View Full Version : Alternative housing for seniors - Babayaga House
As more people are limited in income in their later years, want of finishing their lives in active interesting communities, this might be a good idea to explore.www.english.rfi.fr/france/20130305-babayagas-house
Jane Jacobs, a well-known urban planner who was way ahead of her time, believed that older people should live everywhere and not be warehoused in for-profit, prison-like conditions in their later years. I fervently agree with her.
Anything like this around your part of the world?
iris lilies
11-2-14, 12:55pm
It's the oddest thing, I've been targeted for a mailing campaign from a senior citizen retirement place, odd because it's actually a place I had thought about. It's a multi-story building in an active neighborhood. I don't really know how walkable it is for those with severe mobility problems, but I like the idea of the location with a grocery store directly next door and park across the street and wonderful ethnic shopping 2 - 3 blocks away. I don't know how they got into my head to know that I've thought about living there!
There's also retirement units in an old converted school house, directly across the street from one of our tiny houses. This is a pleasant urban neighborhood, but for this one one would have to have a car. But here, residents have small plots of the garden and take ownership of some of the plantings.
The idea of living in the suburbs bugs me. But I think that there are plenty of options in the city, one just needs to be aware of them.
ToomuchStuff
11-2-14, 1:01pm
I was trying to figure out if it was here, but I think it was something my parents recorded (either CBS this Morning or 60 minutes), where older couples and singles lived in an association where they hired people to help (joined forces on common things) and had other like minded people together. (couldn't find it)
While looking I did see this: http://www.aarp.org/home-family/your-home/info-05-2013/older-women-roommates-house-sharing.html
Portland has an association to facilitate aging in place: http://villagesnw.org/ .
HappyHiker
11-2-14, 2:17pm
This is a very cool concept...would love to see it grow around the world, especailly in the U.S. where it's sorely needed...there are creative options for aging in palce--or/and with friends--if we seek them out!
I, for one, would love this concept and would enjoy participation and contributing.
My parents live in a traditional upscale retirement community, and while it works for them - or at least it works for my mother and my father seems ok with a life of isolation without yardwork - I see so many faults with that model. They are basically totally at the mercy of a for-profit organization. My mom actually has a good head for business and she has run the gift shop and thrift shop and some Christmas community giving program, but even the sharpest tools in the shed have no control over the real money/drain - what is done by the corporation that owns them. Imagine being so close to having "a say" over profiteering of your life and then still not having one, aaargh!! I would be in hell to live like that, "free" society is bad enough. I absolutely love the idea of a retirement home/village run by the people, for the people - it's like they're sneaking in a socialist commune under the guise of being old. Go Abayagas!
iris lilies
11-2-14, 2:23pm
Portland has an association to facilitate aging in place: http://villagesnw.org/ .
Oh yeah, now I remember, we've talked about this before here. We've got one of these communal thingies happening in another active neighborhood in my city, a place that has lots of apartments.
None of these places are practical for us because DH needs a shop, tools and sizable garden, right now, anyway. And I do think that he will need access to a workshop so that he can putter around fixing things until the day he drops dead. It's very likely that he will outlive me. But if that's not the case, I would move--today--to a smaller place, and then later to an apartment in one of the aforementioned urban neighborhoods. And if there are "retirement" places where meals and meds services are available, that would be fine, too. I can see me doing a little gardening here and there around the neighborhood where there are many public plantings.
My Mom bought into this place: http://lwsb.com/lwsbmaster/ for $27K back in 1996 and her monthly dues, including property taxes and insurance, were less than $200/month. It is a not-for-profit place too and run by an elected board rather than a company. Most apt are co-ops.
It has all kinds of interesting things - including wood and metal and car workshops for Iris Lily's DH to putter around all day. Arts and craft shops. A community garden, parking for RV's and boats, car wash facilities, Library, 6 club houses with tons of activities, a couple hundred clubs to join if interested, a gym, huge amphitheater that has free open air concerts in summer, post office, a mini bus, small golf course, pool, medical center, close to shops (and mini bus goes there), etc... List goes on and on. It's 2 miles from a beautiful beach town (and is on the bus line) and a place I'd live if I wanted to stay in SoCal. While it's a "active Adult Community" for those 55 and over, there are a lot of early-ish retirees as well as working professionals that live there. The guy who bought my Mom's place (sold for $96K in 2009) was a just retired single 55 year old surfer "dude" who retired so he could surf all day and live cheaply. However, it's not set up as a care taking facility so would only work if you were healthy when you moved in and planned to get your own private care giver as you got older.
As more people are limited in income in their later years, want of finishing their lives in active interesting communities, this might be a good idea to explore.www.english.rfi.fr/france/20130305-babayagas-house
Jane Jacobs, a well-known urban planner who was way ahead of her time, believed that older people should live everywhere and not be warehoused in for-profit, prison-like conditions in their later years. I fervently agree with her.
Anything like this around your part of the world?This seems very inline with the many "active seniors communities" around the states but it doesn't seem to address the care giving aspects of old age. It seems to me most people can live independently for a long time but once they become bedridden or disabled they often can't live in places like this (or the kind of places my Mom lived in above) any longer and must either go to a nursing home or be cared for at home. Around here there are tons of senior housing like this but none of the affordable ones offer caregiving/end of life kind of things. The ones that do are massively expensive.
Some of you know that my wife is a social worker; her section deals primarily with people who are disabled and cannot live completely independently. She has been saying for some time that the group home/nursing home facilities as we know them will be going away -- or at least greatly diminished in number and scope. Counties are finding it less costly to adapt homes (wheelchair ramps, grab bars, roll-in showers, etc.) and provide personal care assistants for the time and level of care needed than it is to move someone to a group home or nursing home.
The homes won't go away completely, of course. But their growth certainly will not keep pace with the growth in population of people with physical disabilities or memory loss or chronic illnesses. In many ways, this is better for the clients, as well -- they stay in familiar surroundings, with the things around them (pet, living room window view, their musical instrument, whatever) they enjoy most.
Friends of ours have talked for maybe 10 years about buying a lot and building a structure that has a "wing" for each family (couple) and a common living and kitchen area. A bit of a commune as those who could would take care of the lawn/garden/snow -- or it could be hired out. We're good enough friends that I think we could pull it off (well, until the filters of old age are dropped). The sticky part has always been $$ -- we plan to have everyone buy a share of the structure, but not everyone will want/need that kind of housing at the same time, and not everyone may be/is in a position to make that kind of financial commitment. And then there's that part about to whom they sell their share if they can no longer remain at home/pass on. Great idea; we just haven't worked on it much lately. I guess time's awastin' ...
Wow Steve, I've been mulling over the same idea with some good friends. They're all gung ho about building an energy efficient structure from the ground up, I've been thinking it makes all the sense in the world to build bigger / share and go in ... but it's a huge commitment, isn't it. It almost feels like marrying two extra people. (or maybe it would be like spreading my marriage out over two extra people, which might be a huge relief. >8))
kib, in our case, we're talking about four or five other couples. All of them have kids, but not all of them live here (or want to), so that succession-planning thing just gets more and more complicated. We haven't even gotten to the location part. :) Most of the other couples are talking rural; DW and I (the only city-dwellers among the suburbanites) think that's a choice we'd regret in future years.
As more people are limited in income in their later years, want of finishing their lives in active interesting communities, this might be a good idea to explore.www.english.rfi.fr/france/20130305-babayagas-house (http://www.english.rfi.fr/france/20130305-babayagas-house)
Jane Jacobs, a well-known urban planner who was way ahead of her time, believed that older people should live everywhere and not be warehoused in for-profit, prison-like conditions in their later years. I fervently agree with her.
Anything like this around your part of the world?
CBC Radio (on the Current, I believe) did a program on the Babayagas. I remember thinking that idea would be far better than the warehouse/for profit model. But I can't recall who was responsible for things like fixing the roof, shovelling the snow, and other maintenance issues. If the residents got along well together, it could work well.
There is nothing like that here yet. And like irislilies, we have a small shop/studio building which dh and I would not want to give up. That lets us be creative, fix things, and store tools that mightn't be welcome in a shared house, unless we could find a bunch of other eccentrics.... Hmmmm.
As someone who has recently dealt with the final six months of his 85 year old father's life I've clicked on this thread a bunch of times and haven't followed through with responding. A number of thoughts jump out of my head, so I suppose I'll just put them all out there. First, the initial babayaga house took $4M in charity to get built for 25 units. That may be a sustainable and repeatable concept in France but will cause howls of socialistic terror in the US. Costs for residents here would have to be high enough to actually cover the cost of building the place. Second, my father, and undoubtedly many other people, wouldn't have been interested in being part of any sort of communal living situation. After my mother died 8 years ago my sister and I tried to suggest that he move to california, where we both lived, so that even if he didn't want to live with either of us he'd be closer to us so we could help keep a close eye on him. He didn't want that. He wanted to remain "independent". He researched assisted living places in denver and picked the one that convinced him (by lying to his face about what they were capable of) that they could take care of him through the end of his life. (I'm no fan of the current system. We ended up having to move dad to a full skilled nursing home for the last 2 months of his life. He HATED it. It was expensive and depressing. But they gave him decent quality care.) Third, once people get really old and frail they are likely going to need more care than a communal volunteer system can provide, unless the community includes people from all age ranges and has the expectation/agreement that the "young whipper-snappers" who are only in their 70's or early 80's will take care of the truly old who can no longer contribute.
JaneV2.0
12-14-14, 10:38am
I'm not sure why you put independent in quotes. Many of us who always have been want to remain so as long as we can.
I'm another who despises the for-profit warehouse system and hope to avoid it as long as I can, but communal living is anathema to me and calls up people singing Kumbaya around the campfire--very much like my vision of the warehouse calls up a bunch of old people sitting in a circle singing The Itsy-bitsy Spider and throwing a nerf ball around. Just shoot me.
In re-reading that I can see why it's unclear why I put independent in quotes. What I was ineffectively trying to infer was that in reality he ended up not being independent at all. Every time he had to go to the hospital my sister or I either had to fly out and help him manage his care or spend a lot of time on the phone with the various medical professionals. Generally he became incapable of making decisions when he was in the hospital because he'd get completely stressed out. His desire to stay in the city he'd lived in for 50 years and not be a burden on his children ironically ended up causing him to be more of a burden because he was so far away when he truly needed our help.
JaneV2.0
12-14-14, 12:43pm
It's both psychologically and physically hard for old people to move, but in his case I see where it would have been necessary.
Indeed. And frankly, making a move is a hard thing for most people, not just the elderly. For dad just moving from the condo he and mom had lived in for 20 years to the assisted living place a few miles away was crazy stressful for him. I can totally understand why he didn't want to move halfway across the country. If they'd been able to follow through with the level of care they promised it might have worked out better. And even with the 20/20 vision that hindsight provides my sister and me I doubt we could have convinced him to have made a different decision at that time.
Reminds me of what Roz Chast (New Yorker cartoonist) had to do when her elderly parents needed assisted living - she basically bribed by them saying if they left their Brooklyn apartment to "try it out" they could always return.
Of course, as it turned out, they never did return. Her father, and later her mother, were already ailing and needed to be cared for, but it was basically keeping the door open to returning that led them to agree.
Yeah. When the docs said there was nothing more they could do and recommended hospice care we moved him to the inpatient hospice despite his desire to go home to his assisted living apartment telling him that if he got well enough then he could go home. He'd always been a determined sort of guy, so the next morning he managed to get himself out of bed, showered and dressed, and wheeled himself down to the dining room for breakfast. Sure enough, he was sent home the next day with outpatient hospice care checking on him daily. Five days later, after not getting any of his meds and only eating a few meals because they wouldn't wake him when they delivered them and he wasn't mobile enough to put them in the microwave to reheat them, we had to have him transferred to the skilled nursing home. Almost 2 months later, when he was obviously declining, it still seemed like a terribly disloyal act when I was at his apartment getting rid of his stuff before he died. It was the logical thing, though, since there was truly no point in continuing to pay $3,200/month rent on it. It ended up being the right thing because the nursing facility called me literally just as Salvation Army was carrying out the last of his furniture and informed me that he had taken a major decline that morning and wouldn't likely live more than a few days (which was spot on accurate) but it still felt like a really crappy thing to do. I'm very thankful that I will never have to repeat the last 6 months of my life.
My father is 94 and for the past 4-1/2 years he has lived in an assisted-living facility near me, thankfully. In fact, one reason I moved to my current home was to be closer to my dad and my youngest son who had just gotten married 10 years ago. Anyway, my dad made the decision on his own because he fell in his apartment and couldn't get up. He was alone on his kitchen floor all night until the next day around noon when I just happened to stop by. It scared him and he was ready for assisted living. What I am learning from being around him a lot is that he is most comfortable in his own little apartment at the facility. I used to take him out and bring him to my house a lot but he now has very limited mobility so I visit him at his place. My father has a wonderful attitude about his aging and he accepts the changes. He doesn't fight it which makes it easier for him and for his family. I live close to my dad so most of the extra care falls to me which I do not mind because I am grateful to still have my dad; but my sister (in Spokane) and I are careful to leave him with some independence, e.g., he still has his checkbook and wallet with credit cards. I have access to his bank account so I can make sure nothing suspicious is happening. I guess what I'm trying to say is that how someone ages depends so much on attitude and grace.
Linda
Polliwog, your dad sounds much like mine although significantly older. Until Dad went into the hospital in June with pneumonia he was still completely alert and coherent and able to take care of himself. Assisted living, while expensive, allowed him that. He felt secure. And he was much more comfortable relying on the oxygen concentrator for oxygen rather than the portable oxygen tank that he found unreliable, so he chose to rarely leave the building. It was only once he truly needed daily care from medical professionals that assisted living was not enough. Perhaps if Dad had been near by my sister or I could have stepped in and provided the bridge and assisted living would've still been enough. But we weren't so it wasn't.
And an aside, it's interesting that you mention him still having checkbook and wallet. One of the last things dad was complaining about was that he didn't even have any cash on hand. He mentioned it in confusion over not being able to leave a tip at dinner at the nursing home dining room which was undoubtedly related to confusion about where he was (no one leaves a tip at a nursing home dining room...) but the point was clear. He felt like he'd lost control of his life. So sad. And so hard to deal with. I was tempted to give him a $20, and in hindsight probably should have, so that he felt like he had money in case he needed it. I hope you and your father continue to have a good relationship and that his end comes rapidly, not dragged out with him miserable at the loss of what independence he had.
Sorry for what you had to go through jp1. It was a similar story at the end of my dad's life. There are no easy answers. Peace to you.
Thank you Gregg. Sadly stories like mine, and apparently yours, seem quite common. As I get older stories like this seem all too common among my friends. I guess it's part of life. Not everyone can die as perfectly as my aunt. She was in her early 80's and had plenty of health issues, but was well enough that she had gone to help out with bingo night at the VFW hall, went home to the house she and her husband had purchased at retirement, got out her clothes for church the next morning and when her daughter came to take her to church that next morning she was lying in bed stone cold. I mean really, what could be better than dying in one's own bed after spending a nice evening helping out at an organization one had spent one's whole adult life volunteering for.
I am grateful, though, that at least I was able to help my dad get through it as much as I did despite living over 1000 miles away. I get 27 PTO days per year and work was cool with me taking them without notice as the phone calls arrived. And I earn a good enough living that it is not a hardship that my airplane budget this year is almost $5,000, compared to $1250 every year for the last three, not to mention the hotels and rental cars.
I have been following the Babayaga saga for many years now. Therese Clerc is a fascinating woman with a very 1960's feminist way of thinking. I do not know her personally, but know people who know her. It was very tough building the Babayaga house, not only for financial reasons but also because personalities clashed. If I am not mistaken, state authorities (Montreuil's mayor & others) got heavily involved so it remains to be seen how much of the original ideal (self government, non-profit) remains in the end. I will find out more and report back.
ApatheticNoMore
12-23-14, 6:12pm
I am grateful, though, that at least I was able to help my dad get through it as much as I did despite living over 1000 miles away. I get 27 PTO days per year and work was cool with me taking them without notice as the phone calls arrived. And I earn a good enough living that it is not a hardship that my airplane budget this year is almost $5,000, compared to $1250 every year for the last three, not to mention the hotels and rental cars.
When my dad was in the hospital, I told work I didn't know when I'd be back in the office, but that I probably would be back someday, that I wasn't quitting but didn't know when I'd be back. It wasn't long till I was unfortunately. I didn't care if I had PTO or knew when I'd be back really. They are just jobs, lose one, get another at the end of the day. I don't quit just because, but they don't matter to me compared to what matters to me.
Teacher Terry
12-24-14, 3:00pm
It is so hard helping parents maintain dignity as they age. Especially if you live far away. Fortunately when my Dad spent 14 years needing care both my Mom & I could provide it (we bought the house next door to them). After he died at 73 my Mom had a lot of healthy years left. She was determined to live on her own until she went to hospice to die. During 4 bouts of cancer my siblings & I took turns taking time off from work to go help her. She was a strong, tough woman. Fortunately for the last few years my older siblings were retired & lived a lot closer to her then I did so they did the majority of the work but they didn't do much to help my Mom with my Dad so it evened out. A week before she died my Mom fell & could not get up. She had taken her cell out of her robe although my sister made her promise never to do that. I don't think she was thinking that clearly as she was dying of cancer. She went into hospice & died a week later.
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