I have been reading about my childhood and contemplating my old age (which has already begun). Especially noteworthy is the Baby Boom generation. of which I am a part (at 63) born two years after the end of World War II.
Some questions are: Where will we live and die?
It is possible that if I take my pills, follow my doctors other recommendations, exercise regularly, and take advantage of astounding advances in medicine that did not exist when I was born (such as kidney transplants and hip replacements) I could live another 30 years and maybe even live a satisfying and productive life.
This essay (call it a blog posting if you please) is about housing primarily. It is about the kind of housing which my generation will have, the largest generation in the history of the United States. Baby boomers have also had sizeable impacts throughout the industrialized world, a thought worthy of concern at the least when one considers the physical and economic disasters taking place in Japan and Europe, for example.
One out of every four Americans is a part of the Baby Boom generation which the U.S Census Department defines as those 76 million Americans born between 1946, the year after World War II ended, and 1964 when prodigious use of birth control and other factors caused the annual birth rate to fall below 4 million.
The first baby boomers have already begun to retire despite the fact that most jobs in the United States are held by baby boomers. When the members of my generation give up their jobs a whole slew of disaster scenarios appear—whether you go to the U.S. Census Bureau’s excellent website or consult Google’s index and find:
Before we get too caught up in the pessimism, which certainly has cause for rational concern, the purpose of this blog is to suggest that solutions are already being put into place, that these solutions use sophisticated technology ranging from sensors in apartments which tell (the apartments talk) seniors when to take their medication and the world of virtual reality where off beat tools will dramatically change the way housing for the elderly is designed, reduce the cost of construction, and offer hope.
I am awfully fond of hope. I have been reading David Halberstam’s marvelous book about the 1950s (called The Fifties) Many of us in my generation were born nine months after our fathers returned after winning the war in Europe and Japan. These veterans returned confident in themselves, eager to make their wives pregnant as quickly and often as possible. They returned in great swarms—hundreds of thousands of them suddenly crossing the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans (let out of military service far more quickly than many generals thought prudent).
Much has been written about what made these veterans (primarily our fathers) so confident that they could support large families, educate them, and create levels of affluence undreamed of in our history—levels that economists had failed to predict, creating societal changes that literally transformed our country.
For example, the year I was born most Americans lived in cities. There were no suburbs. Less than a quarter of the population lived in rural areas (the figure now is less than 3 percent) either on farms or in small towns that served the farm community.
By the time I was 23 not only had the suburbs been created, but most Americans lived in the suburbs.
Why do I go on and on about suburbs? Because the same techniques that created suburbs dramatically, often overnight, will be needed to solve the housing, health and other needs of aging baby boomers. This blog will be looking at the post-war factury-like house building phenomenon known as Levitown, a company which transformed the 1950s with techniques that may very well be duplicated and improved upon by Blue Roof and others for housing to age in.
Right now, most domestic non-discretionary money the United States government spends is on the elderly and disabled—Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid being the principal examples. Whether there will be money left for the healthy and the young very much depends upon how we answer the question: Where will retiring baby boomers live and who will pay to support them as they live for decades?
Right now, the country spends about 17 percent of its gross domestic product on health care. According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), if current trends continue, our economy will go from spending one out of every 4 dollars for health care in 2025 to one out of every two dollars by 2082.
This blog will focus primarily on two interrelated experiments and the tools they use. There is the “smart housing” (a term to be defined) Blue Roof Technologies experiment in McKeesport, near Pittsburgh There is ICon Lab at Penn State, a 3 hour drive to the east of Blue Roof, where members of the architectural, engineering, and construction industries, end users (the unavoidable word for people like me who actually live in housing for the disabled and aged) and students will be able to review and even change the design of new health care and aged housing facilities before the foundations are dug
In many ways I am an advance man—a sort of scout, looking at the new territory called Old Age and reporting back to other people my age on what it will be like in the decades to come. Other people my age have dominated our society since we were born, changing everything to suit the tastes our parents gave us.
I have had the advantage of being unable to walk for the past 15 years, able to take advantage of the liberating scooters, power chairs, and other durable medical equipment that make a life of independence possible for those of us with serious physical disabilities, equipment that can save the country a fortune by keeping the disabled out of breathtaking expensive assistive housing.
Think of this blog posting as a centerpiece for this blog (to be revised, changed, updated, and robustified). One task requiring consideration is what will happen to the generations after us who will be supporting us, working long hours in jobs where there are too few workers. We must consider the necessity to harness the productivity of my generation and to free our children and grandchildren from having to spend large quantities of the country’s resources while their lives suffer.
Remember hope; we’ll get there.
In the interim, enjoy the work John J Meier, Science Librarian at Penn State’s Physical and Mathematical Sciences Library who describes the virtual world of Second Life in a posting coming to this blog before you can ask What is a virtual world and why do I want to be in it?
No comments:
Post a Comment