With millions of Baby Boomers at or approaching retirement age, university and city leaders here are looking at building from the ground up a new type of “intergenerational” neighborhood that they say could become a model for other college towns along the Interstate 70 corridor in Kansas and Missouri and perhaps spark a new approach to the way the aging process is studied and the resulting research is applied everywhere.
Right now, most retirement centers or senior living developments in Kansas, Missouri and elsewhere in the U.S., are age-segregated, which means only old people live in them.
But Dennis Domer, a University of Kansas architecture historian who is spearheading the New Cities initiative here, and others, say the predominant, current model doesn’t work well and it’s time to change it.
What Boomers want
“That doesn’t work socially or economically and it isn’t what the Boomers want,” Domer said. “They don’t want to go someplace to die, they want to go someplace to live” in a way that doesn’t leave them “slowly trailing down the misery curve the last 10 years of life.”
After three years of research drawn from various disciplines, the conclusion reached by Domer and others involved with New Cities is that most of the nation’s 80 million Boomers, those born between 1946 and 1964, want the following things in retirement, if not sooner:
- Proximity to nature
- Children, grandchildren and friends nearby
- Walk-able neighborhoods
- Continuing education opportunities
- Access to good health care and transportation
- Affordable housing
In addition, they want to leave a legacy, such as mentoring younger people and they don’t want to live out their days among only their contemporaries — they want to be surrounded by people of various ages.
An off-shoot of the New Cities initiative is a planned residential development that Domer describes as a potential “living laboratory” for creating the optimal neighborhood for aging Boomers and for researchers to study the various effects and aspects of aging.<a name=”continued”></a>
Campus Village
Called Campus Village, the proposed development would be on 60 acres in west Lawrence contiguous with the soon-to-be-built Rock Chalk Park, a $39 million sports complex being built by the KU athletics department with help from the city.
The I-70 universities represented in the New Cities initiative are the University of Missouri-St. Louis, Washington University in St. Louis, University of Missouri-Columbia, University of Missouri-Kansas City, University of Kansas Medical Center in Kansas City, Kan., Rockhurst University in Kansas City, Mo., Kansas University in Lawrence, Washburn University in Topeka, and Kansas State University in Manhattan.
Dennis Domer, the initiative’s director, said “it is only a matter of time” before Ft. Hays State University also is represented in the multi-disciplinary research collaboration.
“I want it to go all across Missouri and Kansas,” he said.
About 45 of the researchers are scheduled to meet at KU on Nov. 7 and 8.
Domer said Campus Village could have up to 600 living units, including a mix of apartments for graduate students, affordable single-family homes and condos for families and congregate living quarters for seniors who need increasing assistance as they become enfeebled, a comfortable and enjoyable last place for them to live in a neighborhood abundant with children. It could cost between $60 million and $80 million to build.
A principal target market to occupy the development would be people with current or former ties to KU, ranging from students and young professors to retirees or long-ago graduates interested in returning to Lawrence for the amenities associated with campus life.
“We have approximately 200 KU retirees each year alone. We have 300,000 KU graduates, lots of them are moving back,” Domer said. “The alumni association did a survey of 10,000 of them — age 55 and up — and there was a very strong response to Lawrence. The main difficulty with Lawrence is it doesn’t have housing options that are affordable.”
Domer said Campus Village might have a few “luxury units” but that the goal would be to have a preponderance of residences to rent or buy that would be affordable to most middle-income people.
He has assembled a 15-member board of directors for the project that includes Douglas County Commissioner Jim Flory, City Commissioner Terry Riordan, a pediatrician, and Gene Meyer, chief executive of Lawrence Memorial Hospital. Rick Doll, superintendent of schools, also is on the panel.
Potential benefits for all ages
The project and its umbrella, New Cities, are considered conceptually groundbreaking, if not unique in the region. And if they succeed in making neighborhoods, cities and developments more livable for the elderly, people of all ages are likely to benefit said Cathy Boyer-Shesol, manager of the KC Communities for All Ages project at the nonprofit Mid-America Regional Council in Kansas City, Mo.
Photo by Mike Shields
Rebecca Peterson talks with Campus Village project director Dennis Domer at a downtown Lawrence coffee shop. Peterson, who has three children, is putting together a focus group of similarly aged mothers to see what features might attract them to live in the planned development, which would occupy 60 acres next to the planned Rock Chalk Park in west Lawrence.
Peterson said she was raised by a single mother in an Arizona community with a lot of retirees and remembers the help she received from them as a child.
“What we’re learning is that when you develop policies for older adults, everything becomes better for all ages,” she said. “When you have walk-able communities, it promotes the ability and safety of older adults to walk but it also is helpful to children on bicycles, parents pushing their young kids in strollers. When you have parks that are vibrant for older adults, they’re also vibrant for children.”
Boyer-Shesol said MARC has provided meeting space and a letter of support for the New Cities initiative and was eager to see what shakes out from the collaboration of university researchers stretching from St. Louis to Manhattan.
“What Dennis is doing with the I-70 corridor (bringing together researchers from multiple institutions and disciplines) is amazing and we support him,” she said. “He deserves all the credit on that. We’ll help in any way we can because that kind of work will ultimately help every community in Kansas and Missouri.”
Domer said it was “only a matter of time” before he enlists academics from Ft. Hays State University, extending the burgeoning network farther west into Kansas.
Domer compared the Campus Village idea and the New Cities’ concepts of making communities optimal for seniors to the Georgetown Project in Texas, which began in 1997 in an effort to make that city optimal for children but has resulted in also making it more amenable to the elderly while encouraging the intermingling of ages.
The difference, Domer said, was that project, which is in Georgetown, home of Southwestern University, relied on existing community structures. Campus Village would be built ground up with designs attuned to the New Cities goals.
He also likened the Campus Village project to TigerPlace in Columbia, Mo., which is a retirement center linked to the University of Missouri’s nursing school that is used for teaching and by researchers to study aging.
Domer said the Campus Village board last week approved the site by Rock Chalk Park and agreed to work exclusively with Lane4, a Kansas City development company, on building the project. He said the first phase of construction could begin by spring or summer 2014, though many important elements of the plan remain to be decided.
Grandparent figures
Rebecca Peterson is a Lawrence mother of three putting together a focus group of moms between the ages of 30 and 50 to see what features might attract them to living in Campus Village.
“It’s not going to be the right fit for everybody,” she said. “But…I look back to my own childhood. I was raised by a single mother in a community in Arizona that had a lot of retirees and the woman next door used to check in on me and acted as a grandparent figure since my own grandparents were hundreds of miles away. She was great to have around when I was coming home from school and had a parent who wasn’t going to be home from work for a couple of hours.”
Peterson said she could see the possibility for similar relationships developing at Campus Village.
“I think this could be a great resource,” she said.
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