Creating Aging-Friendly Communities in Wisconsin

Published by the University of Texas Press in April 2012 is a book edited by Henry Cisneros, Margaret Dyer-Chamberlain, and Jane Hickie.  Both the Foreward by John Rowe and Chapter 1 by Henry Cisneros can be accessed online:  https://www.utexas.edu/utpress/excerpts/excisind.html#ex3

Note: Henry Cisneros served as the 10th Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in the Clinton administration (1993 to 1997) and also as the major of San Antonio, Texas.

Here is a useful resource for researching affordable senior housing in Wisconsin:

http://seniorhousing.botw.org/states/wisconsin/

The AARP Public Policy Institute recently published a report entitled, Aging in Place: A State Survey of Livability Policies and Practices.  The policies and practices mentioned in the report include integrating land use, housing and transportation; efficiently delivering services in the home; providing more transportation choices, particularly for older adults who no longer drive; and improving affordable, accessible housing to prevent social isolation.  The report can be accessed and downloaded as a pdf file from: http://www.aarp.org/home-garden/livable-communities/info-11-2011/Aging-In-Place.html

In 2006, the Federal/Provincial/Territorial Ministers Responsible for Seniors (Canada) endorsed the “Age-Friendly Rural/Remote Communities Initiative”. The Initiative had two objectives: (a) To increase awareness of what seniors need to maintain active, healthy and productive lives within their communities by identifying indicators of age-friendly rural or remote communities, and (b) to produce a practical guide that rural and remote communities across Canada can use to identify common barriers, and to foster dialogue and action that supports the development of aging-friendly communities.  A copy of this Guide can be accessed on the following website: http://www.phac-aspc.gc.ca/seniors-aines/publications/public/healthy-sante/age_friendly_rural/index-eng.php

On Tuesday, November 15, 2011, the Administration on Aging and the National Center on Senior Transportation will sponsor a webinar entitled,  “Successful Collaboration Between Aging and Transit: The Experience of Kent County, Michigan”.  The webinar will be from 2-3:30 pm EST.

To register (space is limited), please go to the administration on aging.

This ninety minute webinarwill provide information on a successful collaboration between aging and transit that uses person-centered mobility management as a tool to assist older adults in identifying the right mobility option to meet their needs.  Mobility management is a systems approach to managing transportation resources that, as defined by the National Resource Center for Human Transportation Coordination, emphasizes: movement of people instead of vehicles; improvements to the effectiveness, efficiency and quality of the
travel services being delivered; design and promotion of transit-oriented development, livable communities and energy efficient sustainable communities and improvements in the information that is available about those
services.  The webinar will feature the experience of Ridelink, a person centered transportation system for seniors in Kent County, Michigan.

Participants will: (a) Identify opportunities for collaboration between aging/human services transportation services and public transit; (b) Understand how person-centered mobility management can be used to address the mobility needs of older adults, (c) Learn about successful efforts to meet the mobility needs of minority older
adults, and (d) Gain information about replicable approaches for informing and supporting older adults’ transportation decisions.

Presenters:

Danielle Nelson, Aging Service Program Specialist, Administration on Aging

Karen Wolf-Branigin, Director, National Center on Senior Transportation

Sandra Ghoston-Jones, Area Agency on Aging of Western Michigan

Meegan Joyce, Special Service Manager, Interurban Transit

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has a Health Community Design 101 slideshow for individuals and communities  who want to learn more about how the physical design of communities can affect our physical and mental health. The slideshow is on the CDC’s Health Places website: http://www.cdc.gov/healthyplaces/media.htm

Future plans are to develop slide sets on specific healthy community design topics so that speakers can customize the general presentation.

Note: This post was contributed by Judith Knudsen, Family Living Educator in Brown County, WI.

Here is a link to a July 9th Associated Press article addressing the topic of population aging in cities: http://www.ajc.com/news/nation-world/aging-boomers-strain-cities-1006899.html .  Highlighted in the article are examples of iniatives that New York City has undertaken in order to become more “aging-friendly” (example: using idle school buses to take seniors grocery shopping).

By 2015, more than 15.5 million Americans 65 and older will live in communities where public transportation service is poor or non-existent. That number is expected to continue to grow rapidly as the baby boom generation “ages in place” in suburbs and exurbs with few mobility options for those who do not drive.

Aging in Place – Stuck without Options, a 2011 report by Transportation for America, ranks metro areas by the percentage of seniors with poor access to public transportation, now and in the coming years, and presents other data on aging and transportation. A copy of the report may be downloaded from the following website: http://t4america.org/resources/seniorsmobilitycrisis2011

The analysis by the Center for Neighborhood Technology evaluates metro areas within each of five size categories. It shows that in just four years, 90 percent of seniors in metro Atlanta will live in neighborhoods with poor access to options other than driving, the worst ranking among metro areas with populations over 3 million. In that size category, metro Atlanta is followed by the Riverside-San Bernardino, CA metro area, along with Houston, Detroit and Dallas. Kansas City tops the list for metros of 1-3 million, followed by Oklahoma City, Fort Worth, Nashville and Raleigh-Durham.

A five-year, $9.5 million grant has been awarded to a collaborative research program led by the Center for Health Enhancement Systems Studies (CHESS) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The purpose of the grant is to develop innovations that help older adults remain in their homes as long as possible. The grant comes from the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), whose mission is to improve the quality, safety, efficiency and effectiveness of health care for all Americans.

The grant will bring the center’s research team together with engineers from two other research centers based in the UW-Madison Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering: the Driving Simulation Laboratory and the RFID Laboratory. Experts from UW-Madison’s Mass Communication Research Center, geriatricians, specialists from Wisconsin’s State Bureau of Aging and Disability Resources and community advocates from around the state will also participate in the collaborative. The Wisconsin Institute for Healthy Aging and some of the state’s Aging and Disability Resource Centers will be implementing and demonstrating new approaches. All will work together as an Active Aging Research Center to solve the problems that often cause older adults to leave their homes: falls, unreliable home care, difficulty managing a chronic disease, and declining driving skills.

Principal investigator David H. Gustafson, professor of industrial engineering at UW-Madison, directs the project, titled “Bringing Communities and Technology Together for Healthy Aging.”

Says Gustafson, “This study holds great potential for helping older adults continue to live long and productive lives in their own homes. It’s also an exciting opportunity for state and local governments to work together with the university to achieve this goal.”

America is aging — a fact that advocates are pushing Congress to consider as it  takes up a new transportation bill. Their goal is more safety for older  Americans, on both roads and sidewalks. Here is a link to an NPR story on making streets and sidewalks more “aging-friendly”: http://www.npr.org/2011/05/24/136585282/as-seniors-increase-a-push-to-make-streets-safer