With a Little Help from Our Friends: Creating Community as We Grow Older

12. Design for Life: Building Homes and Neighborhoods That Serve Us

159 Chapter 12 Design for Life Building Homes and Neighborhoods That Serve Us remodeler Stephen hage is a man with a mission. It began twenty years ago, when he was having a beer after work with a friend. Steve was at a crossroads. he and his business partner had parted company , and Steve felt dissatisfied with his remodeling work. “I thought, do I want to keep doing granite countertops?” he recalls. “I could. But do I want to?” his friend told him he should look up a guy named Louis tenenbaum, an expert in the emerging field of aging in place. One thing led to another and Steve ended up working with tenenbaum for a decade. “It became my life’s work,” he said. “It was what I was supposed to do. It combined my building skills with my sense of ministry—of wanting to reach people.” Most people probably don’t imagine such fervor coming from the guy who installs their grab bars. But to Steve, the idea of making your home environment serve your needs is an important and meaningful goal that he can help you achieve. In the beginning, he said, “We were a voice in the desert.” he did all he could think of to market the idea of adapting people’s homes. he contacted discharge planners of hospitals and rehabilitation centers to no avail. “The real problem has been a disconnect between the medical and the practical,” he said. hospitals blithely discharge patients to their homes which can be accidents waiting to happen. Individuals are left to their own devices to decide how to make their homes safe—or not. too often, the result is people fall, sending them back to the hospital. In fact, one in three people over sixty-five fall each year, according to the National Council on aging.1 That can lead to a cascade of events that end in the nursing home or in death. to help prevent such problems, Steve hage started his small company, Strategies for Independent Living. I met with him in his home office, a few blocks from mine, along with my friend Isabelle Schoenfeld, a federal govern- 160 With a Little Help from Our Friends ment retiree who also wants to spread the gospel of aging in place and universal design. We began by talking about the language of design—and how the ongoing denial of aging can be a barrier to change. “The term ‘aging in place’ itself is a problem,” Steve said. “anyone over sixty will resist that language.” Still, he does see change, and a new vocabulary emerging. he and others are experimenting with different terms to describe what they do: “Smart design,” “livability,” “visitability,” “adaptability,” and so on. a home with “visitability,” explained Steve, basically means that someone in a wheelchair would be able to enter your house for a visit and use the bathroom while there. I would have loved to have had “visitability” in our home when my mother was alive. after frequent falls and broken bones, she spent the last year of her life using a wheelchair and had to move to the assisted living building on the campus of her retirement community. to our frustration, it was very difficult for her to come visit us, even though we were just a half hour apart. Our home has eight steps to the front porch, and even though we have two bathrooms on the first floor, neither is accessible for someone in a wheelchair. hopefully, Mom’s predicament will become a rarity over time. Increasingly , designers and architects are thinking in terms of universal design—planning homes that work for everyone. In australia, the construction industry adopted voluntary standards to make all new housing accessible by 2020.2 The standards, developed by the housing industry and disability advocates, set as a baseline that new homes will have a stepless entry, wide doors and halls, a ground-floor bathroom, a “hobless” shower without a rim on the floor to allow wheelchair access, and reinforced walls to allow grab bars to be installed. Jon Sanford, director of the Center for assistive technology and environmental access at the Georgia Institute of technology, explains the difference between universal design and accessibility. “accessibility by definition is designed for people with disabilities,” he said. “Universal design by definition is design for everybody, including people with disabilities. accessible design is primarily about removing barriers in the environment, where with universal design there aren’t any barriers...