A crowd of seniors lined up at the dining room entrance of Evanston’s North Shore Retirement Hotel, but 88-year-old Molly Kubey parked her walker and sat resolutely in a lounge chair away from the crowd.

Kubey used to sell auto parts.

For 35 years she was owner and manager of Main Auto in Indiana Harbor, Ind. In 1985 she retired to Florida, where she lived only three blocks from the beach, where she swam regularly in the ocean. She often played poker with her friends, but she declined to divulge what the stakes were – and she said she never missed a good sale at the nearby shopping center.

In 1980 doctors diagnosed Kubey with macular degeneration, an eye condition she said has not blinded her, but has gradually chipped away at her ability to recognize faces. Eventually, when someone knocked on her door, she said, she wouldn’t be able to tell if the person was a stranger intending to do her harm or whether it was just a friend wanting to visit.

Because her eyesight degenerated to such a dangerous point, Kubey said, her daughter moved her from the apartment in Florida to the North Shore Retirement Hotel’s assisted-living quarters eight months ago.

Her daughter researched many senior residences in the Evanston area, Kubey said, and unfortunately, no better alternatives were available.

“She wanted me to be closer to her,” she said, leaning back and surveying some the frail residents, “but this place is not for me. I’m not thinking about leaving – I’m thinking about dying. This place does that to you.”

Kubey is one of many seniors who feel marginalized by the current senior housing alternatives.

“I think we as a nation don’t necessarily treat our elderly people as well as we could,” said Leslie Wilson, program director at the Levy Senior Activity Center. “There’s in-home care, but that’s expensive – that’s not an option for a lot of people. With any option, it’s a loss of independence and people resent that.”

Many seniors and their families have faced this dilemma over the years. Seniors like Kubey, whose relatives cannot care for them at home, have been moved into senior residences or nursing homes where they are isolated from younger generations. When the senior population balloons with baby boomers, society will have to answer some tough questions about its practice of plucking the elderly from their homes and placing them in segregated senior housing, said AARP Senior Housing Specialist Leon Harper. Eventually students will be responsible for shaping future alternatives to current senior housing practices – alternatives that one day will affect their parents and themselves.

Baby boomers will turn 65 between 2010 and 2030, he said. AARP data in 1997 predicted the senior population nearly will double over the 20-year period, swelling from 39.4 million to 69.4 million.

“The boomers are going to test (senior housing norms),” Harper said. “They’ve changed everything else as they’ve come through – you can bet they’re going to change this too.”

In recent AARP surveys, which included members of the baby boom generation, Harper said respondents first wanted to “age in place” or grow old in their own homes. But when this wasn’t possible, he said they wanted to live in a residence with people of mixed ages. If that alternative was unavailable, seniors wanted to live in segregated senior housing or retirement communities, he said, and the least popular housing choice was nursing homes.

Evanston is home to about 10,000 elderly citzens and 11 senior residences. Senior accommodations vary in care level from 24-hour nursing-home care at St. Francis Hospital to relatively independent living conditions offered at the Swedish Retirement Association. They range in cost from the more expensive accommodations at the North Shore Retirement Hotel, which charges an average of $2000 per month, to the Cook County’s subsidized Noyes Court, which runs about $262 per month.

Too Many Old People

“When I first walked in here, there were all these tired old women,” said 79-year-old Noyes Court resident Gloria Morris, sipping her daily afternoon martini. “They don’t do anything – they just sit in that cotton-picking lobby and gossip.”

Before retiring two years ago, Morris had been employed as a legal secretary in Chicago for nearly 30 years, assisting various attorneys whose specializations ranged from appellate and probate law to business and “oil-and-gas” law. She also did some union work for the local United Auto Workers and the State Congress of Industrial Organizations in Wisconsin, she said.

But now Morris lounges on a couch with her cat, Misty, and tells President George W. Bush just what she thinks of him when he appears on her living-room TV screen. Morris said she tries to get out as much as possible, weather permitting, and her favorite place to visit is her old neighborhood by Chicago Avenue and Main Street.

“I miss the action in my old neighborhood, seeing people drinking coffee at the cafes,” she said. “I look out the window here, and all I see is people on walkers.”

Morris moved into the Cook County Housing Authority’s senior residence at 2300 Noyes Court in April 2000 after her landlord raised the rent for her one-bedroom apartment to $840 per month, she said. Her current apartment, subsidized by the housing authority, costs only $262 per month, but she says if there were any way she could go back to her old home, she would.

“I’ve always had interesting neighbors, but here, this place is weird,” she said. “A lot of these people just sit around and talk about who’s dying and who’s sick.”

Planned activities are designed to increase seniors’ social interaction and include bingo and card games, but they rarely include younger people, said Morris, who added that interaction with younger people would help her feel more connected to society.

“Bingo is for old people,” said Morris, who much prefers a good round of Scrabble. “If only there were a younger family down the hall – I miss young folk.”

A Unique Approach

One Chicago-based organization has tapped into the need for inter-generational housing; Housing Opportunities and Maintenance for the Elderly (H.O.M.E.) runs two such facilities in Rogers Park.

“H.O.M.E. knows what many urban planners have forgotten,” said executive director Roberta Steiner. “Older people need the young, and the younger flourish around older members of society.”

The organization’s Pat Crowley House, first established in 1983, houses 12 seniors, four students, one family and a dog named Patch. H.O.M.E.’s Nathalie Salmon Intergenerational Community House boasts 51 units – also occupied by seniors, families and students – but includes an entire floor of senior assisted-living units.

AARP’s Harper said he sees the H.O.M.E. set-up as a very positive development.

“To have them all in the same building keeps the seniors’ vibrant juices flowing,” Harper said. “There’s not enough like it.”

But Evanston seniors like Kubey and Morris will not be able to take advantage of H.O.M.E.’s inter-generational housing any time soon.

“We have a five-year waiting list for our independent living units,” Steiner said. H.O.M.E. does have plans to build another facility, she said, but it is waiting for approval of a grant for construction.

“It’s a very expensive thing to do,” she said. “We have to do a lot of fund raising in order to keep these places running.”

And Evanston probably will never host a H.O.M.E. facility, she said, because land values would put the cost out of reach.

the future For Evanston seniors

The Evanston City Council has approved plans for three new senior developments: the Jacob Blake, which will provide low-income senior housing on Emerson Street; the Sherman Plaza, which will house 200 senior luxury apartments on Sherman Avenue and Davis Street; and a new Levy Senior Center, a recreation facility slated for southeast Evanston.

Ald. Arthur Newman (1st), who helped push approval for Sherman Plaza’s construction through City Council, said the council had not looked into different types of senior housing before approving the Sherm
an Plaza project.

“Housing is housing,” he said, “and broadening the tax base is broadening the tax base.”

Newman said the council relies on developers to decide on the need and type of senior housing.

“It’s the marketplace that will decide where (senior housing) is, how good it is and how much there is in Evanston,” Newman said.

But the marketplace doesn’t favor nonprofit, intergenerational residences such as H.O.M.E.’s, Steiner said.

Currently none of Evanston’s senior residences offers inter-generational living situations, nor are there any current plans to offer such alternatives, said Evanston’s Commission on Aging Director Jay Terry.

But Terry said that even though the city has no comprehensive plan to deal with future senior housing needs, increasing the amount of low-income senior housing has been a priority since the city first noticed in 1990 that seniors were leaving Evanston apparently because of increasing taxes. According to U.S. Census data, Evanston lost almost 20 percent of its senior population between 1970 and 1990. Only 9,037 of Evanston’s more than 73,000 residents were 65 or older in 1990, compared with 11,225 residents in 1970.

Terry said the city eagerly is awaiting the results of the 2000 U.S. Census to see if the tide has turned, but he said he doesn’t think it has because of property tax hikes in the last few years.

The senior exodus from Evanston is understandable, H.O.M.E.’s Steiner said, but by no means unique.

“I think that all of the North Shore has plenty of seniors that would like to stay but can’t afford it,” Steiner said, adding that H.O.M.E. couldn’t even afford to build in Rogers Park again because land values have risen so much. Instead, Steiner said the organization will have to build where the city of Chicago subsidizes development, probably in a low income area that needs renewal.

Without Evanston’s city government offering similar subsidies, she said, inter-generational housing in Evanston will most certainly not happen.

Noyes resident Gloria Morris said she is pessimistic that Evanston will ever offer such subsidies.

“Mixed-age housing – I wish,” she said, “but they’ll never do it.”

Kubey said she is not going to sit around and wait to see.

“I’ve been here eight months too long,” she said. “I never asked for this.” nyou