Impolitic to say, but I don't think senior housing is a good idea right at transit stations
This article from the San Jose Mercury News, "Big affordable homes project for seniors eyed near San Jose train station," reminds me. Although I meant to write about it earlier, in response to a project in Atlanta ("MARTA Sells Land to Columbia Residential for Development of Senior Affordable Housing at Avondale Station," Saporta Report). From the SJMN:
A big new development of affordable homes, this time for seniors, is being eyed at a choice site a short distance from a train station in San Jose. The project would sprout at 390 Floyd St. next to Lick Avenue and across the street from Tamien Station, according to San Jose city planning documents. An estimated 134 dwelling units would be built on the site, which is slightly below a half-acre in size, the public documents show. “New construction of a 100% affordable senior housing development” is contemplated on the property, according to the proposal. ...
The Tamien Station can be a busy transit site since it serves both the local light rail system and the regional Caltrain line. It’s also a few rail stops away from the bustling Diridon transit station in downtown San Jose.
Seniors use transit less, especially rail transit, because of the crowds and how fast the other riders move in and out of trains and crowd the platforms. The point of adding housing at transit is to generate trips on transit.
Seniors also buy less. If you want property as part of transit oriented development to be economically successful, it has to provide customers to the adjacent retail or that retail is less successful too.
I understand the issue of equity and access, but I think other types of uses have greater value when it comes to transit oriented development and station planning, especially immediately adjacent to stations, especially a site like at Tamien Station in San Jose, which will serve regional commuter rail and local light rail.
Labels: affordable housing, fixed rail transit service, senior living, transit marketing, transit oriented development
posted by Richard Layman @ 10:26 PM&Permanent Link
8 Comments:
Interesting. I'm not unconvinced, necessarily, but could you talk about where you think senior housing should be built, with DC-area hypothetical examples?
How does last-mile, or last-quarter-mile, connection to the transit hub figure into the calculus about how close younger, intensive transit users should be to a station, vs. how close those whose mobility is limited need or want to be, even if they use rail transit less?
Relatedly: Naturally Occurring Retirement Communities. I wonder about the tendency of NORCs to spring up around transit. Locally, Cleveland Park-Woodley Park and Friendship Heights have strong NORC tendencies, though perhaps the calculus is different when you have 1st the buildings, then (decades later) the Metro, and then the old people. Or does that perhaps illustrate the notion that we shouldn't be designing age-restricted housing at all, but should let the market sort out who lives closest to transit?
Great points. I'll respond when I'm at a real keyboard.
Very tough. Equity and access means that you ought to be building by transit. But when transit (and spending) usage isn't high by your target audience, it reduces the likelihood of success for the project overall, and has big opportunity costs for transit success and the development and nurturing of neighborhood retail.
Ideally, what I would do is build bigger buildings, with mixed tenure -- eg mix market, affordable, and senior in one property. I mean, think of the opportunity at Fort Totten Metro. Instead they built squatty 3-4 story buildings (although the ArtPlace development a little further out is replacing small three story garden apartments with much larger and taller buildings with hundreds more units).
Away from homogeneity. I have an old piece on this, but I can't find it. The idea was to have "mixed use by floor." But I'm not sure if it's workable in practice.
But it's hard to do that in the US because of how development is financed, and because people with choice (the market segment) don't often want to mix it up with other demographic segments.
2. I've argued against special housingtax breaks for seniors (no tax) as put forward by CM Bonds, because I think (not confirmed by research) that one of the reasons for decline in the city in the 1970s and 1980s was that the neighborhoods aged, and people as they age stop going out more and buy less, leading to a diminishment of neighborhood commercial districts.
3. With regard to your point about where, I think properties should be "central" just not necessarily "on top" of transit stations.
Still in districts and centrally located with access to amenities. But needing different kinds of mobility options other than straight up transit.
Probably the kind of intra-district options I've written about. E.g. http://urbanplacesandspaces.blogspot.com/2016/08/intra-neighborhood-tertiary-transit.html
+ which could also include package delivery
4. NORCs are very interesting. But I think they are fostered by certain kinds of conditions. Existing density. Existing locations. And people aging in places they've owned for years. And people being comparatively healthy and able to get around.
And the existence and/or the development of support organizations. Like the "village" groups that have been being created like wildfire over the last ten years.
https://newoldage.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/25/when-the-neighborhood-is-the-retirement-village/
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/14/realestate/elderly-new-yorkers-here-for-the-duration.html
(I don't necessarily remember reading the second NYT article, but I do remember the first, and that it was revelatory.)
E.g. it's interesting to think about the properties on Connecticut Avenue that you mention. It's a function of the people aging in place, in properties and places they've lived for decades, with high tacit knowledge about resources, etc.
I WONDER TOO if it's "better" to have NORCs in apartment buildings as opposed to a block of houses on the 200 block of Quackenbos St. NW (many of the properties on my block changed in the early 2000s as very old people--our house's previous owner was in her 90s--died). So the block was NORC but hard to service (I also happened to work in that area for the 2000 Census and I interviewed one person who had lived there for 65 years) in comparison to an apartment building.
But again, as people need a lot more care, I wonder if NORCs still work?
While we still have our house in DC, I am in Salt Lake City.
We joined our household with my wife's aging parents, because her father has dementia and her mother can no longer take care of him by herself (she still does all the hard work, but we do stuff, cook, ferry them around, etc. to take the edge off).
Plus where they were before, in SoCal sprawl, they were very isolated, with limited options for assistance (their closest friends lived two miles away and speaking of NORCs not--as the houses in their neighborhood turned over, they increasingly didn't know their neighbors and weren't able to ask people for help--also a personal issue of "being able to ask").
There's no way they could use regular transit to get around. Aging transportation maybe. But again, as his condition has progressed it's much much harder for him to move around/walk. He walks but needs to be guided and held in the off chance he would fall).
So being in senior housing at a transit station wouldn't have much benefit for them.
Eg a friend asked us early on if we walk to a "local" park (about 2 miles away). I said it would take hours to walk there and then we'd have to get back.
(We used to walk around the neighborhood but that has diminished greatly, to not even around the block. And even though the area is somewhat curvilinear it is in block form and walkable with high quality amenities within 1/2 mile both west and east.)
We drive them. (I still try to do "simple" errands by bike, when I am by myself.) And we got a transporter chair after our experience with the initial round of covid shots. It was a zoo, lines lasting 1.5 hours, limited seating, limited transporter chairs available. (The next go around it was much better and faster. But having our own transporter made it even better. And we use it in other situations now too, especially medical visits.)
But big apartment buildings like on Connecticut Avenue, not small buildings like the one proposed in San Jose, make sense to me, because you can get the economies of scale to offer services on site.
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We could have accommodated them in DC, by renovating the attic and us moving up their. We lived together for 10 weeks when they were visiting and her father had to be hospitalized and then in a nursing home for rehabilitation, proving we could live together. While MIL was willing at first to move to DC, she later changed her mind.
And in a way, I think the SLC thing works better. The medical care at U Utah is super integrated and convenient (we live within a couple miles of the hospital center and another ancillary facility in the other direction), and there are way more convenient amenities, parks, libraries, etc. Here rec and senior facilities are provided by the county, not the city, but the combined library (SLC has its own libraries too), senior center, recreation center is about 3 miles away. Although now that his range of walking is reduced, we haven't been going to the senior-recreation center. Maybe when it gets colder.
Thanks for all this. Lots to digest, but I particularly appreciate your sensitivity, from experience, to the realities of mobility for seniors, even in a "walkable" area.
Re Conn. Ave. NORCs, I'm thinking particularly of The Broadmoor by the CP Metro, which has become a kind of aging in place village in itself, with lots of mutual support activities and services. It's a place lots of seniors downsize to from the SFHs in the neighborhood. Ditto the Kennedy Warren, though on a rental model rather than coop. You're absolutely right about "high tacit knowledge about resources."
Really really tough. We need to make places walkable, you know, the 8-80 communities promoted by Gil Penelosa.
https://www.880cities.org/
AARP has a big program too.
https://www.aarp.org/livable-communities/act/walkable-livable-communities/info-12-2012/walkable-and-livable-communities-institute.html
But it's the difference between theory and practice.
The properties you mention in Cleveland Park are very interesting and deserving of further study, being written about as case studies.
Interesting fact about 55+ communities. People don't want to live in them til they are about 72 years old and even then they are still in pretty good shape.
I am 61, and because of my situation, thinking about this a lot.
I saw Jan Gehl speak once, and he mentioned off hand how with the Danish bike superhighways, he and his wife still biked to town etc, 10km at least, and they were in their late 70s at the time.
I was hoping to get to 65 before breaking down and getting an e-bike and I don't know if I can put it off that long. The elevation is a big issue and "the hills" which can be brutal. Sometimes I can make it up them without stopping. Mostly I plan my trip back home so I can use one of three streets that aren't too hilly.
E-bikes, protected walkways, sidewalks that are smooth, longer crosswalk timing, better and more crosswalks, changing the road pavement so that people drive more slowly, changing the speed limits, intra-neighborhood transit and mobility services, etc., are the kinds of accommodations we need in senior/NORC areas.
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I once criticized the AARP walkability approach because it didn't marry practice and theory.
Eg., our area in SLC ranked low. But it's one mile to the city library, two miles to the main U Utah health campus, two miles to a U Utah clinic building, one half mile in either direction to retail amenities, within one mile and two miles for many park resources, two miles for another major retail district, and the area has a grid/block pattern with pretty much 100% sidewalk coverage and minimal traffic on residential streets. (Although here the sidwalks can have terrible deterioration, subsidence, or upthrust.)
I think this area is awesome for seniors, provided they have assistance.
In fact, I think it's a lot better than it would have been had we lived in Manor Park with them. Maybe Kaiser is roughly equivalent to U Utah, except they don't have associated hospitals. But that's about it, and it's less convenient in terms of proximity to Manor Park.
Suzanne's parents are 84. There are tons of old people here (the good Mormons who don't use drugs, tobacco or caffeine), with many people living into their 90s and definitely over 100.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/rllayman/4313707642
I wrote their nearest friends were two miles away. That's a typo. IT WAS TWO HOURS.
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