It’s dinner hour. Our baby grandson has come to visit. His auntie and uncle have arrived from several provinces away, along with his 94-year-old great-grandmother from her retirement residence across town. Conversation, laughter, the clinking of glass and china — until one of our assorted offspring, turning from interviewing Grandma about her accommodation, asks where I plan to live in my old age.

I have given the matter some thought. Really.

“I’m going to build a nice garden shed,” I allow, “and whichever of you needs a house can live here. . . (pause for the punch line). . . and I will live in the shed and appear from time to time for a hot meal.”

Silence around the table. Apparently retirement living is no laughing matter.

In fact, my children are not the only ones interested in my plans. The retirement home industry — while not holding its collective breath over my desire to live simply — is thinking very hard about people like me, born in 1943, and the Baby Boomers who follow right on our heels. There’s so many of us and we’re so used to getting what we want.

As Reginald Bibby of the University of Lethbridge writes in his recently released book, The Boomer Factor, “There has been a major shift from deference to discernment.” We want choice and freedom, individual attention, good relationships and lots of exercise opportunities. (Note: Shed/garden = fitness.)

Furthermore, the Boomers have almost persuaded me that I don’t have to do anything, or live anywhere, out of duty. As Bibby writes, that enormous cohort born between 1946 and 1965 is responsible for “a societal shift from decision-making based on obligation to decision-making based on gratification.”

How can the retirement home industry plan for a future in which everything — the economy, migration patterns, pensions, human resources — is driven by a freedom-loving, comfort-seeking gang who will start turning 65 in four short years, and who will live even longer than their parents? As American researcher Sharon Brooks points out, while today there are 80,000 centenarians in her country, at least 1 million of the Boomers will live to be 100, and “many will live to a ‘natural cap’ of 120 years plus.”

No wonder my children aren’t laughing.

Expectations are incredible
The first consideration for retirement home operators is what those Boomers want. My mother, at her retirement home, is pleased to share the same dining table with the same three women three times a day. As Tony McLean, Senior Vice-president for Research and Program Development at Chartwell REIT, points out, her generation “learned to live communally” during World War II, “got through awful times” during the Depression, and learned to be grateful for small things.

Later generations aren’t like that. And while even the oldest Boomers may have another two decades before their own frailties mark the end of independent living, they want lots of good stuff for the parents they are moving into retirement homes right now. The elderly mother, says McLean, is “going to look through her daughter’s eyes” for a swimming pool and Internet hook-up. “The expectations are incredible.”

According to Gord White, Chief Executive Officer of the Ontario Retirement Communities Association, the Boomers’ anxiety on behalf of those they love is hardly new. “They will be very involved in the process. They will be demanding in the same way for their parents as they were for their children.”

The result is considerably more choice than before. Elisa Prashad, Vice-President of Marketing for Origin Retirement Communities Inc., describes dining arrangements where “six different venues vary what you eat and where you eat each day, like a cruise ship. You might be having a sandwich in the café, and then when the grandkids come, you take them to the ’50s diner.”

For Prashad, who is an Ontario College of Arts and Design graduate, and her husband Neil Prashad, President of Origin and an architect, the attractiveness of the physical surroundings is as crucial as fresh ingredients for the food. In fact, newly built retirement buildings in general are looking better. McLean describes the construction site for one Chartwell long-term care facility as being so besieged by would-be non-senior buyers that they had to put up a sign saying, “This is not a condo.”

Of course, the difference between a retirement residence and a typical condo is more subtle than the arrangement of bricks and mortar. While the morning flight to work may leave a condo virtually empty, at the retirement residence, Elisa Prashad says, “Life is just starting at 9 a.m.: aquatics class, farmers’ market, brain fitness, bone density exercises. It’s more social.”

This is to be expected. While the Boomers famously cherish, in sociologist Bibby’s words, freedom and a “much-sought-after comfortable life,” they have an Achilles’ heel. “What Boomers have not given comparable attention to,” Bibby says, “is the importance of relationships — beginning with their own lives and own homes and extending outward.”

So, the strong market for well-appointed retirement condos might be interpreted as the result of efforts by Boomers to welcome their parents into their lives. Even seniors who can still drive and say they “don’t need my kids to look after me” are selling up in order to buy a condo near “the successful daughter” who left the hometown years ago, says McLean. “As the Baby Boomer lifestyle changes, it changes the behaviour of the 75-year-old.”

In fact, we are all more mobile than before. One in 10 Canadian parents have adult offspring living in another country. Another one in 10 have offspring living in a different province. The numbers are even higher among parents who share a province, but not a community, with their children. Our grandson, presiding in his high chair over his extended family, was on the move with his parents to the other side to the world. Eventually they will need to know I am looked after. That’s why my garden shed won’t do.

But can the boomers afford it
All this, however, costs money, another consideration for those building retirement accommodation. Will the Boomers have enough of it? Despite or because of their modest tastes, pre-Boomers as a group are well-fixed financially. The same war that taught them to live communally also instructed them in the art of working in large organizations, says McLean. They came home, worked hard, saved their money and obeyed the dictum to never “tell people what you earn. Even StatsCan doesn’t know.”

Although they might not admit it, many pre-Boomers can probably afford the granite counter tops their kids want them to have, not to mention the medication support and bathing help they’ll require later. But the Boomers — sandwiched between the costs of their kids’ education and their own mortgage (54 per cent are still paying off their homes) — might find it a stretch to afford the Jacuzzi and a view in retirement.

“Might” is the operative word. The figures are interesting. One in five Boomers has no retirement savings — though only five per cent expect government pensions to provide more than half of their retirement income. Although Canadian governments have planned better than most to avoid huge tax hikes or debt loads arising due to the top-heavy demographics, StatsCan still notes that by 2017, more people will be leaving the work force than entering it.

What Boomers do have is inheritance, an enormous transfer of wealth from the frugal generation before them. And unless they fail to pay off those mortgages, or succumb to a reverse mortgage too early, they will also have a great deal of capital from the sale of their houses.

Whether or not that will be enough to keep them for the remainder of their expected long lives, only time will tell. According to Millie Christie, President of the Ontario Retirement Communities Association, “The first wave of Boomers (now in their 50s) will be able to afford all this, and they’re used to spending their money on themselves.” The later ones, now in their 40s, may not be so fortunate. There won’t be so many defined pension plans, and — lacking the housing-hungry population bulge enjoyed by their older siblings — they may not be able to sell their properties for the same high prices.

Furthermore, if seniors continue to consume triple the health care spending of those under age 65, then by 2025 — with 20 per cent of the population over 65 — those late Boomers could end up financing more of their own medical expenses. They may have to look at “not so much what I want, but what I can afford,” says Christie. The message for a retirement industry deciding now what and how much to build, she says, is to develop “a product without a lot of overhead and debt.”

It’s a bit of a Rubik’s Cube. Everything changes as you twist one factor. Perhaps the Boomers will be healthier longer, and therefore consume less health care. Harvard Economics professor David Cutler suggests incoming elderly — who enjoyed all that cod liver oil and orange juice as youngsters, stopped smoking or never started, take hypertension medication before they have a stroke, and never, as children, suffered as many infectious diseases as their parents — may also enjoy lower rates of disability.

Perhaps the Boomers will be content to live where housing is inexpensive. (Elliot Lake, Ont., offers a prime example, along with great sunsets and bird-watching.) Origin Retirement Communities prefers to put money into amenities, Prashad says, rather than paying the highest land prices, so chooses sites that are accessible to large urban centres with “lower land values” like Orangeville, Ont., or Nanaimo, B.C., instead of downtown Toronto or Vancouver.

Perhaps some Boomers will pay a premium to live downtown. Economist Linda Nazareth suggests that many Boomers like arts and culture, the convenience of mass transit and “lots of medical care.” Cities, she concludes, “just might end up being big winners in the Boomer-relocation lottery.”

Clearly, thoughtful choices must be made. John Colangeli, Chief Executive Officer of Lutherwood, in Waterloo, Ont., which includes the retirement complex Luther Village on the Park, points to the advantage
of locating in the downtown of a mid-sized city near a university campus. “The synergy is incredible,” he says. It means nearby gerontology research, professors willing to offer lectures, perhaps a teaching hospital, parks and “a huge labour pool” of students.


The workers may be few
A diminishing labour pool — the “Boomers didn’t have enough children,” in White’s blunt words — is another challenge. It spotlights the rather likeable generation that follows them. Bibby, who has studied post-Boomers extensively, says they may have learned from the relational errors of their parents to place a balanced life ahead of work. While they share the Boomers’ emphasis on “education, discernment and information,” they are “harmonizing” these themes with a desire for “good relationships, time to focus on their children, social compassion, spiritual fulfillment and the opportunity to simply enjoy life.”

This is both bad and good news for retirement residence operators.

Few in numbers, and disinclined to stay without good reason and a decent paycheque, post-Boomer employees will have to be kept happy. Retirement homes, forced to compete with higher-paying hospitals for medically trained personnel, will need “to think outside the box,” says Christie.

Operators who opt to include nursing or hospice care might begin to mentor, train and supervise “unregulated care providers” to do some tasks now done by registered practical nurses, for instance. Many of those services are provided informally earlier in the community. “Families do this all the time,” Christie says. “ Properly trained and properly overseen,” others can do the same.

While many retirement communities will provide the opportunity to “age in place,” going from active living to assisted living to long-term care, others will opt to provide more services and amenities for the able-bodied. Residents will simply hire their own care providers when and if required.

But they will all need staff.

Prashad says Origin works hard to develop staff loyalty, with full benefit plans and subsidized access to the same meals enjoyed by residents (a form of “quality assurance” that also gives employees the “energy to deal with their responsibilities.”) Talent is rewarded by promotion — “we never pigeonhole someone in their role.” — and by financial help with further education, if necessary.

The good news is that those relational skills enjoyed by the post-Boomers just might mesh with the needs of retirement communities. “It’s such a neat business,” Prashad says. This is “not like a hotel where you don’t get to know your clients.”

Home services too
The future, then, looks promising. A lot of variables are in play, but the industry is innovative and the Boomers, in their high numbers, are coming. It’s always good to get a complete overview, though. According to Colangeli, “We can’t plan in isolation.” He feels that a more “holistic” approach is needed, one in which the retirement industry, both the non-profit and for-profit sectors, brings solutions as well as problems to those who create the policy framework in which retirement living exists. “Everyone,” he says, “needs to be on board: the city, regional, provincial and national governments.”

The “greying of the suburbs,” for instance, bears watching as the urban sprawl continues. As seniors become “less able to steam around,” how will they cope with a “car-dependent culture? What about going to the doctor, to the library?” Low-density suburbs are environmentally unsustainable, he says, and are “practically unsustainable for the elderly” as well.

We’d be wise, as a nation, to have an eye to walkable communities that allow us to remain in our homes for a longer time. Retirement residences might look at providing packages of in-home services, including adult daycare and respite care. “Most people will live in their own home and die in their own home,” White points out. The Beacon Hill model, in which a group of tough-minded seniors in Boston banded together to hire medical and maintenance services in their own homes, could well spring up here, he says, among “naturally-occurring clusters of people.”

One thing is certain. Retirement residences will be “more flexible,” White says. I look around my crowded table — the baby has begun bashing his sippy cup on my glass to encourage more toasts — and hope that he is right. I am pretty clear, myself, what I will want in my old age. The same things as this baby’s great-grandmother wants: people who treat me with dignity; kind relationships; and perhaps because of the Boomers, I will also want freedom, beauty and individual choice.

If I wear out some day — as we all do — then I will (oh, a long time from now) move to the retirement community that figures out how to offer me all that at a price I can afford. To that end, I hope the industry prospers, and even overbuilds a bit. As Millie Christie says, “Some will hit the nail on the head, and some won’t. It’s really emerging and quite exciting.”

For boomers and seniors interested in the above article, Comfort Life magazine and website list many homes that are well prepared for "the boomer bulge." Search Comfortlife.ca for retirement homes