Publications / 2012 Proceedings of the 29th ISARC, Eindhoven, Netherlands

Aging-in-Place: A Challenge Towards Sustainable Planning in the Dutch Housing Market

August A.M. van Vliet
Abstract:

Purpose Aging-in-place is an economically sound alternative for the current Dutch policy and legislation for housing senior citizen. Preliminaries for establishing aging-in-place are a good urban infrastructure for daily provisions, a service-framework for care-giving at home, and the availability of good housing for all, including disabled or frail citizens. This paper focuses on the availability of home-features that enhance independent living for senior citizen with disabilities. Establishing appropriate housing for all senior citizen depends on the availability of existing homes that either already have suitable provisions, or that are easy to retrofit. Adding newly built homes that support aging-in-place is the most direct way to improve the housing stock. However, western, increasingly grey, societies have stable, or even shrinking populations. Therefore, the creation of quality housing stock tends towards converting and renovating existing housing stock. Success of the retrofitting depends on the technical features of the existing homes. This paper aims to conduct a quick scan of the technical quality of the existing housing stock and the suitability of these homes to be converted into homes needed to support aging-in-place. Method The amount of necessary homes for the age-cohorts for 2020 and 20304 and the composition of the Dutch housing stock by age and by home type5 were estimated through desktop re-search. Literature review produced preferences in the Dutch population towards affordable homes for seniors6. A valua-tion method7 that links the affordability to establish aging-in-place with technical features of the home by 4 performance indicators for affordable healthy housing quality was used. Each performance was linked to a parameter in technical features of home types. Five mainstream home types were reviewed for this set of parameters. Results & Discussion Most growth of households in period 2008-2030 is positioned in the cohort of senior citizen: from 1.6 to 2.7 million. Most existing homes are not provided with appropriate technical features to establish aging-in-place. Locating housing for seniors in existing neighborhoods would require large renovation programs which should include the home lay-out. Soli-darity between generations is likely to become a problem in housing.

Keywords: Ageing-in-Place, healthy housing; performance, independent, urban planning