A Bold but Sensible Proposal! Part 1
Let’s utilize the
buildings and homes in the suburbs soon to be vacated by the people whose
families have grown and dispersed. Let’s renovate and rebuild them as shared
and assisted living for us as we age. Let’s use the existing Municipal Agencies
to finance and service the needs of the new people occupying them in the same
manner and with the same economy they did in building the original family
oriented suburbs as they have existed.
My last posting Part
XI The Metamorphoses, subtitled: Suburbs
are showing their age (Click
on it to go there and read it), I found significant. Although the article was
written of my home area, Minneapolis, it fits the profile of Anywhere USA.
It describes the vast
Suburban Metamorphosis rapidly unfolding before our very eyes. It highlights
one of the many ingredients we face aging in and aging as a culture. It
underscores our need to renovate the community service capability one of the
many factors that led to the growth of each of the suburban living models.
Cost of living coupled
with the ease of transportation facilitated by automobile and the roadway
system improved and expanded after WWII started the change.
Following on its heels
services within the community were designed to attract and provide for the
demographic character of the population needed to fill the space in the
suburbs. The population came in droves generating yet further demographic need.
It was self-actualizing
The suburbs attracted
working families. Their attraction was to geographical room in which to live
and build affordable single family homes to live in. This generated families
with little children. Children required parks, playgrounds, safe neighborhoods
and good schools. The suburbs generated these
The living style they
serviced were these many families with children the service geared to the
community needs of the many children in it. As time moved along the
children have been educated, they have had children, the same needs
proliferated and the suburbs multiplied extending finally into exurbs.
Within this same
period of time a distinct change occurred with the demographic makeup of the
society. We have all become older. We have reached that time where the older
percentage of us is growing in number and the younger percentage of us is
reducing in number.
This has changed the
suburb. There are far less children with need and far more seniors with needs
unmet. If we choose to continue to occupy the communities in a territorial
spread rather than in a centralized nucleus as once our communities were, it is
important for us to provide for the needs of the population now occupying each
of these communities.
If we do not the
suburbs will atrophy, their infrastructure decay and we will need to rebuild
the core of our cites. They will need to do this to accommodate the people
leaving the suburbs. The peoples leaving the “burbs” are doing so as the
children leave home and the communities can neither serve them nor can they
afford to maintain their composition because they are essentially communities
designed for families with children. These families are now staying in the
inner city or the near suburbs.
If we act now to stem
the deterioration and utilize the existing built and paid for infrastructure,
operating out of an existing system of municipal services with established
living areas and people living in them, we can both save and serve the people
there. Those people so served will then have cause to stay there and continue
paying the lesser cost of the physical model they occupy.
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