drug overdose in the shadows, which is common, as drug users often are too ashamed to seek help or use in the open.
