Posts Tagged ‘British Columbia’

CKNW Interview

Monday, June 27th, 2011

For all you non-Vancouverites following our blog, CKNW is the # 1 rated talk radio show in the region. I just did an interview with Jill Bennett, one of the hosts on the station. Before the interview started I was thinking about interesting ways to talk about the numbers—how our population is aging and what that really means. For example, the Vancouver metropolitan area is expected to grow by 1 million people between now and 2035. That’s a pretty interesting number in itself (where are they all going to live you might reasonably ask) but what is more interesting is that fully 40% of those 1 million people will be over the age of 65.

What does that really mean though? The fact is that there are lots of communities that already have much higher proportions of their population over the age of 65 than Vancouver will have in 2035 (22%). For example, Parksville-Qualicum at 33%, or Penticton at 24%. If you visit Penticton you do not get the sense that it is overrun with seniors. Parksville-Qualicum is a little different, partly because it is quite a lot smaller than Penticton. I know people who decided to retire in Nanaimo rather than Parksville-Qualicum because they got frustrated in grocery stores by slower-moving shoppers. Just imagine though what life would be like in Sun City Arizona, where 80% of the population is over the age of 65.

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Food and grab bars

Friday, April 8th, 2011

I realize that I have posted about these two issues on numerous occasions but they are both something of bêtes noires for me.

I have been travelling a lot and have eaten at several seniors’ projects. In one of them (which will remain nameless) the food was execrable. It isn’t often you get to use “execrable” in a sentence and I would have been glad of the opportunity if it weren’t for the fact that because I couldn’t eat the food I was extremely hungry.

I mentioned this to my good friend and colleague Rita Thibault at Westbridge Group Valuation Partner and she said: “Aren’t people trained to cook decent food for large numbers of people?” Good question. One of the residents at a sister project of the aforementioned community, where the food was much better but apparently still not up to snuff, commented that if the chef really were trained at some school the school ought to be shut down.

It consistently amazes and astonishes me that operators serve such lousy food. Even in projects that are fully funded and also full of people who can’t afford to move anywhere else, you would think simple human decency would lead these operators to serve decent food.

Then yesterday I ate a community that prides itself on its food and rightly so. My lunch was delicious. Food costs here are $7.50 per person per day, which is on the high side, but not only are the residents happy, the community generates a lot of revenue by catering outside events.

Enough said about food, at least for today, and on to grab bars. I have been in two seniors communities recently that have no grab bars in the bathroom because these communities are intended for “independent seniors”. That’s just dumb. Even hotels are better than that, or at least some hotels. I am currently staying in a brand new mid-range hotel and there is not a grab bar in site although the bathtub is very high. How many people do you think actually have baths in hotels? Very few I imagine. Why don’t they install showers instead? Even if there is some logic to the bathtubs, why no grab bars? Grab bars make tubs safer for everybody, to say nothing of the one in four British Columbians who are going to be over 65 in no time flat.

So there you have it – my rants for today.

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An Asian Retirement Community

Thursday, March 17th, 2011

Readers of this blog are by now familiar with one of my many obsessions, that being the impact of multi-generational cultures on the demand for supportive seniors housing. The hypothesis is that in cultures where families look after their elders at home until they are so frail they need residential care, the intermediate step of supportive housing (IL, congregate care, service-enriched) is skipped. Here in very multi-cultural British Columbia, there is lots of evidence indicating that this hypothesis is a sound one. For example, in spite of a very large Chinese population (which typically cares for elders at home) there is only one small private pay supportive housing project targeted at the Chinese community.

But a recent issue of the Journal of Active Aging focuses on a retirement community targeted directly at the Asian community in Fremont, California that has been around for a decade. Fremont is a community of just over 200,000 people that is part of the much larger San Francisco Bay area (over 7 million people). The 64 unit project is owned and operated by Aegis Living and is called Aegis Gardens. The article is very positive, highlighting the linguistic skills of the staff (all, at a minimum, speak Cantonese or Mandarin or both), the design of the project (incorporating feng shui principles), and the activities (tai chi, mah-jong, origami). Food is not addressed in the article.

Outcomes have been extremely successful—80% of residents participate in physical activity programs, falls are a fraction of what they are at most communities, average age is older than at most other communities, staff turnover is extremely low.

The president of Aegis is quoted in the article as saying the company needed to negotiate a very steep learning curve on the way to success.

Part of that learning curve is described in an article in the San Jose Mercury News in 2004. That is a very long time ago but it is interesting to note that way back then, residents were upset. Here are some excerpts from the article:

But in the last few months, residents say, beloved Chinese staff members have resigned or been released, and replaced by employees who speak only English. The new staff members have implemented several culturally puzzling changes: buying wine for “happy hour,” moving a pingpong table into the tai chi space, and banning residents from cooking zong zi, a special rice dumpling prepared for the Chinese Dragon Boat Festival.

Residents have also complained that the center only spent $5.25 per resident a day on food. Though management has since raised the food budget to $5.75 a day, the food budget remains an issue. [note: $5.00 per day on food is quite common in 2011]

The Aegis Gardens situation is a “typical business problem” among companies trying to serve ethnic communities, said Felipe Korzenny, Florida State University professor of marketing communities and a local marketing consultant. The Aegis company has no Asian-American managers or corporate executives outside of its Chinese-oriented facility, Lucas said.

Note that was way back in 2004 and clearly, Aegis has addressed those issues. But the fact remains that in a metropolitan area of over 7 million people, where 20% are Asian, there is only one very small retirement community for those 1.5 million people.

Perhaps there are others and if any blog readers know of them please let me know.

Note: in US demographics “Asian-American” typically includes people of East, South East and South Asian descent.

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Sleepless in Seattle because your mortgage is underwater

Tuesday, March 1st, 2011

Because Seattle is so close to Vancouver (Canada), we pay a lot of attention to what goes on there. A recent article in the Vancouver Sun about negative equity in the state of Washington as well as other US cities was truly startling. In metro Seattle at the end of 2010, 34% of all houses with mortgages were worth less than the mortgages, up from 23% at the end of 2009. It has taken Seattle longer to feel the impact of the recession than in Las Vegas (where an astonishing 82% of houses are underwater) or Phoenix (70%).

Some people are a bit worried about the metro Vancouver market too, although I am not one of them. That is to say, I do not lie awake at night worrying about the market. However, that being said, I would not be a bit surprised in prices bumping along (with the odd case of price wars in special circumstances) for several years. People forget that the last half of the 1990s was a period of general stagnancy in house prices.

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Going with the flow: interstate elderly migration, 1970-2000

Friday, November 12th, 2010

As regular readers of this blog know, I have an unhealthy interest in migratory patterns of seniors. A recent article in the Journals of Gerontology (Volume 65B #5, November 2010) focuses on elderly migration in the US over the period from 1970 to 2000, specifically, on interstate migration. The article compares migration trends based on Census data to those based on so-called PUMS (public use micro-samples) data, which rely on  much smaller samples than the Census data.

The analysis supports other US research findings that interstate elderly migration has been remarkably stable since 1970. In geographic terms, Florida and California declined in popularity over the 1970-2000 period while Nevada, Georgia, and the Carolinas increased in popularity.

The 2000 US Census found that 4.1% of the 65+ population in the US moved from one state to another between the 1995 Census and the 2000 Census. As my book The Future of Seniors’ Housing: Planning, Building and Operating Successful Seniors Housing Projects points out, the comparable Canadian rate for interprovincial migration (between 2001 and 2006) was 6%.

Sadly, as we have discussed in several previous posts, our knowledge of migration patterns among the 65+ population is about to come to a screeching halt thanks to the Harper government decision to cancel the 2011 long form Census.

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I Have Seen the Future…and It’s Open Kitchens!

Friday, October 8th, 2010

A couple of weeks ago I toured the new Tapestry at UBC project, which just opened. Like its sister project, Tapestry O’Keefe, the UBC project offers both rental units and condo units. One of the things that struck me about the dining room was the open kitchen, which is sort of like an Earl’s. I wondered whether seniors might like that idea, or not. It’s unusual in upscale communities, although there may be a grill area adjacent to the dining room where special events occur. The Dunfield in Toronto offers this feature—there’s a grill-to-order event every Friday night. Some less upscale communities have open kitchens, but these are somewhat more reminiscent of hockey arenas than an Earl’s Restaurant.

So I was happy to tour the Belletini in Seattle last week, not exactly a sister to the Tapestry projects but definitely related by virtue of management by Leisure Care. The Belletini too has an open kitchen and according to both the Chef and the Marketing Manager, the residents love it! They love to interact with the chefs, they love to see the food being cooked, they like the general liveliness created by all that activity. There is a counter facing the kitchen that has six quite high stools for eating and watching. Apparently these stools are occupied the minute the kitchen opens at 5, notwithstanding the fact that when I say the stools are tall, I mean they are tall! The Chef told me that if people need help climbing up on them, they help them—no big deal.

So there you go. Never hold a preconceived notion. More on the Belletini and another Seattle-area project in forthcoming posts.

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Another Bad Rap for Seniors

Wednesday, September 15th, 2010

It’s taken me a while to catch up on my newspapers after spending a wonderful week in New York recently. I was taken aback by a Facts & Argument piece in the September 1st issue of the Globe and Mail. Facts & Argument is written by Globe readers, in this case a woman living in Toronto whose mother moved into and out of a “swanky” retirement residence in April. Its location is not specified in the article but it might be BC. I suggest that for two reasons—one is that the mum lived in a condo by the sea before moving into the retirement residence (actually the tense should be present not past because she moved right back into it before the condo could be sold), and the other is that the family grew up in Winnipeg.  I don’t know the actual numbers but I am sure ex-Winnipeggers living in BC outnumber ex-Winnipeggers living on the east coast by several orders of magnitude.

The article focused on the truly horrible food the family ate while growing up—it was appalling, heavy on the TV dinners, KFC, spam spam and more spam, and the delicacy known as “tuna goo”—canned tuna, frozen peas, and cream of mushroom soup.

And yet in spite of a gastronomic history like this, the mother moved out of her swanky residence after three weeks because the food was “inedible–cold and tasteless”.

There are three main messages to take from this article. One is that it is truly unfortunate for the industry when stories like this appear—they reinforce everyone’ s suspicions about retirement homes, suspicions that are usually baseless. The second is that the food in this case may have been a red herring, to keep the food theme going. Maybe the mum was simply not prepared to move. And the third message is that if the food really WAS inedible, that suggests operational stupidity of the very highest order.

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Sun City Arizona is 50 Years Old

Friday, August 20th, 2010

That seems almost impossible to believe.  Not so much its age per se, but the fact that it was built when the median age in the US was 29.5 and the oldest baby boomer was 14. Today the median age is 36.7 and the oldest boomer is 64. Del Webb died in 1974. I don’t know if anyone has written a biography of him but it would certainly be interesting to ask him how he came up with the vision of enormous retirement communities when the US was comparatively so youthful. Wikipedia notes his many accomplishments, but doesn’t touch on this subject. The entry does note though that on opening day, 100,000 people came to check out Sun City–so many that Del Webb had to survey the scene via helicopter.

In 2010, more than 40,000 people, 98% of them white, live in Sun City, which contains seven recreation centres,  eight golf courses, three country clubs, two bowling centres, an amphitheatre and a lake—the largest concentration of year-round recreational facilities in the United States. According to the 2000 census, 80% of the population of Sun City was over the age of 65. The median age is 75, twice the national median of 36.7.

These are staggering statistics. The oldest mid-sized urban area in Canada is Parksville, BC, on the eastern coast of Vancouver Island. Compared to Sun City, Parksville is positively youthful—only 34% of the population is over 65. Perhaps because of this comparative youthfulness, not many developers of golf course communities have been drawn to the Parksville area, notwithstanding its assumed appeal for retirees and seniors. The closest golf course community is Fairwinds, which offers “1,350 acres of living” consisting of one golf course, one marina, a community centre and 400 residential units. Arbutus Ridge is further south and a little bigger, with 600 residential units. The 830-acre Crown Isle Resort is an hour north of Fairwinds. And that’s basically it for active-adult type of communities in what is usually considered the epicentre of retirement living in Canada.

I wonder what Del Webb would make of that.

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Alberta, not BC, is Canada’s Retirement Magnet for Seniors

Tuesday, May 4th, 2010

Here is a chart that surprises almost everyone who sees it. Over the 10 year period between 1998 and 2008, Alberta attracted and retained considerably more interprovincial migrants than BC. The numbers come from Canada Revenue Agency records.

Interprovincial Migration of Seniors 1998 - 2008

Interprovincial Migration of Seniors 1998 - 2008

Note that we are talking here about NET migration, in minus out. The net figures are interesting but the detailed in and out comparisons are just as interesting, perhaps even more so.  As an example, about the same number of people moved to BC and Alberta over this period, but more left BC than left Alberta.

We will return to the subject in later posts but after having spent a great deal of time thinking about this apparent conundrum, we have come to the conclusion that the two major reasons for the ascendancy of Alberta are 1) much greater job creation, at least until the recent recession and 2) lower cost of living. Of course seniors aren’t moving to Alberta in search of jobs, but their kids (and grandkids) are. As for the cost of living, we have charted some amazing differences between the two provinces but overall, it’s probably about 25% cheaper to live in Alberta than in BC if you are over the age of 65.

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