Archive for March, 2010

Universal Design

Tuesday, March 30th, 2010

Lever handles on doors are an example of universal design. So are lowered light switches (children and people in wheel chairs can reach them easily), raised outlets (for people who find it difficult to bend), and windows that are low enough for seated people to see out of. Here is an excellent definition of universal design, from Universal Education Design Online:

Universal design is not a fad or a trend but an enduring design approach that originates from the belief that the broad range of human ability is ordinary, not special. Universal design accommodates people with disabilities, older people, children, and others who are non-average in a way that is not stigmatizing and benefits all users. After all, stereo equipment labels that can be read by someone with low vision are easier for everyone to read; public telephones in noisy locations that have volume controls are easier for everyone to hear; and building entrances without stairs assist equally someone who moves furniture, pushes a baby stroller, or uses a wheelchair. Designing for a broad range of users from the beginning of the process can increase usability of an environment or product without significantly increasing its cost. It results in easier use for everyone and it reduces the need for design modifications later when abilities or circumstances change.

Hard as it may be to believe, people are even now designing seniors’ housing projects that do not respect the basic principles of universal design. It is true that most plugs are raised and most light switches are lowered, but I see way too many knobs on cupboard doors (“D” handles are easier for everyone to open), poor lighting, and balconies that are really only accessible for the physically fit. In November 2009 I visited a brand new project that no one had moved into yet. We had to enter through the back door but still, there was a big step at the back door and a sign taped onto the window: “Please watch your step.” That is pretty incredible.

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More News from Central Alberta

Thursday, March 25th, 2010

I hate to return to my laundry fetish, the subject of a recent post, but I saw something new (to me) this week. Purely by accident I met one of the Masterpiece residents on my tour and she invited me to see her suite.  A clothes lover, she found her unit short of closet space so installed an armoire in the bathroom. I think she got it at Rona or something like that. It looked great. In another closet she installed a washer/dryer—the kind that only requires 110 volts, the maximum allowable in her building (in individual units that is). I used a machine like this in Tokyo recently, but I have never seen them used in seniors’ buildings in North America. You can hook them up virtually anywhere as long as there is a plumbing line nearby. They take about 3 ½ hours to wash and dry a load but you don’t have to do any transferring of wet clothes and the machines are very energy efficient. Research done in the States (admittedly by LG, a major manufacturer of laundry equipment), suggests that in-suite laundry increases rent potential by $40 to $100 per month, and condo prices by $5,000 to $15,000.

For people who don’t want their own in-suite laundry equipment, communal laundry rooms have come a long way in some seniors’ housing projects. Flat-screen TVs, fridges and microwaves, and comfortable chairs can transform the mere act of washing and drying your laundry into a whole new experience. Years ago we wrote a report for CMHC called Aging Tenants in the Private Rental Market. The objective of the report was to discover how private landlords were coping with aging residents. Very well, as it turned out, but one of the memories of that report that has stuck with me was the laundry room in a big building in Victoria. The laundry room was the social hub of the building—people read there, or played cards with their neighbours, or just talked.  Of course it was a big room, the only laundry room in the building. People sometimes think that laundry rooms on every floor of a seniors’ building are absolutely necessary, but I have seen many situations where central laundry rooms have worked fine.

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News from Central Alberta

Monday, March 22nd, 2010

I’ve been in Red Deer this week.  We haven’t actually looked at the data yet, but we have heard that the level of affluence along Highway 2 between Calgary and Edmonton is unequalled outside the oil sheikdoms of the Middle East. We’ll see what the numbers say, but the communities do indeed look prosperous. As I said to our client: “Even the trailer parks look attractive”. Not that I have anything against trailer parks of course.

The Red Deer seniors’ market is oversupplied, a situation likely to last for some time. Part of the oversupply is attributable to two large Masterpiece projects in the southeast corner of town, right across the street from each other. There may be some merit in the auto mall approach to seniors’ housing, but it didn’t work in Red Deer. Perhaps that is one of the reasons Masterpiece is now in the hands of its lenders. The Holiday project in town, Victoria Gardens, also has a number of vacancies. Many in the industry, including Lumina, believe that the Holiday model—large numbers of studios, vast dining rooms, major meal at noon—is too old-fashioned to survive much longer. That is in terms of new projects of course. There are something like 300 existing projects in the US and 35 in Canada. My tour guide told me that Holiday is keen to expand to Australia and Europe. Every time I walk into a Holiday project I get a severe case of déjà vu, but of course none of their residents has probably been in more than one—the one they live in—and even if they did know they lived in a cookie cutter, they probably wouldn’t care.

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Swimming Pools

Thursday, March 18th, 2010

Sometimes people are very annoying about pools. If you suggest to an owner or an architect that adding a pool to a building might be a good idea, most times someone will leap into the conversation and say oh no, pools are expensive, they are hard to maintain, no one uses them, they are a waste of space, and on and on and on. It’s interesting then that a recent survey undertaken in the US by the National Investment Center for the Seniors’ Housing and Care Industry (NIC) found that only two physical attributes had a statistically significant relationship with the proportion of residents who were very satisfied—pools and woodworking shops.[i]

Where they exist, pools are mostly part of upscale communities, in Canada at least. In the US pools are common everywhere, partly because US communities are on average so much larger than Canadian communities that the cost of expensive amenities like pools can be spread over more units. Some projects don’t get great use out of their pools but believe they are useful for marketing purposes. I have also heard the reverse argument—that they are a bad marketing tool because people who will never use them resent the fact that they will be paying for them. This objection could certainly be overcome by good marketers. After all, some projects are very successful at encouraging people to use the pool. It is great exercise after all. There is even one project I know of that encourages outside people to use their pool for swimming lessons. The pool is completely visible from the main floor amenity area, which serves the double purpose of providing something for residents to watch while at the same time maximizing exposure of the project to the wider community.

That pool is a large one but most Canadian pools aren’t. They are practical for aquacise but not for swimming laps. They must also be practical from an entrance and exit perspective. Some places have lifts to get people into and out of their pool, but a much better solution is to angle the floor of the pool so that stairs (and lifts) aren’t necessary at all.

Whether or not you need a pool, you probably don’t need a treadmill. They are considered by many to be potentially dangerous for seniors. Interestingly enough, as I was trying to find some evidence for this statement on the internet, I found out that treadmills were originally used as a method for reforming inmates in prisons. Who knew?

[i] NIC, Seniors Housing and Care Journal, Volume 17, Number 1, 2009

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What’s New in Toronto

Monday, March 15th, 2010

I just got back from the 3d Canadian Seniors Housing Forum, organized by Insight Information. As the first presenter at the two day conference, I had the opportunity to say everything first! That can be a great advantage. My presentation was entitled “A Year in Review” and over the next two or three weeks I will be posting some of the content of my presentation and of others as well.

Whenever I am faced with the five hour flight and three hour time change required of a visit to Toronto, I try to take maximum advantage of my time there. This time I toured two new projects—Origin at Evergreen in Mississauga, and The Dunfield, near Yonge and Eglinton. Evergreen is a big project: 160 condos, 140 rental units, and 45,000 square feet of amenity space, with another 54 garden flat condo units slated for the next phase.  The Dunfield is big too, at least by Vancouver standards: 177 rental units.  I’d characterize Evergreen as mid-range and The Dunfield as high end (eg two bedroom units topping out at $8,400 per month, although studios start at $3,300).

I am going to be coming back to these two projects in future posts, but for now I am going to focus on—wait for it!—laundry equipment. I haven’t quite got over the fabulous red chandelier in The Dunfield’s spa, although it is definitely something to be seen, but I have always taken perhaps an unhealthy interest in washers and dryers and that’s what I want to talk about today. The Dunfield includes a washer/dryer in each unit, even the studios. If people have absolutely no desire ever to do any laundry in their own unit, the appliances will be removed to create additional storage space, but few people have so far made this request.

Elsewhere in the country, in-suite washers and dryers are uncommon in supportive rental projects, the theory being that 80+ residents don’t want to do their own laundry and don’t want to give up storage space. But in light of our endless quest to lower the average age of entry into supportive housing, in-suite washers and dryers can be one way to help foster that sense of independence so valued by our customers.

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Bathrooms

Thursday, March 11th, 2010

The rule is, no bathtubs in units with only one bathroom. If there are two bathrooms, a bathtub in one of them is fine. Bathtubs are hard to get into and hard to get out of. If someone needs help with bathing, it is much easier to provide that assistance in a shower. It really should not be necessary to point this out in 2010, but sadly it is. Of course the no bathtub prohibition applies only to new buildings—there are thousands of units with bathtubs in old buildings. Some places are replacing bathtubs with showers and that is a good idea, although relatively costly.

Floors in bathrooms should be non-slip. Toilets should be raised. There should be enough grab bars in the right places[i] but please try and make the bathroom look safe and inviting, not like something straight out of a hospital ward. Towel bars can double as grab bars if they are sturdy enough. As long as walls are reinforced for later installation of additional grab bars, it is not necessary to have every square inch of a shower enclosure covered with grab bars. It’s interesting to note that my 20-something son lived for a while in an apartment that had originally been intended to accommodate seniors. The requisite grab bars had been placed in the shower enclosure and beside the toilet. When he moved away from the apartment, he missed the grab bars! Anyone can slip in a shower—you don’t have to be 85 for that fate to befall you.

[i] See CMHC, Evaluation of Optimal Grab Bar Placement for Seniors

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Studio Units in Senior Housing Projects

Monday, March 8th, 2010

Much like the human appendix, studio units, or bachelor units if you prefer, are in evolutionary decline. People don’t like them. Many owners of buildings with unrentable studio units are knocking down walls and joining units together. Even studio units that are subsidized or that have very low rents may be hard to fill. We worked for a client once who was convinced that studio units were the way of the future because of their sustainability, by which he meant that 100 people would take up less land if they were living in 400 square foot units than if they were living in 600 square foot units. That is unquestionably true. There is a whole movement afoot now to convince people to reduce their demands on the planet by living in smaller houses. It is rare to go a month without reading some aging boomer’s lament about the 900 square foot one bathroom house she grew up in and why can’t people today do the same? I grew up in a house like that, maybe a little bigger but only one bathroom for two parents and four children. Today I live in a 3,700 square foot house and politically correct or not, I love it.

On a smaller scale, literally and figuratively, that is what is happening to studio units. I kept telling our studio-fixated client that he was dead wrong but he was stubborn and convinced his own instincts were right—he was a developer, did I mention that? But he wasn’t a stupid developer because he was willing to test his ideas with consumers. It was a complicated issue to explore but eventually we designed a questionnaire that looked like this:

“If sizes and rents were as follows (note this was a few years ago):

Studio, 400 square feet:                      $1,500

One bedroom, 550 square feet:           $1,900

Two bedroom: 750 square feet           $2,300

Which unit would you choose (please check one):

Studio             _____

One Bedroom             _____

Two Bedroom _____

If you checked One Bedroom, at what point would you choose a studio instead (please check one):

If the studio were $400 cheaper         _______

If the studio were $500 cheaper         _______

If the studio were $600 cheaper         _______

If the studio were $700 cheaper         ______

It wouldn’t matter, I would still want a one bedroom unit    ______

No matter what the rent differential was, the majority of survey respondents still preferred a one bedroom unit. This didn’t surprise me but it did surprise the developer. He did not proceed with his plans, although he has never thanked me for saving him millions of dollars.

The dislike of studios is not so much a matter of space per se. There are very large studios and very small one bedroom units and still people prefer units with bedrooms. It could be a gender issue, at least partly. Somewhere around 75 or 80% of the residents of supportive housing projects are women. It is said (by who I am not sure) that women of a certain age apparently don’t like to entertain visitors in their bedrooms, which is essentially what a studio apartment is, and furthermore they don’t like to run the risk of someone coming to visit them when their bed is unmade, which would be instantly obvious if they were living in a studio unit. The fact that very few people in seniors’ housing projects visit in each other’s units is immaterial to this debate. Men on the other hand are assumed to care not at all about visitors or unmade beds. If, magically, the existing gender ratio could be  reversed, studios might become wildly popular, especially as they are unquestionably cheaper. And while we are on the subject of beds, it is not that unusual to run across people with no beds as in people who sleep in their recliners. By all accounts it is very comfortable especially if it is difficult for people to lie down for some reason.

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Location of Senior Housing Projects

Saturday, March 6th, 2010

Location, location, location—does the golden rule of real estate also apply to senior housing projects? Conventional wisdom suggests that walking-distance proximity to stores and services is, if not essential, then at the very least extremely important. But without sitting down and doing the math, I would say that a minority of senior housing projects in BC are located close enough to stores and services so that people could easily walk to them. Some are in locations that are downright pastoral. Of course walking isn’t necessary for all people—some have scooters that enlarge their geographic boundaries. Scooters though are used by a distinct minority of seniors, meaning that walking distance is more important than scooter distance. The average senior housing project in our area (say 120 units) usually has scooter parking for around 10 scooters, a ratio that seems to work fine, at least so far.

And then there are the buses and the tuck shops and the meals. Many senior housing projects have their own buses to take people around to shopping and doctors’ appointments, many have small tuck shops that sell various items, and in any case, most meals are provided on site. So why do people need to walk anywhere? I firmly believe that the answer to that question is this: even if people don’t have to walk anywhere, the fact that they could if they wanted to is an important psychological benefit. And for those people who actually do walk to the store or the bank, it’s more than just a psychological benefit—it’s a physical benefit as well.

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First new post

Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010

To our readers: I apologize for the lack of new posts over the past few weeks. From now on, we will post to the blog at least once or twice a week, perhaps more often. Next week I am going to Toronto to speak at the Third Canadian Seniors’ Housing Forum. I will be reporting on the conference as well as discussing two senior housing communities I am touring while there. Stay tuned!

http://www.insightinfo.com/index.php/ci_id/23125/la_id/1.htm

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