Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Senior cohousing

[S. Kashdan (skashdan]

Jackson Place Cohousing is nine years old. We have a multi-age community,
with members ranging from 0 to their eighties. We have a few members who are
in their early sixties and have been laid off from good paying white-collar
jobs. They may find lower paying jobs, but, given the current job market,
they may not, and illness may make early retirement necessary anyway. And,
when thinking about the Social Security System, we also really need to 
remember the people who help us by building and
maintaining our facilities through their manual labor, as well as the farm
workers, truck drivers, waiters and waitresses, and supermarket employees
who help us get our food, and even the physical therapists and
chiropractors, all of whom often need to retire earlier than the average 
white-collar working person who does office and teaching and other such 
jobs. And we need to remember
that many older people who are laid off from white-collar jobs when 
companies cut back are
discriminated against because of their higher qualifications, which might
justify higher pay, and therefore those people often have more difficulty 
getting new jobs even
if they want and need to continue working.

Here at Jackson Place Cohousing we are currently discussing how we as a 
community can develop a support system to help neighbors who need to retire 
and/or
become disabled in some way, so they won't have to leave our community
because of either financial or support or health care reasons.
We would appreciate learning about how other established communities are
dealing with this.

Sylvie

Sylvie Kashdan
Jackson Place Cohousing
800 Hiawatha Place South
Seattle, WA 98144
www.seattlecohousing.org
info [at] jacksonplacecohousing.org

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Diane" <dianeclaire [at] gmail.com>
To: "Cohousing-L" <cohousing-l [at] cohousing.org>
Cc: "YES Residents" <yesr [at] googlegroups.com>
Sent: Thursday, December 16, 2010 7:14 AM
Subject: Re: [C-L]_ Senior cohousing



Well I'm for both kinds and I am especially interested in the accommodations
that multigenerational cohousing communities are making  as its middle-aged
members become seniors.

However, I would like to say something about those words about Social
Security -- it will not go broke unless we join those who want it to
belly-up by assuming it must go broke.  A few tweeks and it will last
through the baby boomers and beyond.  the tweeks? 1) turn it from a
regressive to a progressive tax -- at the moment the richer you are the
smaller is the perventage of your income that you pay into it.  2) raise the
retirement age slightly; 3) stop dipping into the fund to pay for deficits
in other parts of the budget.

Thanks,
Diane