|
|
Big Cities Are
Havens for Aging Population
By Ruth Walker, www.news.harvard.edu
April 26, 2007
The phrase “retirement communities” calls to mind a
number of different kinds of places — high-end gated communities or
whole cities built from scratch in Sun Belt states like Florida and
Arizona. Or perhaps even dismal trailer parks under the hot breath of a
developer who wants to turn the whole place into high-rise condos.
For most people, the phrase probably doesn’t suggest the great world
cities of New York, London, Paris, and Tokyo. But it should. That’s what
Victor G. Rodwin, professor of health policy and management at New York
University’s Graduate School of Public Service, told an audience in
Askwith Lecture Hall at Longfellow Hall April 20.
“Already today there are places where almost 20 percent of the
population is 65 years old or more,” Rodwin said. Florida is one of
them; Italy is another. Others include certain neighborhoods in New
York, London, Paris, and Tokyo.
“The trends point to one obvious conclusion — so obvious that most
people don’t talk about it — and it’s that cities will be where older
people live. We typically talk about population aging as if it doesn’t
matter where you live.” But it does matter, Rodwin said. “And not just
what city, but what neighborhood.”
Rodwin was speaking at the symposium “Perspectives from the Future:
Tomorrow’s World as Defined by Today’s Research and Planning.” The
symposium marked the 30th anniversary of the Harvard Institute for
Learning in Retirement.
Rodwin and his Columbia University colleague Michael K. Gusmano have
been studying the four cities as mega-examples of what gerontologists
call NORCs — naturally occurring retirement communities. They’re looking
for policy lessons from the experience of these places.
Rodwin noted that the United States and Europe have witnessed a “quiet
revolution” in longevity — with life expectancy increasing an average of
three months per year over the past 30 years. From 1900 to 2000, life
expectancy at 65 has increased from 12 to 18 years.
Rodwin’s four cities “happen to be the largest cities of some of the
wealthiest countries in the world,” he explained. These world cities
exercise a disproportionate influence on their countries and the rest of
the world. And each has a tradition of seeing itself as unique and
incomparable, although there’s a long tradition of comparative studies
among them.
Despite the claims of what Rodwin called “the urban health penalty
literature,” his own research finds the health status of seniors living
in cities to be the same as or better than that of those living in the
rest of their respective countries. A 65-year-old male in Manhattan in
2000, for instance, could count on 17 more years, whereas the life
expectancy of his counterpart elsewhere in the United States was 16.3
years.
Nor should age necessarily be correlated with poverty: New York City
census tracts with high proportions of residents aged 65-plus include
some of the wealthiest neighborhoods in New York. And productivity in
later years, even by the crude measure of labor force participation, is
higher than stereotypes might suggest.
In Manhattan in 2000, 27.2 percent of men and 13.6 percent of women aged
65-plus were in the labor force. Inner London had roughly similar
numbers. In Inner Tokyo, 53 percent of the men and 24 percent of the
women aged 65 or more were in the labor force in 1995. (Mandatory
retirement laws in France make Paris the outlier here.)
Yet if aging is not always associated with vulnerability, it certainly
is sometimes. The 9/11 attacks in New York City, Hurricane Katrina in
New Orleans, and the summer 2003 heat wave in France, blamed for nearly
15,000 deaths, are examples of events that lay bare the isolation of
some seniors.
In all four of Rodwin’s world cities, local government steps in to fill
gaps in national health care and other services for the elderly. One of
the challenges is targeting services for the elderly to their
neighborhoods.
In keeping with the implicit theme that “all aging is local,” Rodwin and
his colleague have mapped the locations of the vulnerable elderly in New
York City.
He presented his “vulnerability index,” which scores census tracts by
several different measures, including the proportion of seniors living
alone, the proportion of those below poverty level, the proportion of
those “linguistically isolated,” the rate of “avoidable
hospitalizations” (when problems that should have been treated by a
primary physician lead to an emergency room visit instead), and the
number of “walk-ups” and vacant lots.
When these data are mapped, it’s obvious that the vulnerabilities are
clustered geographically in places like Harlem and the Lower East Side.
The event was co-sponsored by the Kennedy School of Government New
England Alumni Association Inc.
|
|
