Creating Safer and Kinder Districts to Grow Old
To make it safer for older people, the city added four seconds to the time pedestrians are given to cross intersections like Broadway and 72nd Street.
By ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS
New York City has given pedestrians more time to cross at more than 400 intersections in an effort to make streets safer for older residents. The city has sent yellow school buses, filled not with children but with elderly people, on dozens of grocery store runs over the past seven months.
The city has allowed artists to use space and supplies in 10 senior centers in exchange for giving art lessons. And it is about to create two aging-improvement districts, parts of the city that will become safer and more accessible for older residents.
People live in New York because it is like no place else — pulsating with life, energy and a wealth of choices — but there is some recognition among city planners that it could be a kinder and gentler place in which to grow old.
The city’s efforts, gaining strength as the baby boomer generation starts reaching retirement age, are born of good intentions as well as an economic strategy.
“New York has become a safer city, and we have such richness of parks and culture that we’re becoming a senior retirement destination,” said Linda I. Gibbs, New York’s deputy mayor for health and human services. “They come not only with their minds and their bodies; they come with their pocketbooks.”
The round trip back to cities among empty nesters, rejoining those who simply grow old where they were once young, goes on, of course, across the country, and New York is not the only place trying to ease that passage. Cities like Cleveland and Portland, Ore., have taken steps to become more “age-friendly.” But perhaps never has a city as fast-paced and youth-oriented as New York taken on the challenge.
The Department of City Planning predicts that in 20 years, New York’s shares of schoolchildren and older people will be about the same, 15 percent each, a sharp change from 1950, when schoolchildren outnumbered older residents by more than 2 to 1. By 2030, the number of New Yorkers age 65 and over — a result of the baby boomers, diminished fertility and increasing longevity — is expected to reach 1.35 million, up 44 percent from 2000.
Their economic power is significant. About a third of the nation’s population is over 50, and they control half of the country’s discretionary spending, according to a recent report by AARP, a group representing the interests of retirees. In some ways, the city has tackled the toughest challenges of making itself attractive to its older residents and those across the country who might consider retiring to the Upper East Side or Brooklyn Heights.
Crime has been in decline for close to two decades; the city has added more parkland than at any similar period in its history; and the 311 system has made dealing with the bureaucracy of government agencies and social services more manageable.
Now, the city is looking to enhance life here in more modest, but meaningful, ways. The New York Academy of Medicine adopted the idea of creating an age-friendly city from the World Health Organization in 2007, and went to the City Council and the Bloomberg administration for financial and political support. The academy has held more than 30 town hall meetings and focus groups with thousands of older people across the city. This summer, it is holding more intimate focus groups in East Harlem and on the Upper West Side.
What people say they want most of all is to live in a neighborly place where it is safe to cross the street and where the corner drugstore will give them a drink of water and let them use the bathroom. They ask for personal shoppers at Fairway to help them find the good deals on groceries. They want better street drainage, because it is hard to jump over puddles with walkers and wheelchairs.
“No bingo played here” could be Ms. Gibbs’s motto. She is the conceptual artist behind the city’s initiative, working with the Academy of Medicine. She is at the tail end of the boomer generation, having turned 51 on Sunday, her silvery bob a rebuke to fears of aging.
“The whole conversation around aging has, in my mind, gone from one which is kind of disease oriented and tragic, end- of-life oriented,” Ms. Gibbs said, to being “much more about the strength and the fidelity and the energy that an older population contributes to our city.”
One of her ideas is to hold a contest to design a “perch” to put in stores or on sidewalks where tired older residents doing errands could take a break. When boomers talk, she listens.
New York City Aims to Improve Lives of the Elderly - NYTimes.com
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