“I always just made friends with the old folks," my wife explained to me one day when describing her childhood escapades in a neighborhood of quietly dignified, faded Victorians and a smattering of duplexes and apartments in a small Northeastern city.

For a kid, a neighborhood with this kind of range of ages and walks of life is a rewarding social opportunity, a series of lessons in empathy and generosity, and a chance to learn about the world through others' eyes. For my wife, some nights it was impromptu dinner with Martha and her family. The older couple across the street and four houses down had a Japanese garden with a koi pond in the backyard, and my future wife was swiftly enlisted to help care for the fish. Other neighbors had memorabilia from foreign travels, and no shortage of stories to share. There were always attentive eyes at living-room windows providing free supervision for kid shenanigans, and usually someone who could be cajoled into chaperoning a trip to the neighborhood diner for an order of fries.

For those on the other side of the equation, a neighborhood with a wide range of ages and walks of life also comes with its own very tangible, even quantifiable, rewards. Longtime residents in their 70s and 80s who might have struggled physically to keep up with the requirements of homeownership got the assistance they needed—the kids were invariably drafted, for example, to shovel elderly neighbors' sidewalks and rake their leaves, and were strictly forbidden by their parents to accept payment (except in the form of cookies). It was not at all uncommon for neighbors to pick up and drop off medication or meals for each other. The adult children of aging empty-nesters can derive no small amount of comfort from knowing that familiar faces are keeping an eye on their loved ones from day to day.

This safety net and support network are, perhaps, even more important for those without a flock of their own—maybe they never had children or a partner, or those people are no longer around or able to help. Our neighborhoods need varied living arrangements to accommodate those who don't fit the nuclear-family, detached-house mold—and old, established urban neighborhoods often provide those arrangements, if informally. Think of the single, older renter who lives in a basement apartment or backyard ADU with a longtime landlord who has become a close friend. These scenarios aren't the normative model of what an idyllic American neighborhood is thought to be, but they are very present around us—and more so where the built environment is allowed to openly and easily accommodate them.

My own childhood neighborhood had some of the above characteristics, but the sheer amount of neighborliness and mutual cooperation that my wife describes from her childhood struck me as a "Sesame Street"-esque fantasy at first. Now I just think it sounds wonderful. And essential for our society as we move forward into times that will challenge our institutions and support systems around aging.

What Makes "Aging in Place" Work?

As the Boomer generation hits the crest of its retirement wave, much is going to continue to be made of "aging in place." Surveys consistently show a strong desire among seniors to remain in their communities, but there can be formidable obstacles to doing so as you age and your physical mobility declines, along with your capacity to keep up with such things as home maintenance.

The way most human societies have dealt with this is through the kinds of informal, neighborly support networks described above. When people of different ages and abilities live alongside each other, they can look out for each other and pick up slack. My wife and I were just in her childhood neighborhood for the holidays. She pointed out the homes of people in their 80s and 90s whom she remembers from years ago. Without the support of the neighborhood, it's likely that many of these people would have years ago found a formal retirement community a more manageable option.

The Rise—And Fall?—of Senior Living?

The appeal of 55+ communities is understandable. They offer built-in amenities, and ample social opportunities with those similar to you. They make it simple to access the services you will begin to need. There is a general lack of friction to all of this. Some residents also prefer to avoid the noise and disruption that can come with having many kids and families around.

Places like The Villages, Florida are the apotheosis of this trend—a whole city built from scratch just for seniors, who have thus freed themselves of the burden of even paying taxes to support a school system. These places are still booming now, riding the demographic wave. But what happens to them when that wave crests and starts to subside?

“OK Boomer, Who's Going to Buy Your 21 Million Homes?” the Wall Street Journal asked provocatively last November, in one of a growing genre of articles about the impending market tsunami that’s expected when the bulk of the retired homeowners of the generation that still defines American homeownership no longer want to or are able to “age in place.” This is a challenge for individual households, but its impact is going to be tectonic when it comes to entire neighborhoods where most homeowners are of a similar age and situation—because they were built all at once, on a cookie-cutter template, and marketed from the start to people of a very narrow demographic, lifestyle, and income profile. This model of community is efficient and expedient, but likely ultimately very fragile.

The coming demographic shifts—both the near-term need to accommodate aging-in-place (or out of place) for the largest wave of senior citizens in history, or the ensuing need to secure a future for the places we've built for them that they'll be vacating—are going to strain the resilience, maintenance, and social fabric of many of our places.

The extreme examples of the senior-living trend—think Del Webb planned communities, or places like The Villages—are the opposite of adaptable. And they're not built with an eye to their long-term costs. The Villages is already a Growth Ponzi Scheme avalanche waiting to happen, as the Orlando Sentinel foreshadowed a few months ago with an article about the specter of sudden, massive tax increases to pay for the still-growing community’s infrastructure binge hangover.

I have to wonder about the future of the senior-living apartment clusters sprouting in suburban America, too. These are often built on the handful of oddball sites where it's still possible or expedient to build a large apartment complex, with the result that they're isolated islands on unwalkable stroads and your tether to the rest of the world comes in the form of family visits or scheduled bus trips to the pharmacy and grocery store.

Both of my own grandmothers lived in places like this for years after my respective grandfathers passed away. They found friends there. They were comfortable. It wasn't a bad option. But when I hear stories of neighborhoods like where my wife grew up, where many of the "amenities" and "services" bundled into these places were not “amenities” at all but just an organic part of the fabric of life and community, I do suspect we've lost something by making these far more institutional arrangements, increasingly, the societal default.

So the next time you hear "age-friendly community" or "aging in place," don't picture the senior housing complex on a pond at the edge of town. Picture the well-worn neighborhood where you leave all your family photos up on the wall a few years longer, the curious, precocious 8-year-old girl down the street pops in often for dinner and to hear your stories, you provide her parents with a bit of free child-care and she shovels your walk every time it snows and makes sure you’ve got medicine when you’re sick.

The organizer of a presentation I recently gave for an AARP group began his opening remarks with a reminder that, "You only get old if you're lucky." The luckiest among us deserve places to live that can age gracefully with us, because those are places where we can age gracefully.

(Cover photo via Flickr. Creative Commons license.)