‘Greying of suburbia’ may get worse

Press, 14 October 1986, Page 18

‘Greying of suburbia’ may get worse

PA Wellington Commercial interests in retirement packages would worsen the “greying of suburbia” by segregating old people according to age and income, a recent study says. Two Canadian professors of geography made a case study of special housing supply and the distribution of elderly people in metropolitan Auckland.

The authors, Messrs Brent Hall and Alun Joseph, said among factors that set the elderly apart from the rest of society was their need for special accommodation, such as geriatric rest homes, pensioner flats and retirement complexes.

In New Zealand the private sector was now more active as a supplier of elderly housing than ever before, with planned retirement complexes at Titirangi and on Whangaparaoa Peninsula. Messrs Hall and Joseph said that while this gave more lifestyle options for the elderly, the relative luxuries offered by priv-ate-sector entrepreneurs further polarised quality

of life after retirement. “It appears there is the need -for some regulation of special housing supply which explicitly provides for the low-income elderly,” the study said.

“Without such intervention, the market response to the increased demand for elderly housing will only serve the needs of those with strong equity,” it concluded.

Messrs Hall and Joseph said the ageing of the “1950 s baby boom cohort” would mean by the second decade of next century, one person in five in all developed countries would be aged over 60.

The study said that overseas research was already being done into the expected increased demand for specialised housing, but said that very little research had yet focused on the elderly in New Zealand.

Messrs Hall and Joseph said this was in spite of the fact that New Zealand has almost twice the number of old people living in some form of special housing as the United States and Britain.