Coming Full Circle: The Future of Retirement Housing

Chris Serold's grandmother, Wilhelmina Smith

In the 60s I attended St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota where there were separate dormitories for girls and boys. There have been many changes at the college since I graduated forty-eight years ago, including in the arrangements for student housing. The dormitories are now co-ed and not even a topic of discussion. When the subject was initially under debate, there were many voices on both sides. It was a big leap for the school.

In 1987 I started my career in retirement housing and it was about that time that a handful of communities started adding Assisted Living, including the one where I was working. Prior to embracing Assisted Living, there were Independent Living Communities and Nursing Homes which provided custodial care. It was that piece, custodial care, that became Assisted Living and only minimal services were provided— among them, dispensing medications and assistance with bathing and dressing. Assistance with such services as transfers, escorts to meals or activities, or checking blood sugar levels, required that an individual live in a nursing home.

It is interesting to have lived long enough to bear witness to and understand the predictableness of the phrase, “the only thing constant in life is change.” Change is everywhere and so predictable.

So, if change is inevitable, I can’t help wondering what retirement housing might look like in the future. That is a daunting thought, but predictable. I have no idea what architects or developers are thinking along these lines but I do have friends and often our conversations turn to the subject of retirement housing. After all, we are the next generation that will make that move, so we talk and what I hear is a desire to have multiple generations under the same roof.

Sound familiar? I think we have come full circle. When I was growing up, my aging grandmother came to live with us and remained in our home till her death ten years later. There were multiple generations, three in fact, living together under one roof.

This time around, will the look and feel of “multiple generations under one roof” be very different? Yes and no. It will be different because the structure won’t be a modest three bedroom, one bathroom home, and different because the occupants won’t be different generations of the same family. It will be different because of how technology has impacted our lives. When my grandmother lived in our house, we moved from a black and white TV to a color TV. Today TV has been overshadowed by the do-everything smart phone, Kindles and Nooks that let us read books electronically, iPads, iPods, Netflix, etc. You name it and we bump into technology every time we turn around.

What won’t change is the people and what we glean from living together. It is true that multigenerational households are on the rise and maybe that is a trend influencing our discussion, but I also think we recognize we’ve lost something by not daily reaching across generations to share and learn from one another.

I am the first to say that life wasn’t always easy with three generations under one roof, but what I can say is I learned an appreciation for the lives of those who went before me. I listened at dinner time to the stories of a time so different from the one I was living, of hardship and what it meant to hope and persevere. I learned to make pie crust from my grandmother who was a stickler for not handling the dough too much. I learned that it took all of us helping and supporting one another. Our lives were simple and we didn’t know the word luxury, but we had a roof over our head, a place to lay our head at night, and enough to eat. And I was surrounded by people who loved me. We had enough. We were, in so many ways, truly rich.

This is what my friends imagine when they express a desire for multigenerational living in retirement, reaching across generations to share and learn from one another.

In Part 2 of this two-part installment on the future of retirement housing, I will explore more specific trends and ideas that are shaping what the future living model might look like.

If you would like to find out why Chateau Retirement Communities are committed to retirement housing, please call us at (425) 488-2400. Also, visit our website at www. ChateauRetirement.com