Getting Seniors to Downsize
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Small homes are an attractive senior housing option in many ways, but there is always the big question: Will seniors want to move in?
As anyone with any experience with this (including yours truly) will tell you, simply getting a senior loved one to even consider leaving the family home to move anyplace, no matter how impractical or unsafe the home may be, is difficult. Their resistance is understandable, even though looming staircases get ever higher, rooms get tougher to clean and isolation from friends and neighbors continues to grow.
But then, once a move is settled upon, the small home presents the next challenge: adapting to living in a space of, say, 500 to 800 square feet without feeling stifled or cramped, even if the unit is attached to the family home.
Maine builder Christopher Lee has confronted this challenge several times over during the past couple of years. His company Backyard ADUs
www.backyardadus.com based in Portland, Maine, deals with people, usually in their 60s, who are leaving the larger home to family members, but then take one look at the proposed attached ADU and say they’re feeling cramped. They still want to have a sense of comfortable space and enough room for favored pieces of furniture such as large couches and tables. Even though the adult children take it upon themselves to help these seniors adapt to their new environments, Lee has found that much of the onus for their ultimate acceptance is on the designs he provides.
Lee tries to adjust the planned spaces to accommodate the senior dweller’s priorities, be it a larger kitchen, spacious recreational area or well-equipped bathroom. Lee has come up with a variety of floor plans to accommodate individual preferences.
Spaces can be sized, for example, to accommodate those familiar but large pieces of furniture.
Another key issue accompanying any senior downsizing move is availability of storage. Lee (and others) have found that simply getting rid of “stuff” is unavoidable in a senior downsize, and the choices can be painful. For what is remaining, though, the storage must be sufficient and easy to use. One rule of thumb Lee applies is to make storage or retrieval a one-step procedure, avoiding the need to stack or sort things beforehand. The location and sizing of drawers and closets makes this possible.
Two potential small home design features that Lee has yet to see develop yet are use of innovative flexible furniture and movable walls, as seen in today’s groundbreaking microapartment design (click on the category “microapartments” above), as well as supportive sensor technology enabling seniors to be safely monitored from remote sites (click on the category “technology” above). “Most of my customers so far have been people in their sixties who don’t quite yet see the need for any of this or who may not even want it because of privacy concerns.”
He does see change coming, though, witness the experience of his own grandmother who survived a multi-fracture fall and bleeding episode thanks to monitoring technology and Alexa communications devices in her unit alerting emergency medical technicians. “For people moving into their 90s this could be a real possibility.”
Lee’s customers are finding that the cost of an ADU is far more sustainable than other senior living options, with a price of $130,000-140,000, financed at about $600 a month, compared to the thousands a month of the other options. Financing for this has become increasingly available, he notes, especially in relatively high-priced neighborhoods.
Further savings have come from his company’s use of prefabrication, with the offsite manufacturer working from those flexible floor plans and adjusting their materials and manufacturing methods accordingly. These structures can be assembled in a matter of days.
The most challenging aspect from the builders’ perspective is dealing with the multifarious codes and requirements of jurisdictions scattered hither and yon, says Lee. “Every town and county has its own approval process and as a result we have ended up eating a lot of the cost of this so far.”
Hence, one more reminder that even the most enlightened builders and developers must still pay a price for leading the way toward the senior small home option.