The generation of people famous for walking 20 miles to school uphill both ways still want to get around by the power of their own two feet.
According to a new survey from A Place for Mom, a senior living advisory service, 53 percent of respondents consider walkability “very important” or a “must have” for senior apartments. Curbed notes that 87 percent said that walkability was at least “somewhat important” for senior apartments as well.
Walkability also scored highly among respondents in independent living and assisted living communities.
For years, developers have focused on building senior centers on plots of land far away from urban centers. Seniors, as it turns out, don’t care for that style of campus living.
“We were creating these islands of old age,” says Bill Pettit, President of R.D. Merrill Co., “where you’re surrounded by your peers and you lose that intergenerational connectivity. We found we were spending a disproportionate period of time busing our seniors to other places to generate that intergenerational connectivity.”
PB Topical Ref
