Three-quarters of adults over the age of 50 want to remain in their homes as they age, according to the American Association of Retired Persons. But for some older adults in Portland, current infrastructure presents some serious physical and social challenges. A new draft report from Portland’s Bureau of Planning and Sustainability lays out some recommendations to address these issues. The Age and Disability Inclusive Neighborhoods Action Plan advocates for creating age-friendly centers, increasing accessible public spaces and providing more support for those wanting to age in place. Alan DeLaTorre is an adjunct professor in the College of Urban and Public Affairs at Portland State University and the former Age-Friendly City program manager for Portland’s Bureau of Planning and Sustainability. He is also the main author of the new plan. He joins us to share the challenges facing Portland’s older population and what it would mean to make the city more age-friendly.
This transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. Three-quarters of adults over the age of 50 want to remain in their homes as they age, according to the AARP. But for some older adults in Portland, current infrastructure presents some serious physical and social challenges. A new draft report from the Portland Bureau of Planning and Sustainability is a kind of road map to address these issues. It advocates for creating age-friendly centers, increasing accessible public spaces and providing more support for people who want to age in place.
Alan DeLaTorre is an adjunct professor in the College of Urban and Public Affairs at Portland State University and the former Age-Friendly City program manager for the city of Portland, and he joins us now. Welcome to the show.
Alan DeLaTorre: Thanks Dave, I’m excited to be here.
Miller: What does it mean to be an age-friendly city? What does it look like?
DeLaTorre: Well, first you never actually arrive at being an age-friendly city. So it’s kind of in perpetuity reaching for improving our environments and that could be physical social and service environments. But I would say that to be an age-friendly city today, requires you to be aligned at this moment with the World Health Organization and AARP, looking at age-friendly environments, having an action plan that could be both implemented and then monitored over time. So these are affiliations that we have with these national and international bodies as we continue to move forward to become more age-friendly.
Miller: How old is Portland right now? And, as boomers get older and older, I mean, what do our demographics look like going forward?
DeLaTorre: Yeah. It’s a good question. Portland, in general, is similarly aged to other cities in the United States and in Oregon. But I would say, what’s happening here is you’ve got the boomer population, folks born from 1946 to 1964, who have started turning 65 and older are getting even older there. But when we think about planning for an age friendly community, we’re all also looking at the next generation. So I’m an Xer myself, a Gen Xer. But the largest cohort in our population structure is the millennials. And so often when we’re thinking about planning for the future, if we’re looking out to say 2045 and thinking about a housing production strategy, we’re actually thinking about planning for our future older adults, not just those today.
Miller: That’s a helpful point. I’m a Gen Xer as well. So people who are listening right now who are in their twenties or thirties or forties who might be thinking more about their parents, you’re also thinking about them right now.
DeLaTorre: Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s really important for us not to just think that interventions for age-friendly cities come once you turn 65. One of the articles I reference in the actual draft plan is this article that references longevity-friendly communities of thinking that we’re always trying to think about better outcomes for older adults. But the interventions happen across every point in life, whether it’s early childhood, middle age, etcetera, to trying to think about planning a community where you can grow up and grow old, not just where you can be old.
Miller: One of the phrases you use is a ‘complete neighborhood,’ and not you alone. It’s a kind of a planning phrase. What does it mean?
DeLaTorre: Well, complete communities or complete neighborhoods - also, I referred to things like ‘15- or 20-minute neighborhoods’ - are really places where you can get all the things [that] will meet all of your daily needs within an area without needing to get in your automobile multiple times or without needing to take transit to multiple stops. And in Portland, we think about this often by planning our urban centers, which are places where we’re growing up and not out. So higher density development, multifamily housing and really a co-location of services that can get you not just there but in-and-around. So good infrastructure, access to government services places, you could get groceries and/or things called third places where you might go that aren’t your work or aren’t your home where you’re meeting people and connecting socially.
Miller: What are some actual parts of Portland that you think come closest to that?
DeLaTorre: I’d say the Hollywood neighborhood is a pretty good example. If you’ve got good transit access, good services, good physical infrastructure. We know physical infrastructure in Portland is stronger in areas that would be kind of in the Inner Southeast neighborhood or even in parts of downtown Portland where as you get further east or even in Southwest, you’ve got less developed infrastructure, less sidewalks, patterns that weren’t really put in complete infrastructure in place because of the way we annexed our city over time.
Miller: When I think about aging in place…and conversations we’ve had about aging in place in the past… and this is for people who, say, own their own homes or have been in an apartment for a while. Often, what people talk about is having the ability to have ramps, say, to get in, to have first floor living. And a lot of that though, you’re talking about private residences. I mean, what role can or should a city play to encourage that kind of physical livability for people who have more and more serious mobility issues. We’re talking about people’s homes.
DeLaTorre: Right. We are in many ways, yeah, talking about people’s homes. And you mentioned a couple of things: ramps to get in and out of one’s house are really important. Things like grab bars in a bathroom that could help prevent falls and keep people more independent over time. I’d say that our housing environments are critically important, but we also would spill out from that environment of where we live, the rooms that we’re in and our yard itself, to that what’s often called a mezzo or a neighborhood level environment. So understanding the social connections that we have, allowing people to understand that we have social needs and are, as the surgeon general recently pointed out, in an epidemic of loneliness. So being able to find those social environments that are keeping you in place that can in some ways keep you interdependent with the community, not just independent on your own, but perhaps being able to ask a neighbor for a little bit of assistance, of knowing in an emergency who you could turn to or where you would go in those kind of instances.
Then there’s more traditional pieces, like the city of Portland and Multnomah County have programs around weatherization and home repair. And really those are fixing up homes so that we can save money with our electric bills, other utilities, and actually be able to get into and out of our home or around our homes in an accessible way.
Miller: How much hope do you have that the statewide zoning changes that happened a couple years ago, could actually impact what you’re talking about? And I’m thinking in particular about getting rid of single-family zoning so that developers, builders could put a cottage cluster of little homes or a triplex or a quadplex, where in the past it was only one home. What does that mean for what you’re talking about?
DeLaTorre: It’s a really good question and I think that we’re in a place where our land use changes at the state and then also at the local level in Portland have really allowed us to see new options that are on the table. So I’d say maybe 10 years ago, we were talking about how accessory-dwelling units (ADU), like a second home in your backyard, could be a great place for a caregiver or an aging loved one or…
Miller: … they used to be called ‘Granny Flats.’ It was built into one of the nicknames for these buildings.
DeLaTorre: It’s very true. I don’t use the term personally. But yeah, this idea of a second housing unit was allowed, but more recently with state legislation and the residential infill project in Portland, we now have the ability to do two ADUs on a property or to build quadplexes in certain areas where we didn’t used to be able to do that. The thing I’m most excited about is this idea of cottage clusters which are small homes that are socially oriented. They might have opportunities for being lower in cost for production and allowing people to live in small communities, but together and kind of oriented toward one another.
Miller: Builders can build those now. Are they doing it?
DeLaTorre: Yeah. Actually, I’ve heard a little bit already about nonprofit builders in particular here in Portland. And then statewide, what would be some of the more government supported places looking at cottage clusters, specifically ones that could be accessible and allow for aging in place. I think Cottage Grove, Oregon has an example of that. And then locally, I know a couple of nonprofits who have started to look into that opportunity for affordable, accessible cottage clusters for older adults and people with disabilities in the community.
Miller: We’ve talked in the past about what planners and transportation people call the ‘curb cut’ effect. The idea is that if you put a curb in a sidewalk to help people with wheelchairs, all kinds of other people can also benefit: people with strollers, kids with scooters or bikes, delivery people with hand trucks. The benefits ripple out. Is the same thing true for the kinds of changes you’re talking about for aging in place?
DeLaTorre: I think so. As a person who’s trained as an academic - I worked at Portland State for 10 years as faculty - this idea that you are maybe looking at more of a targeted, universal approach to development. That older adults and younger people, children in particular, could be the planned or target population we’re planning for and that the resulting environments kind of work well for everybody, rather than thinking maybe about a 20- or 30-year-old athlete and planning for them where it’s not gonna work for folks who might have the same physical abilities. I like the idea of thinking about those populations as critically important.
And I’d say that the one other thing that I wanna talk about, if I were to have a magic wand, that it might be finding a way to do away with stairs that get into and out of homes. It seems like something that we kind of default to and I understand we live in a rainy place so it’s important to keep water out. But trying to figure out how to get rid of as many stairs as we have, we’re requiring people to navigate if they’re in a mobility device, whether a wheelchair or a walker. Those things are just difficult for some folks.
Miller: I mean, you’re talking about a world of with many more ramps, in a sense.
DeLaTorre: Ramps or thresholds that are kind of in that inch-ish, realm where somebody could actually roll over them rather than needing to have a ramp that would get them up and over two steps or even one full step.
Miller: I wanna talk about money. What’s the likelihood that an aging Portlander, or future Portlanders who are 55, 60, 85, that they have enough money to live on? I guess traditional pensions are increasingly extinct, but enough savings to actually live?
DeLaTorre: Unfortunately, I don’t think we’re in a place where there’s a lot of folks with cushions, emergency savings that would get them through one major event at this moment. You’re right. We have a decrease in traditional pensions or what we would call defined pension programs. There are more defined contribution plans now where people are contributing to 401k plans, etcetera, and that’s leaving a little less security. I’d say, there’s also a three-legged stool that we talk about with kind of retirement savings, of being kind of pension, social security and private savings. And there’s just not enough of that that’s happening. So you see that and the squeezing of pension systems and retirements that people are vulnerable. There’s a lot of precarity that exists among older adults. And we can even see that reflected in some ways to see the increasing number of folks who are houseless, who are older, which is disproportionately rising.
Miller: You mentioned the social component of this and you talked about loneliness. It’s an issue that has come up so many times in so many different venues on this show just in the last couple of months. But I’m curious what policies or pointy-headed planners in a city department or academics can do when we’re talking about something so personal? Somebody listening right now, who is alone or feels alone, who is isolated or feels isolated, how can planning make it less likely for someone to feel that way?
DeLaTorre: Well, I think part of the solution here is ensuring that our public spaces are accessible and inclusive. This is difficult…so I was sitting in on a focus group where we were ‘ground truthing’ some of the findings that we had from our working group. And this was a focus group with people with disabilities. And as we were talking about what good public space meant to those individuals, we had two almost exactly opposite answers. One of the individuals said, “I need a place that feels open, that’s wide, where I don’t feel claustrophobic and closed in.” The next person, who was blind said, “I need a space that’s smaller and compact where I feel like I can navigate without the need of somebody else to help me.”
So I’d say there’s no silver bullet to designing these environments. But there are opportunities for us to continue to connect with each other through housing environments like cottage clusters, accessory dwelling units. It’s kind of one opportunity, but I think we need to figure out ways as a society, as a community, to lean into each other in many ways. And I’ll give a plug for one incredible organization that I’ve been kind of following recently called Adopt One Block. They do a great job of leveraging community to help clean up their community, to their neighborhood, their streets. And you’re bringing people together in that process to say we have this common kind of interest and by just giving out free garbage-pick up supplies, they’re creating community because people are then meeting each other on the streets…
Miller: … and they’re also working, right? And in that sense, making their communities nicer. But if it’s not a paying job, it strikes me that it is an act that itself can provide some sense of fulfillment.
DeLaTorre: Yeah, that’s a really good point. So, there are not just older adults and people with disabilities who are kind of maintaining roles in the workforce, but they’re volunteering and really staying connected with people. There’s a little danger though of expecting that folks can engage socially through volunteering when they’re in a place where earning money, making sure that their rent is kind of paid on time, is really still at the top of their agenda. It’s a great luxury when we have older adults in particular with great skills who’ve been retired or are kind of transitioning out of full-time jobs and kind of lean into work - whether it’s reading with children or volunteering to pick up, through Adopt One Block. I think those are opportunities that we need to continue to kind of explore to get people involved with.
On the economic and economy side, we have opportunities to get people back into the workforce to help us in stabilizing changes in our economy and jobs that are needed still to be filled, whether it’s nursing or school related jobs.
Miller: You’ve been thinking about aging and policies that can help older people for almost two decades. But as you noted, you are now in your mid-forties. Has doing this work affected the way you think about your own older self, the future you want when you’re older?
DeLaTorre: Yeah, I think it helps a lot to know…I’ve been in the literature and I talked a lot about this. But one example I can give is that we know that people make decisions on where they’re gonna live in their forties and fifties and are often not thinking about what that means to age in place and age in community. And so from a personal perspective, I’m a little bit more clued into that because I study these issues, I’ll even carry over into my kind of family and my personal life, trying to figure out how my parents and my immediate family may eventually live together in some way, to share housing, to share a property where we are aging in community together. And I think that’s an area that I continue to think about.
I’m getting increasingly gray here, which has been interesting too. So I feel physically that I’m aging and sometimes I think back to my work in my twenties and thirties where people were saying, “Well, you’re not really old enough to talk as an expert in the field of aging.” I don’t get that as much anymore.
[Laughter]
Miller: It’s sad to look increasingly like you know what you’re talking about.
DeLaTorre: Yeah. Although I’m trying to embrace it because we live in a society where we’re ageist, whether we know it or not. And I’m trying to kind of work on my own ageism and how I kind of look not just at myself but at older adults…
Miller: Like, “We should be so lucky to get old.”
DeLaTorre: Yeah, exactly. The alternative is not great.
Miller: Alan DeLaTorre, thanks very much.
DeLaTorre: Yeah, thanks Dave.
Miller: Alan DeLaTorre is now the former Age-Friendly City program manager with the Portland Bureau of Planning and Sustainability. You can read the draft report, the action plan, that he put out as one of his final acts in that job. He is adjunct faculty at the College of Urban and Public Affairs at Portland State University.
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