Cohousing-L Mailing List: How do seniors cope without younger people around?

[Sharon Villines (sharon]

> On Apr 20, 2026, at 11:37 PM, Marina King <marinakingcarpenter [at] 
> gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> we are an aging community of 30 households. As I look ahead, I don't see how 
> we will be able to keep up with the landscape work, building maintenance and 
> administrative tasks that this community requires. We are not age 55+ by 
> bylaws, but simply because of who showed up to invest in our project. We 
> function well now, but tasks are large, and unless enough units turn over in 
> the coming years to provide an influx of younger residents with fresh energy 
> and ideas, I foresee increasing burnout and decreasing energy to keep things 
> humming along.

I read a social work study years ago that said it takes three daughters to care 
for one set of aging parents without undue hardship. Sons were found to be a 
wild card — maybe they help and maybe not.  “A son is a son until he has a 
wife. A daughter is a daughter all of her life.”

As a strategy for social organization, even designating three unrelated women 
as caregivers to a set of elderly residents, this is unworkable over 
generations and certainly unworkable for cohousing. To be sustainable each of 
those daughters would then have to have three daughters.

Definitions that might be helpful for planning in senior cohousing:

CCRC stands for Continuing Care Retirement Community, which is a specific type 
of long-term care or "aging-in-place" community designed to provide housing and 
healthcare for seniors on a single campus. I think senior cohousing has tried 
to reach this ideal but it is difficult and expensive. And hit or miss 
depending on how many residents need help daily. Historically, even large 
senior communities have had a hard time predicting the need for assisted living 
and memory care.
 
The Three Tiers of Care are defined as:

1. INDEPENDENT LIVING: Residents live in private apartments, cottages, or 
townhomes. They are generally active and do not require daily medical 
assistance but have access to communal amenities like dining, gyms, and social 
clubs, and on campus medical care in many cases. At Riderwood, the security 
staff has EMS training and can determine if emergency hospital care is needed. 
Residents can always call 911 themselves. Riderwood works closely with local 
EMS providers and hospitals so if a resident says “I’m from Riderwood,” the 
staff knows who to contact for information.

At Riderwood, many people stay in independent living and hire full or part time 
aids instead of moving to assisted living or memory care. There is also a 
Vacation Program of 1-2 hours in the afternoon where aids can take residents so 
aids have time for a lunch break or to do other errands.

2. ASSISTED LIVING: If a resident needs help with "activities of daily living" 
(such as dressing, bathing, or medication management), they can move to a 
different section of the community that provides that support. The many couples 
like having the option of staying on the same campus, seeing each other daily, 
having meals and walks together but one partner being free of the other 
partner’s increasing needs. 

This is the level at which cohousing may not be able to provide support. 
Ongoing, it is a large comittment on the part of the community and the care 
needed is often greater than health aids can provide. Liability issues also 
enter here because neighbors might  be providing inadequate services that 
affect the health of the person.

3. SKILLED NURSING AND MEMORY CARE: This level is for residents who require 
24/7 medical supervision or specialized care for conditions like Alzheimer’s or 
dementia. Definitely more than neighbors would be able to give and the liabilty 
issues are more serious.

Riderwood, for example, now only admits new residents into independent living. 
Assisted living and memory care admit only current residents.  This allows them 
to predict much more accurately the upcoming needs. Riderwood does admit people 
will all kinds of inabilities into independent living. Residents just need to 
be able function daily without help or with their own health aid. 

At Takoma Village Cohousing over the years several residents hired health aids 
for a few hours a day or a few days a week, backed up with 911 calls when 
needed. But my own sense of how well this worked depended heavily on the coping 
skills of the person who needed assistance. We were blessed with incredibly 
capable and energetic people who knew how to access community resources with 
minimal support.

I still think cohousing needs larger communities to afford more services. Not 
1000 people but 300-500 would make urban locations more feasible financially 
and increase management possibilities. Urban locations would mean being closer 
to the larger community services for all ages.

The demographics at Takoma Village in the group that began forming in 1998 and 
moved in in 2000-2001 have changed drastically. Many more units are owned by 2 
people who have professional level incomes. Housing prices have inceased 
substantially. Originally we had many singles and single parents. People who 
had committed to low paying jobs at non-profits like peace work and civil 
rights. Two professional-salaried adult households with 2-3 children have 
little time for more than simple short term maintenance projects or researching 
best solutions or meals and social events.

The assumption on the part of the public is that everyone who moves to senior 
communities is in assisted living or nursing care or expects to be very soon. 
This is far from the reality. At Riderwood some people have been here 20+ years 
in an apartment. There are two generations of some families living here. Some 
people live here so they can travel several times a year. Some are seasonal, 
alternating with Maine or Florida.

My Monday night dinner group has one member who is 98 and living perfectly well 
independently. 90th birthdays are very common. I’m beginning a regular lunch 
meeting about cooperative management systems with a man of 94 and his friends 
who are interested in the same topic. From my experience, the issues with aging 
are being less reliable. I can’t predict that I will have enough energy to both 
cook and serve a meal. I don’t have the patience or persistence to keep arguing 
over solutions when we have had the same argument 10 times. Some things just 
get less interesting. More decisions need to go to professionals, which costs 
money.

FROM PERPLEXITY: Only about 2% of Americans age 65+ live in assisted living 
communities that provide 24/7 nursing care — roughly 1 million people — and 
about 4 in 10 residents in those communities have Alzheimer’s disease or 
another dementia. The median length of stay in assisted living is about 22 
months, or just under 2 years. For memory care, often longer.

Sharon
----
Sharon Villines
Riderwood Village, Silver Spring MD
Founding member and 25 year resident in Takoma Village, Washington DC

(The issues related to quality of life and using technology to maintain lives 
beyond the person’s choice is being studied widely and progress being made. I 
don’t think there is anything here that is particular for cohousing. There are 
large issues relating to doctors who invest in nursing homes and then assign 
their own medicare patients to them.)