Home, Community, and Gerontocracy: Forecasting the Future of Senior Housing

Headnote

Ethnically diverse choices await immigrants who choose to age in place-either near their children, or a world away.

Aging for many involves "the quest for community" (Nisbet, 1969), or an opportunity to live how and where one chooses. For elders in the United States, community has typically meant homogeneous neighborhoods of people with similar income, lifestyle, or health status. In 2025, fifteen years from now, the quest for community could also involve the search for culturally sensitive communities. By this we mean places where residents share a common culture, language, and belief system. Culturally sensitive communities will attract people who immigrated to the United States from cultures with very different understandings of aging-places like Japan, China, India, and Vietnam.

In many ways, the culturally sensitive communities of 2025 will be in but not of the United States. Tomorrow's culturally sensitive communities will proudly borrow from the architecture and interior design traditions of other cultures. Landscaping, color palette, and home furnishings in these communities will feel homelike to people who grew up in India, Japan, or China, but are now living in Florida, California, or Texas.

In addition to creating new forms of housing, the quest for culturally sensitive communities will spawn new specialists to service them. These specialties will include architects, interior designers, and landscape architects who specialize in ethnically themed senior housing as well as geriatric-care managers, social workers, and discharge planners who excel at placing clients in culturally sensitive communities.

The culturally sensitive communities of 2025 will be seedbeds of gerontocracy: places where older people enjoy more power and privilege than they did before relocating. By and large, these communities will attract people who come from gerontocratic cultures: Koreans, Hindus, and older people from China and Japan. But in the absence of extended families, these new gerontocracies will honor people based on health, spirituality, or wisdom.

The coming of culturally sensitive communities for older people will also validate a small but growing sub-specialty within gerontology: a field known as ethnogeriatrics, the study of ethnic differences in social structure and functioning. It is currently taught in medical schools to ensure that physicians are aware of ethnic norms that might shape doctor-patient interaction. The coming of culturally sensitive communities will make ethnogeriatrics more important...