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No place like home

By Rhoda Amon | rhoda.amon@newsday.com

1:56 PM EDT, May 9, 2008

For retired professor Leonard Markowitz, life began at 83. He married for the first time and settled with his bride, Beatrice, in the Plainview home where she had lived for 52 years.

Unfortunately, after "the happiest four years of my life," he said, Beatrice died. It left him sad -- but not alone -- at 87. A nurse, a social worker, neighbors, volunteers, friends all come to him.

Similarly, the community comes to Catherine Gannon, who recently celebrated her 93rd birthday in her New Hyde Park house. Neighbors do her shopping, a nurse checks her blood pressure, a doctor and a hairdresser make house calls.

And in Huntington, sisters Helen Czech, 89, and Mary Potenza, 91, are still in the back-to-back houses they bought 55 years ago -- Helen in her Cape Cod, Mary in her ranch -- still marching to their own beat. They recently went to a mobile dental unit to have their teeth examined at no cost.

What these Long Islanders have in common is that they live in a neighborhood NORC, an acronym for "naturally occurring retirement communities," a designated area heavily populated with seniors where supportive services help older people stay put in their own homes.

Little known on Long Island only three years ago, NORC programs have become a way of life in some areas. There are now NORCs in Nassau and Suffolk with nearly 8,000 people older than 60 living in them. Their coming was inevitable because of the settlement pattern -- the movement of young GI couples to Long Island's first ring of suburbs who are now aging -- said Fredda Vladeck of the United Hospital Fund.

There are about 80 NORC programs in 25 states across the country, part of a national trend to encourage aging in place after pouring billions into institutionalizing the aged.

"This is second-generation NORCs," serving seniors in private one-family houses, said Dale Chaikin, director of Community Health NORC programs of the North Shore-LIJ Health System. It provides nurses and mobile dental van visits for all Long Island NORCs.

The first generation began 22 years ago in New York City's high-rise housing complexes with large concentrations of older tenants or co-op dwellers. Co-Op City in the Bronx and Penn South, the 2,800-apartment complex south of Penn Station where the first NORC model was established in 1986, were touted as "a great place to grow old."

Long Island is a different way of life -- it's family barbecues, PTA meetings and graduation parties. It's also a place of isolated pockets where elderly people can feel alone.

But for the seniors ages 60 to 100 who now live in the designated areas in Nassau and Suffolk, prospects have improved, according to many residents and organizers.

"People tell us they couldn't manage without us," said Harriet Blatt, who coordinates more than 40 senior volunteers who provide transportation to doctors and shopping, do home repairs and make home visits to other seniors in the Plainview-Old Bethpage NORCs.

"We lobbied in Albany for neighborhood NORC supportive services because we felt our needs were even more compelling \[than city seniors'\] -- the isolation, home maintenance, transportation," said Kathy Rosenthal, vice president for Long Island Regional Operations for FEGS (Federation for Employment and Guidance Service), a health and human services agency.

Services are expanding

Evelyn Roth, former FEGS executive director, and Anita Altman of the UJA-Federation of New York took the idea for a suburban NORC to Assem. Steven Englebright (D-Setauket), then chairman of the State Assembly Committee on the Aging, who helped develop a neighborhood NORC model. NORCs without walls -- situated in a census track where more than 40 percent of the population is older than 60 -- were first funded by the state in 2005.

As Long Island ages, NORC services are expanding. The launch last year of Hands- On Huntington NORC brought the number to four in Nassau and Suffolk, on top of nine in Queens. Two are sprawled over census tracks in Plainview-Old Bethpage, where former potato fields sprouted home developments in the 1950s and '60s.

Project Independence NORC, which covers northern New Hyde Park, has been plugged into the Town of North Hempstead's 311 hot line, and the plan is to extend support services to seniors throughout the town. "It's time we made an appropriate investment of resources in those folks who built our communities," said Town Supervisor Jon Kaiman.

Huntington Town Supervisor Frank Petrone also has hopes of spreading services to all town seniors. "They paid their dues. They expended their energies to build this town. Why should they leave?" he asked.

"Every Long Island community should have these services," Roth said. "Our focus now should be on helping seniors outside the NORC areas." Senior services, including health and safety monitoring, transportation and health education seminars, are implemented by FEGS in Huntington and New Hyde Park and by the Middle Island Y JCC in Plainview-Old Bethpage, in partnership with the town governments, the state, North Shore-LIJ and other agencies. The Suffolk Y JCC in Commack also partners with Hands-On Huntington.

While the World War II "greatest generation" is living longer than many expectations, their children, known as baby boomers, probably will live even longer, and there are many more of them. By 2030, when all boomers will be 65 or older, the number of old people will have increased 300 percent from 1995, according to census projections.