By ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS
To make streets safer for older residents, New York City has given pedestrians more time to cross at more than 400 intersections. The city has sent yellow school buses, filled not with children but with elderly people, on dozens of grocery store runs.
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, Oregon, 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 two to one. 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.
In some ways, the city has already 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 agefriendly city from the World Health Organization in 2007, and went to the City Council and the mayor’s office for support. The academy has held meetings and focus groups with thousands of older people across the city. 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 want better street drainage, because it is hard to jump over puddles with walkers and wheelchairs. “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.” Her office is pushing two pilot agingimprovement districts, one in East Harlem and the other on the Upper West Side, that would encourage businesses to voluntarily adopt amenities for the elderly.
Examples could include window stickers that identify businesses as age-friendly; extra benches; adequate lighting; menus with large type; and even alcohol discounts for older residents. “Senior centers are great, but they have a stigma whether you like it or not,” said Councilwoman Gale A. Brewer of the Upper West Side. “It’s just not for everybody. But what is for everybody is a bench. What is for everybody is discounts at the grocery store when you’re over 65.”
