Recent Trends affecting Senior Housing Design: Aging in Place - Flexiblity and Future Convertibilty
The aging population and increased life expectancy has driven service delivery to a point in which independent living resident services are now competing with lighter care assisted living. Projects designed years ago as independent living are becoming more and more service intensive (Catered Care), and are “aging in place” along with the residents. The trend in the past has been geared toward more defined packaging of services and living arrangements: i.e. if an aging independent senior needed more services, they would be moved them to assisted living.
The goal must be to design projects flexible enough in their ability to deliver services, and in the size and layout of resident apartments and common spaces, to allow the resident to stay in their “home” as long as they possibly can. This trend affects the design of current senior campuses as well as long term master-planning of future senior projects. Projects should be designed to meet the future challenges of additional security, handicap accessibility, and resident movement as the population ages in place.
Campus sites should also be master-planned to create more independent resident housing as the independent housing “ages in place” into more catered care and assisted living models. Consideration must also be given to the design of some “neighborhood” assisted living models to be convertible to future skilled care facilities. This can add significant up-front costs to a project (i.e. non-combustible construction materials for skilled care vs. wood framed for assisted living), but the ability to license the project as skilled care in the future as residents age in place may, in the long run, outweigh the additional initial project costs.
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