Rethinking Surburban Seniors

Marian Knapp got her Ph.D. last year, at the age of 70, in environmental studies. Unlike her fellow students concerned with whales and egrets, Knapp studied the elderly in her hometown of Newton, a suburb of Boston. Her dissertation, "Aging in Place in Suburbia," is a group portrait of Newton women adapting to a new life as elderly residents in a place built for young families. Now a member of Newton's Council on Aging and a consultant to local agencies, Knapp talked to Burb about the issues facing the half of Americans over 65 who live in the burbs.


What inspired you to get your degree?
I had a lot of family members who lived to be really old. So part of it was asking myself, what am I going to do with the next 30 years? But I was also influenced by being a caregiver for these older people. When I read what the current literature says about aging at home, I was troubled. If you type "aging in place" into a search engine, it defines staying at home as having services brought in. That was not my life, or my relatives' lives. Their lives were a lot more complicated. I'm trying to reframe the image of elders in suburbia.

How is that image different from reality?
The house is really important to seniors, but it's not their whole life. The women I interviewed talked about nature, about their neighborhoods, about Boston, and about the world, which was still very much a part of their persona, and how they viewed their lives.

So aging in place means being actively involved in the broader community. The image we have is an old person sitting there, very needy, and that the alternative is going to a nursing home. We have to change this idea so we can engage these people in a meaningful way.

How do you do that?
I've been working with the Department of Senior Services here in Newton on a survey of what's going on outside the walls of the senior center. We've produced a demographic map of the town, color coded to show where the elders are, so we can match programs with where they live. We're trying to get the community to focus on needs, but also existing assets. If there are gaps, then we want to fill those gaps.

One challenge here is transportation.
The elderly need transportation not only to get to the doctor, but to stay connected to people. In Newton we've recently restored a transportation system that gets them to appointments, but also to houses of worship, so they can get to religious services. The question with transportation is, who's going to fund it?

You talked earlier about the elderly connecting to nature.
For many people, nature was a very important part of moving out of the city. When they were younger, these people would go walk in the woods. Now some women find a place in their house where they can see the change of the seasons. They feed the birds, or garden. It's a very positive thing we should be paying more attention to.

We think of activities for seniors as playing bingo and cards. Is this what do they really want to do?
The senior center here knows it's in a transition period. So it does have bingo, and serves lunch. They have to maintain those sorts of things. But it also has computer classes. art classes, music, art and French language classes. The next generation of elderly still want to be involved in technology and cultural things.

Do the elderly only want to socialize with other elderly?
Not at all. In fact, there's some self-imposed ageism going on, people who say "I won't go to the senior center. They're all old." There are efforts going on to bring people together in their neighborhoods. I'm not sure how successful they've been. People are wrapped up in their daily lives and they're not thinking about the neighborhood piece.

How do we need to rethink our approach to elderly in the suburbs?
A lot of this work is defined by professionals, so we have these silos of services--transportation and housing and medicine. And even when they get together, they have a clinical perpsective--they ask, "How can we work professionals together?", not, "How can we see the whole person?" Communities need to think about the whole person, and how we can help seniors continue to be a whole person.