It's my birthday! Here's a review of my posts about aging and urbanism
Ten years ago today, on my sixtieth birthday, I was sitting in a bar in Sienna, listening to a big conference call where it was announced that Treehugger’s owners, the Discovery Network, had sold us to the Mother Nature Network. I had recently pitched Discovery the idea of a website for active boomers, an idea that has been tried with varying degrees of success, and Emily at MNN gave me an outlet to write about aging and urbanism, a subject I had become obsessed with. When Treehugger was sold to Dotdash Meredith a few years ago, many of these were deemed not to be about sustainability and were removed, but I had made backups.
Today, on my seventieth birthday, I am most definitely not in Sienna. But I am still writing for Treehugger (albeit not much about aging boomers), had a book published, and am still teaching Sustainable Design at what is now Toronto Metropolitan University. My bike has become an e-bike, I traded in my snowboard for cross-country skis and looking back at my posts about aging and urbanism, believe they are still worth reading. Here are my favourites:
The issue for boomers won’t be ‘aging in place’ -It will be “how do I get out of this place?
From MNN, 2018: The oldest baby boomers have just turned 70, and most can drive to their birthday parties. They’re being followed by 70 million other boomers, all happily motoring along. Their parents? Not so good these days. Janet Morrissey of The New York Times looks at the issue of transportation for senior citizens and sees a problem: lack of transportation. I read the article and wanted to scream in all bold capital letters: THIS ISN’T A TRANSPORTATION PROBLEM. IT’S AN URBAN DESIGN PROBLEM! Only once, in the entire article, did it mention that we are in this mess because of the great suburban experiment of designing our world around cars. Read more….
It Won't Be Pretty When Boomers Lose Their Cars
MNN, 2017: My late mother-in-law lived in a lovely side-split house on a cul-de-sac in suburban Toronto, and she stayed there after her daughter left home and even after her husband died 20 years ago. She had a car and could drive to the grocery store and the bank — until she couldn’t any more, and my wife had to drive 45 minutes out there to take her shopping, and to the bank, and to the doctor. Being a side-split, there was a powder room at entry level, a kitchen on the middle level, a bathroom on the upper level. When it got to the point that she could barely walk, it got difficult to decide whether to eat or go to the bathroom. Finally, my wife convinced her to sell the house and junk the car and move to a retirement home. More, still in Treehugger
Why Aging Boomers Need Walkable Cities More Than Convenient Parking
W have a moving target with the 75 million aging baby boomers, the vast majority of whom live in the suburbs and the oldest of whom have just turned 70. Most are still driving, and when you ask those suburban drivers what they want now, it's more lanes and more parking and get rid of those damn bikes.
But in 10 or 15 years, it will be a different story. More in Treehugger
Why the Future of Housing Should Be Multifamily and Multigenerational
When John Kinsley saw an empty property in the Portobello district of Edinburgh, he first thought of building himself a house but it was too expensive. So he ran a notice on a local website looking for like-minded people to put together a little building. More on Treehugger
Baby boomers will be among the hardest hit by climate change (And no, they won’t all be dead before its effects hit us all hard.)
The 16-year-old activist Greta Thunberg complains about older generations: “You say you love your children above all else, and yet you are stealing their future in front of their very eyes.” Bruce Gibney, in “A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America,” wrote “Unlike acid rain, which had immediate impacts on Boomers’ quality of life and was therefore swiftly addressed, climate change is a problem whose consequences will fall most heavily on other generations, so far too little has been done.” And you know what? They’re all wrong in thinking that the baby boomers will all be dead before it hits the fan. More from my archives
Walking While Old Is Killing a Lot More Pedestrians Than Walking While Distracted
While everybody is complaining about young people compromising their hearing and vision with smartphones, the fact is that a huge and growing proportion of our population is compromised by age. Drivers should be driving on the assumption the person in the road is not looking or seeing them, because they might not be able to. More in Treehugger
Architects Know What Aging Boomers Want, but Are They Giving Them What They Need?
When Mr. Blandings wanted to build his dream house, he went to an architect, because architects are supposed to know how to design houses that meet their clients' needs. But that movie came out in 1948 and it seems that things have changed since then. More in Treehugger
Aging boomers: Forget the car, get on a bike
Alex Steffen once wrote in the late lamented Worldchanging discussion forum:
There is a direct relationship between the kinds of places we live, the transportation choices we have, and how much we drive. The best car-related innovation we have is not to improve the car, but eliminate the need to drive it everywhere we go.
One of the problems we face as aging baby boomers is that most of us live in the kinds of places where we don’t have many transportation alternatives to driving. More in my archives
Boomers and E-Bikes Were Made for Each Other
That’s me in Minneapolis, testing a Surly Big Easy. Good e-bikes plus good bike infrastructure equals a whole lot of healthier, happier baby boomers. More in Treehugger
Architecture for the Ages: How Houses Can Adapt to Aging Boomers
Of the 78 million baby boomers in the United States, most appear to want to retire in a nice big, single floor house on a cul-de-sac. Having seen too many of my parent’s generation do that and be totally miserable, I've tried to make the case that boomers should be doing the opposite, and should be looking to live in walkable communities where they won’t be trapped when they're forced to hang up the car keys. More on Treehugger
This House Is Not Designed to Help Anyone Age Gracefully
I had fun with this, a room-by-room takedown of a so-called “NEXTadventure” house which I noted, “it's not only not a very good example of aging in place in, but is in fact probably exactly the opposite, a house that might in fact age you in place.” It’s exactly what we shouldn’t be doing. More in the archives.
Are baby boomers ‘a generation of sociopaths’?
This post got me in so much trouble, with hundreds of comments that called for me to be fired. But I was mad about so many baby boomers fighting progress, bike lanes, and highway removals, I thought “Perhaps calling us sociopaths is a bit strong, but we did mortgage our kids’ futures.” More in the archives. in the same vein during the Trump years, It's Time to Stop Listening to Your Elders and the very controversial Should People Over 70 Lose the Right to Vote?
Boomer Alert!
That’s me in my rowing shell, I am still doing this! Over the years, I have written a series of posts under the heading Boomer Alert, covering various news stories of interest to olders, the term I started using when boomer became unfashionable:
Boomer alert: Exercise keeps your brain young
Get out there and run, bike or row. Why? Because it prevents cognitive decline. From the archives.
Boomer alert: Smartphones keep your brain young
Forget Sudoku: Go play with your phone or computer instead. From the archives
Boomer Alert: You Need Better Lighting to Compensate for Aging Eyes.
Most people have thermostat wars. In our house, we have lighting wars. More in Treehugger
Now off for birthday cake!
Happy birthday Lloyd! In Toronto, your views about aging and urbanism are certainly contrarian. Here in France, the government has decreed that NO additional density can be created, forcing cities and their citizens to do exactly what you prescribe, namely get out of their cars, onto the bicycle or better yet, to go about on foot, and to share their urban footprint with as many fellow citizens as possible. The switch of energy source from carbon to electricity remains to be resolved here however. Still work to do! Wishing you continued success with Carbon Upfront, Ruth Cawker
Bookmarking to read all of these. The titles resonate with me. Watching my parents generation (the depression babies) who never had to take a bus anywhere, either falter trying to cope with old age or some actively refusing to deal with it has made me determined to plan ahead for myself.