With seniors staying more active as they age, many are choosing to continue to age in place rather than move to a senior living facility. This seems to be true as the recent State of the Nation's Housing 2011 report, compiled by the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University, found senior home ownership is on the rise.
Because of the stay at home trend, the report also showed that seniors are the leaders in home renovations, as they "will choose to stay in their current homes or age in place, which may involve remodeling to make their living spaces more senior-friendly," said writers from the Joint Center report.
Such remodels could be in the kitchen to lower countertops or even redoing stairs in the home to make them wider or to add more lighting.
A second group of boomers and seniors are choosing to sell their large, family-raising homes for more modest smaller or one-level homes that are easier for them to navigate through. The report found that between 2010 and 2020, there will be an increase by 10.2 million of households headed by individuals between the ages of 55 and 74.
A caregiver can assist their parents in updating or moving into a new home by installing hand rails in their bathrooms and keeping clutter around their home at bay to avoid falls.
March 6, 2012 at 8:27 pm
I’m not there yet, but I would definitely eprfer living at home with someone who could help me out. In many nursing homes there is abuse, or the patients are shut up and kept quiet by stuffing unnecessary pills into them. One doesn’t have the freedom like when living at home. Unless of course you are very rich, then it might be better, but I think that even the very best homes are mediocre at best. For the elderly it is important to be needed and and to be surrounded by family and friends and not to be locked up where life will start to seem senseless. The thing about the elderly is that they are young people who live inside old bodies that are not as fit as they used to be.A nursing home would be like prison for a younger person.My grandmother died at a nursing home because they forgot to give her her necessary medication she needed to survive. They were totally negligent.No matter what my kids would try to do with me, I would never go into a nursing home.
March 6, 2012 at 9:34 pm
I beleive most would rpefere to be at home if at all possible.My mom would have for sure ..there wasn’t any chance of getting better ..she needed dialysis though. Lord knows what the fee for that was but it was 300 each way for an ambulance .every other day. It would have been better if it was from her home or had a mobile unit brought in but this was from a home as well just the trip destroyed her. I got her moved to another home where they had dialysis .and she died after the first treatment there. It was floors and even the move through elevators and such was too much. She was so ill ..the home was so noisy and it was so stressful for her. She could barely eat and with all the medications she was on certain things made her ill and changed the taste of foods ..you either ate what they brought or you didn’t eat. Needless to say ..she quit eating. She couldn’t feed herself and after the staff passed the food out ..then they’d come back and try and feed her ice cold food. In a home it’s close to impossible to please everyone so I don’t blame them ..I just know at home It would have been so much easier to switch the lime jello for cherry without a major production and a 45 minute wait.In her case ..she knew it was over .last days and no you can’t have another 7-up because of diet restrictions? I don’t want someone telling me what I can and cannot do or have the last period of my life when I know I’m dying and there’s no hope. They seem to have lost the importance of choicesShe was paying top dollar and not able to participate in any of the activities. She couldn’t turn her TV on and off or change channels.Turn off lights or shut the door. The massive amount of money for her care would have better well spent making her final days more to her comfort and alot less expensive at home. We were trying to find out about it and see what we could do but she died and no-one gave us jack for information on anything to do with home care to help us speed up the process at all.Doris .70 s Illinois my mom ..severe rheumatoid arthritis and kidney failure.