Back to the drawing board

No one knows if our economic downturn is temporary or if lasting changes are being made in the way we live. What will life look like in five or 10 years?

One relatively new living arrangement may have to change if it is to survive: the retirement community.

As our population aged, retirement communities looked like the answer to longer lives and smaller families. Older people pay entrance fees and then monthly fees to live in communities of senior citizens. All the services an aging population might need are at hand: living quarters built on one level with safety features for people with limited mobility, meals, transportation to doctors appointments, social and recreational opportunities, a cleaning service, and when the time comes assisted living and nursing home care.

People with the means to do so have bought into these communities hoping to have all their needs met to the end of life. They wanted to spare their children the burden of their care. Some had no children or close family. Not everyone could afford them, but for those who could, it seemed a sensible choice. People also chose them because the residents had a lot more interaction with other people than most American elderly. In short, they were fun.

Why might this pattern change? In tough economic times the income residents were counting on to pay for this may not be there. Administrators of these facilities are finding increasing numbers of residents outliving their money. Potential new residents may hesitate when they have seen their savings shrink. They may be reluctant to pay high initial fees if they aren’t sure they have enough money to stay until they die. That is the most obvious reason retirement communities might become less popular, but there are other reasons that I find more interesting.

When you sign up for a retirement community, the money you use is no longer available to help your children should they need it. What happens if a son or daughter needs money because of a job layoff or an illness? Are you going to be able to help?

In times gone by, children who suffered catastrophe might come live with a parent, but this is not currently allowed in retirement communities. With millions of Americans losing their jobs, there are going to be parents who simply cannot help by inviting children or grandchildren to move in with them, even temporarily, because the regulations do not permit it. Residents may not have the money to help desperate family members because it is being soaked up by monthly fees, and they can’t provide them with a place to live either. The time-honored way families have taken care of their own has been cut off.

These facilities were created with the assumption that children would never need to be helped out by their parents. They also assumed that investments were relatively secure. Neither is turning out to be the case. What now?

New patterns of providing for the elderly will probably evolve, but we are not there yet. It will be interesting to see what creative ideas come forth if the older patterns of retirement become too expensive. People may look back on retirement communities with amazement that life could ever have been secure enough and predictable enough to allow for the creation of such places.

Will multi-generation households become common once again? It seems to be happening already. Will there be new arrangements we have never seen before? Probably.

That is the trouble with us humans. Just when we think we have figured out a perfectly fine way of doing something, the ground shifts beneath our feet, and it’s back to the drawing board.

Patricia Hunt, of Staunton, is a chaplain at Mary Baldwin College.