A varied community can be source of vitality

Once in awhile, past experiences emerge to color my present life with surprising new shades of meaning.

Several days ago, for instance, while sorting through boxes of old stuff, I found a paper that my father, Edmund, had written in 1971 when he was 54, after he had left the aerospace industry.

It was a reflective analysis of the types of nursing homes being built at that time, titled "Thoughts on America's Problems Concerning the Aged."

I was struck by this passage: "The aged want what most people of all ages want, and that is to be in the midst of human activity, preferably as a participant, but if not, certainly as a respected observer. Not to do this is tantamount to feeding their body and starving their soul."

A few days later, I picked up a novel that had been sitting on my bookshelf,  "The Events at Vista Bay," given to me by its author, August Franza.

Gus Franza was a popular English teacher I knew while a student at Syosset High School in the late 1960s and we've kept in touch sporadically over the years.

The novel was set in 1988 and centers on an empty-nest couple who sell their home on Long Island and move into a bucolic, gated adult community. The narrator, a retired teacher, looks forward to spending days painting nature scenes from his deck,  only to find himself caught in an emotional battle between his affluent neighbors and a group of poor boys from across the bay who decide to breach the community's stiffly guarded isolation.

The novel does have some autobiographical elements. Franza and his wife, Amy, moved from Setauket to an age-restricted community in eastern Suffolk County.

"We've been living happily ever after," Franza told me, although he acknowledges that the intergenerational conflict presciently related in his narrative surfaced recently. "The book is a warning of some kind," says Franza, "about people who have been left out" of the good life.

These refound voices from my past have given me an unexpected perspective on today's pressing intergenerational housing issues. Public officials and business leaders lament that Long Island is losing its young people, often because of a lack of affordable housing. At the same time, many seniors on fixed incomes also are being forced to leave their homes because of high taxes and living expenses.

What's missing amid the hand-wringing is the recognition of how connected these two groups are -- or can be. Both young and older families generally don't have children; they need less space to live than families with school-age kids; and they usually have less money, so they can't afford substantial mortgages. So why can't we provide more housing that integrates, rather than segregates, our communities by age?

Part of the problem is typical suburban zoning. The smaller, multiple-unit complexes that can serve both young and old require a housing density that often alarms local civic leaders -- they fear an "urbanization" of suburbia. But these types of developments - thoughtfully designed -- can actually take us back to our earlier suburban landscape, when many communities resembled New England villages centered around downtowns.

Forty years ago, my dad suggested that instead of placing seniors in "comfortable isolation," those who were on the "spry side" could be housed next to, or be part of, a children's day care center.

Indeed, that is what's happening in places across the nation. In Westchester County, for example, a new village-style community was built several years ago, called the Belle Fair at Rye Brook.

It's a combination of more than 250 single-family homes, with a "meetinghouse" country market and café. There's also a child-care center and an independent living senior residence. Shuttle buses take residents to the nearby railroad station.

On Long Island, one widely recognized facility is the Landmark on Main Street in Port Washington, which was converted 15 years ago from a vacant historic school building into a multiuse facility with rental units for low-income seniors.

Landmark is also home to a teen center, child care center and the Jeanne Rimsky Theater, where resident seniors can volunteer and attend concerts, dance performances and children's programs. Children, in turn, can take part in intergenerational activities, such as trick-or-treating at the senior residence.

Every year, researchers add to a growing canon of studies linking significant health benefits to having strong social ties as we age. Of course, these ties can be maintained through social relationships at active retirement communities.

Franza noted that his community has lots of parties, bridge games, cocktail hours and other social events. But he added that such sequestered lifestyles, however pleasant, can sometimes lack vital social connection: "There's so much diversity, but little to share -- except to talk about our ailments."

I think my dad understood the importance of trying to keep seniors central to their communities, to participate in both the profound and the mundane.

Even the frail elderly, he believed, could be treated in ways that made them feel "included in meaningful human activity."

He concluded that for many of us, rooms with "a view of a shopping center parking lot would be much more appreciated, as a daily diet, than trees, fields and sky -- with few or no people."