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As young people leave suburbs, aging population taxes resources

The Vindicator, January 15, 2003

Youngstown has one of the highest percentages of elderly residents in the country.

Alice Hilliard's job — helping out older residents around Pittsburgh — has gotten more difficult over the past decade.

Like many other places in the Northeast and Midwest, the Pittsburgh suburbs underwent a demographic shift in the 1990s. Many younger families left for better job opportunities, leaving large populations of older residents.

That leaves people like Hilliard, director of Eastern Area Adult Services in Wilkinsburg, Pa., struggling to find the money and volunteers to help care for the aged, an especially challenging task for financially strapped communities and outreach groups. In the Pittsburgh suburbs, 18 percent of all residents are senior citizens.

"Sometimes we sit and hold our heads and think, 'How is this all going to come together?'" said Hilliard. They did find money recently to open an adult day-care center and information kiosks in two malls.

Providing transportation for the elderly to visit doctors or senior centers can also be a major problem for a suburb, said Mary Ellen Walsh, director of the Amherst Center for Senior Services in suburban Buffalo, N.Y.

"In the city you have access to public transportation, but in suburbs and rural areas, you don't, and that's a big issue because people are so spread out," Walsh said Tuesday.

Moved away

Many couples moved to the suburbs to raise families in the mid-20th century. When factories closed and the economies of industrial cities declined during the latter decades, younger people moved away.

Many headed South and West, where jobs were more plentiful. Once their parents reached retirement age, they sought warmer weather, moving to places like Sarasota, Fla., Phoenix and Las Vegas.

About 35 million people 65 and older now live in the United States, roughly 12 percent of the population. Nearly 30 percent of the people in the suburbs of Sarasota are 65 or over, the highest among the 102 most populous metropolitan areas in the nation, according to a Brookings Institution study of Census Bureau figures being released today.

Other areas

Two other Florida retirement centers, West Palm Beach and Tampa-St. Petersburg, were next on the list. The remaining top 20 suburban areas, based on percentage of elderly residents, were dominated by Northeast and Midwest suburbs around cities like Pittsburgh, Buffalo and Youngstown.

The 65-and-over population in the suburbs of El Paso, Texas, rose 83 percent between 1990 and 2000, the largest gain of any metropolitan area. Las Vegas, Colorado Springs, Colo., Honolulu and Tucson, Ariz., had the next four largest gains.

University of Michigan demographer William Frey, who wrote the Brookings report, said boomtowns in the South and West generally have stronger economic bases to provide senior services than do the more depressed suburbs of the Northeast and Midwest.

Still, dealing with a huge influx of new older residents in a faltering economy isn't easy anywhere, said Pat Amaincangioli, a volunteer with the Clark County, Nev., Senior Advocate Program, which offers referrals for older people in Las Vegas and its suburbs.

"We are going to have all those baby boomers here soon," she said.

"And because of the recent economic unrest, they are not going to have their 401(k) plans."