310. Aging in place plus

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Aging in place

One of my (older) cousins is having health problems and so they are considering moving into an "independent living" complex. They have a website, of course, so I checked the place out. It's nice enough... if I could redecorate everything and move it to an urban location.

But it got me thinking about the best way to handle housing for people who are not getting any younger. Most people would prefer to "age in place." But our built environment was not constructed with Universal Design in mind (designing spaces to work for the frail elderly and disabled as well as people who can dance up stairs.) The best workaround for that is for people some time after they are 55, to move into independent living complexes that are designed with these future limitations in mind. Both my mother and my aunt lived in one of these places, so I'm quite familiar with them. They are very similar to a regular apartment complex with a few extra features and a few drawbacks. But they usually work well until people get into their eighties and start needing even more "assistance." That's why these complexes usually also have an "assisted living" section. This tends to be a fairly posh nursing home.

Also, around fifteen years ago when both my parents were making their exits in hospitals, it occurred to me that for many people, a good hotel would be a better (and often cheaper) alternative to a loud and chaotic hospital. Hospitals are designed for the convenience of doctors, not patients. 

So combining these two trains of thought, it occurred to me today that something very like our Four Seasons Hotel and Residences could be an ideal solution to many of these problems. The Four Seasons Hotel has retail at ground level (on Market Street) that I would replace with an Urgent Care operation. Above is a large fitness center, that I would keep, along with the usual ballrooms and the like. Above that are many floors of hotel rooms, and above those are many floors of condos. I'm pretty sure you can get room service in the condos.

In my vision, the Building would negotiate with hotel operators to get a tenant that would operate the hotel while providing some services to the residents above at reasonable rates: room service, discount dining, discount rooms for guests. There would be similar negotiation with the fitness center and Urgent Care tenants.

Optionally, the high-rise residential section would follow my "Medieval Urban Sky-street" model so it isn't just stacked, double-loaded corridors. (In which case the residential area would be below and the hotel section above.) 

You would move in some time after turning 55 when you were still working (in the Medieval Urban Sky-street case you might even move your business into the building with you.) As you aged, you might take advantage of additional "aging-in-place" services or you might move into a smaller unit or even sub-let your business space. You would probably make more use of room service and Urgent Care (a quick elevator ride away.) Your actual world might shrink, over time, to mostly just the building, but the building would offer most of the services you needed. If you eventually became house-bound, necessary services would be available to bring what you needed to your unit.

Devolution

Just when I think the tenants in my building can't get any dumber when it comes to disposing of their trash I'm proved wrong. I now accept that they can't distinguish between the three color coded toters, but now someone -- I'm assuming the most recent addition -- is putting their trash into the small can we have next to the dryer for the disposal of lint and other odds and ends. 

Today I finally gave up and pulled that can off the floor and replaced it with a tiny container. If she just puts her bag of trash on top of that, I may snap. This would make for interesting jury selection at the trial as prosecution and defense quiz the jury pool on their feelings about recycling and proper trash disposal. 

Education

Speculation - what is the best way to develop character for either the average person or the troubled person?

I'm not a huge fan of Plato (or you could say Socrates, though I'm not entirely confident with Plato's account of Socrates), but I do have my Republic moments when I think how I would order things if it were up to me. I've always seen the ideal educational system evaluating individuals to see in what way (if any) they excel, and then helping them develop those skills. This would include addressing weaknesses -- in much the same way the US Navy helped its young officers develop -- but I don't usually see the role of education as turning people into something they aren't by nature. Admittedly, this reflects my personal preference for following the route of least resistance.

But even I acknowledge that there is no such thing as a route of no resistance. Learning to deal with various kinds of resistance is also necessary. I know the least steep routes to most everywhere in SF, but when you live near the top of a hill, you eventually have to climb. 

To return to the great books again, I would not pick difficult books, like Fernand Braudel's, to tempt students into a field of study, but once they had discovered an interest, I would then encourage books like this. To change subjects, I might recommend The Elegance of the Hedgehog to lure people into both the Russian novels and the philosophy of the 19th and 20th centuries. Rather than having them start with The Brothers Karamazov or The Birth of Tragedy or (God forbid) something by Kant.