The new old

HOW WILL THE BABY BOOMERS’ INDIVIDUALISM REDEFINE PREVIOUS GENERATIONAL APPROACHES TO AGEING? AND WHAT URBAN CONDITIONS WILL EMERGE TO SATISFY THEIR PURSUIT OF PERSONAL FREEDOM THROUGH CONSUMPTION AND LEISURE?

13 The New-Old

THE NEW-OLD

Over the next 50 years the age pyramid of the population will be turned upside down. Leading this shift are the Baby Boomers. Highly individualistic as thinkers and consumers the Boomers have driven change and shaped the society we experience today. This essay will address the Baby Boomers’ conflict with ageing through their identification as the ‘NEW-old’, their pursuit of personal freedom in the ‘third age’ and their rejection of previous generational approaches to ageing. How the Baby Boomers choose to exert their personal freedom in ageing will have both implications and opportunities for architecture and the contemporary city.

Born between 1945 and 1965 the Baby Boomers represent a large proportion of the population. For New Zealand and Australia high fertility rates and early child-bearing ages post World War 2 resulted in Baby Booms unparalleled in the Western World.1 In New Zealand the Baby Boom was prolonged with the number of births growing until 1961, dropping a little and then finally peaking in 1971.2 As this large cohort reaches retirement age in the next 30 years, special consideration has been given to the shift between adult and senior citizen. With increasing longevity due to a rise in wealth and living standards, the life course of the Baby Boomers has lengthened, creating a moment or gap that requires a new definition.

Drawing on social historian Peter Laslett’s conception of the ‘Third Age’, Deane Simpson describes how

“The traditional notion of ‘old-age’ has bifurcated between the ailing and dependent ‘Old-Old’ (the Fourth Age) and a new and rapidly expanding population of healthy and independent ‘Young-Old’ (the Third Age)”.3 This marked split between two notions of ageing is driven by the Baby Boomers’ reluctance to consider ageing as it suggests an enforced slowing down and an end to living.

For the Boomers, retirement and old age is what their parents had and differentiating themselves from this by inventing alternative identities and lifestyles is highly important. The silver foxes, wild elderly, transformers, revivers, new phasers, middlescents and S.K.I trippers (spending kids’ inheritance) are all versions of this wish to shed age-association and challenge previous generational approaches to ageing.

4

Establishing the distinction between the Third Age and the Fourth Age allows Boomers to consider

themselves the NEW-old.5 This Third Age has emerged as a leisure class, a period of “late freedom”, free from the responsibilities of adulthood as well as a freedom from physical and mental disabilities associated with traditional old-age.6 And it is within this that we see the Baby Boomers’ notion of personal freedom heightened. “When scaled down to the individual, ageing is seen as a liberating phenomenon, enabling Baby Boomers with surplus dollars to actively pursue any number of alluring post-retirement fantasies.”7 In the satisfying of this

new identity there is a rejection of age associated activities and retirement typologies. Baby Boomers are searching for living options beyond the retirement-village model and pursuits beyond being diverted to the bowling or golf club.

The NEW-old is not defined by age but by activity (cue caricatures Fig.3 to Fig.9). These identities are not purely driven by a denial of ageing but by a wish to remain relevant and active in whatever their chosen pursuit. For every Boomer saving for an early retirement there is a Boomer adamant to work until they drop. And there is just as much evidence to support their portrayal as a selfish generation as there is to suggest a return to their activist roots as social crusaders.

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*not to be confused with the elderly.

The New-Old

the Third Agers, the Silver Foxes, the Wild Elderly, the Young-Old the New Agers the Transformers, the Geriatric Delinquents the Revivers, the New Phasers, the Middlescents, the Ski Trippers or the Boomers*

“‘Your dreams are crazy! ...They’re impossible. That’s what they said back in the day when your

dreams changed everything! That’s not gonna stop now. You’re not gonna turn your dreams over to

the authorities at age 60, you find someone who believes in your dreams. Start with your dreams

and your Ameriprise Financial advisor working with you one on one, face to face. We’ll work with

you to help make your dreams realities. See, the thing about dreams is, they don’t retire”

– Dennis Hopper

Fig. 1.

Dennis Hopper in “Dreams don’t retire” advertisement

Ameriprise Financial

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This need to distinguish themselves from their age cohort and from previous generations stems from their individualistic nature. The Boomers are a highly stratified cohort with large differentiation in affluence, longevity, education and ethnicity. Demographic studies describe the Baby Boomers as a “disconnected generation” more detached from locality, community, social networks and organizations than previous the defining character of the Baby Boomers is their need to be seen as individuals. As a fragmented cohort it is difficult to predict how the Baby Boomers will coalesce. It is increasingly suggested that they will not, instead further splintering into smaller sub-categories, developing identities, activities and living conditions distinct from their age cohort.

As the generation that experienced the emergence of a mass consumptive economy, consumerism has operated as a mode in which to articulate their individualism. The Baby Boomers have grown up in an age of affluence in which tourism, travel and leisure is accessible to the middle classes.9 Marketed

to all their lives the Baby Boomers have been encouraged to define themselves by personal materialist choices.10 “Their experience of consumerism is a kind of reconciliation between the desire to make ever more personalized choices and the need to remain within homogenised systems for managing them.”11

For the Baby Boomers consumerism is a vehicle for self-differentiation and a mode in which they exert their NEW-old identity. The beauty industry has already profited considerably from the affluent Baby Boomers’ desire to stay young through cosmetics and plastic surgery.12 And the success of BMW’s new Mini and Volkswagen’s resurrected Campervan has been widely attributed to Boomers buying into 1960s and 1970s nostalgia.13 The Baby Boomers’ acceptance of consumerism is highly conflicted. Many cling to the altruistic and idealistic views formed in their youth. But they do so through a considered consumption, defining themselves as brand literate or ethical consumers. The purchasing of free trade or free-range is a way to define oneself. Consumption has become an identity, a form of individualism.

The Baby Boomers are fervent consumers; of education, power, leisure, current affairs and property and have come to expect their individual wants and needs to be satisfied. For Boomers property has been a vehicle for economic improvement throughout their lives trading-up or down with property to meet their lifestyle requirements. As the beneficiaries of an extended housing boom, the Boomers hold an established position in the property market.

The New-Old

generations.8 Although some hold onto nostalgic or romantic notions of the collective from their youth;

In The Ageing of Aquarius, Shane Murray discusses how “…the values of consumption and lifestyle have begun to take precedence over the role of the home as anchor of personal identity.”14 In contrast to previous generations who viewed the home as a symbol of stability, the Boomers see property as the economic facilitator for a greater flexibility in retirement. Often the Baby Boomer’s single largest asset, the home is a product to cash in in the acquisition of lifestyle. As lifestyle becomes the central occupation in the Third-Age this capital asset will be drained.

If private property is to be the vehicle for the Boomers’ pursuit of personal freedom in the Third Age, architecture is implicated. Architecture must propose living conditions relevant to the Baby Boomers new set of demands. Current retirement typologies are being rejected by the Baby Boomers.

The retirement village is an institution for the old, for their parent’s generation and as such will be a last resort or a necessary evil in the Fourth Age. The Boomers’ frustration with the regimented and confined environment of institutional care has led to the growing popularity of age-segregation communities designed around a leisure lifestyle.

The consumptive lifestyle desired by Boomers has led to commercialization and privatization of the retirement village. The Villages in Florida conceived as an all year vacation is a resort-like development to satisfy the Boomers’ Third-Age activities. In Leisureville, Andrew Blechman describes it as abdication of responsibility and an embracing of a second youth with bars, clubs, festivals, inhabitants’ drunk-driving golf carts and a rather high rate of sexually transmitted diseases.15 The senior city or the senior village of age-segregated communities represent a generalizing approach to the future property demand of retiring Baby Boomers. Although providing consumptive leisure, these gated communities do not encourage individualism or personal freedom. They are merely retirement villages carefully rebranded and jazzed up. Deane Simpson argues these typologies cultivate a sinister “deep slice urbanism”; the careful and considered consolidation of a demographic physically and the subsequent exploitation of the Baby Boomers as a market.16

Age-segregated or gated communities have the capacity to exacerbate discrepancies in age and affluence already being articulated. Described as like-mindedness by a resident of The Villages; the racial and social uniformity of the gated community is more exclusive than inclusive.17 And although the economic autonomy or user-pays logic of its organization is attractive to the Baby Boomer demographic it ultimately signals a retreat from contributing to wider public services. This urban condition is an example of a self-serving segregation physically and economically which could further stratify the population along generational lines.

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Yet the sprawling landscape of suburbia is not a encouraging alternative. Large detached dwellings, designed for the nuclear family and accessible by automobile are unsustainable and inhospitable to an aging Boomer population.18 The quiet suburban plot does not satisfy the variety of lifestyles

isolation. Especially given that by the age of 75 almost half of the Baby Boomer population is likely to be living solo.19 Efforts to support the Baby Boomer generation ageing in place are unrealistic, remaining in a family home too large to maintain will only result in the unnecessarily fast draining of one’s principal asset.

Furthermore the Baby Boomer’s established position within the property market could exacerbate existing tensions in the current housing shortage. Research suggests without change to New Zealand Superannuation or the property favouring tax system (capital gains), the Baby Boomers will likely hold on to suburban homes and rentals thereby increasing housing demand and raising house prices.20 This combined with an expected higher taxation in the coming decades will result in declining home ownership amongst the younger population and further economic and social stratification between the working age and the Boomers.21 If denser living options are not proposed to the Baby Boomers, the status

quo of suburban growth will be perpetuated and Auckland’s urban limits widened further.

Architecture needs to propose new urban conditions:- dense, attractive and more relevant to the desires of an ageing population. And local or national authorities need to allow for new ways of negotiating space. The granny flat as a proposal for densification is of course highly circumstantial and therefore only applicable to a few. But the UK’s proposed reduction of council tax on live-in annexes for immediate relations is estimated to benefit 300,000 families.22 And speculation regarding Auckland City Council removing the development fee for separate minor dwellings (granny flats) could encourage new typologies and solutions.

The next forty years will be defined as the “senior moment” an era in which ageing is the central social issue.23 The current lack of housing options for an ageing population could exacerbate discrepancies in affluence, property and political influence already present between generations. How space is negotiated within this context will impact on what is already a highly negative debate. As longevity has increased, so have the negative connotations towards the ageing population. Phrases like the demographic ‘time bomb’ or “slow burning fuse,”24 capture a sense of threat and paranoia in the media.

The New-Old

craved by the NEW-old nor does it address issues regarding proximity to amenity or social

Initially conceived as a contract between generations, superannuation fundamentally shifted the economic burden of the elderly away from the family to the State. But over forty years neoliberal policy has fundamentally altered the role of the State in the management of the economy. The elevation of the private sector increased competition and prosperity but with the 2008 financial crisis neoliberal structures and ideologies endorsed by the Boomers showed their fragility. And as Baby Boomers reach

retirement age in this era of economic insecurity the social contract between generations and between the citizen and the State is looking more precarious. Superannuation’s sustainability has been debated heavily, called a burden, “a tax on the young”, and a drain on our economy, public policies, and health care system. It is possible that Baby Boomers may be the last generation to enjoy fully taxfunded superannuation.

The Baby Boomers’ orientation away from formal authority and distrust of institutions formed in their youth helped to cement the individualistic position within politics.25 Liberal economic theory and its emphasis on individual freedom, choice and autonomy instigated a change in thinking towards public services.

The notion of the ‘citizen’ shifted to that of the ‘consumer’ and a preoccupation with user satisfaction, customisation and quality led to a commodification of public services.26 In the effort to increase their competitiveness services were contracted out, streamlined or privatized. But put bluntly, the populist idiom of the user as a ‘consumer’ often reduces quality and almost always reduces influence. Perhaps the consumer can choose what to buy but they have less say in how the shop is run. The Baby Boomers’ wish to be treated as consumers, to have their individual needs met and increase productivity and competitiveness led to a privatization of the State’s responsibilities.

Now as the Baby Boomer population recognises the loss of influence in the management of the services they purchase, there is a push towards self-organization. Recognizing a new demand, New Zealand lobby group Grey Power is contemplating the establishment of its own electricity company to supply power to its members (50 years or older) at the cost of supply.27 This search for autonomy through private commerce is consistent with the neoliberal political framework Boomers have endorsed. But the inclination towards self-serving segregation rather than wider electricity sector reform on behalf of those in need, regardless of age, is troubling.

Seniors are not a passive segment of society that lack agency.28 The Government’s reluctance to raise the age of eligibility or introduce means testing to superannuation and Prime Minister John Key’s pledge that he would resign if superannuation was changed under his government illustrate the Baby Boomer population’s significant political influence.29 Due to the voting power of the Baby Boomer cohort it is very likely the Baby Boomers will decide their own policy over the next 20 years. Whereas those potentially affected by these policies represent a much smaller proportion of the New Zealand electorate or are currently too young to vote.

Fig. 2.

Negative connotations towards an ageing population

21 The New-Old

The Baby Boomers are a large, affluent cohort which holds a privileged position within the property market and New Zealand politics. This influence means their actions are publicly scrutinized and any sign of self-serving segregation will be met with harsh social commentary and criticism. The Baby Boomers’ focus on the pursuit of personal freedom in ageing is the product of an era that glorified the individual. Liberal political and economic theories of self-interest and individual responsibility provided an era of prosperity, but post 2008, will the Boomers adopt a different position?

The Baby Boomers’ desire for independence, flexibility and a consumptive lifestyle in the Third Age will no doubt be expensive. According to research by Diane Oslerg and Mark Winters, a third of Baby Boomers expect to use up all their assets before they die.30 What is concerning is whether Boomers will be able to supplement their own welfare in the Fourth Age of deteriorating health. The rate to which Boomers drain their capital asset and the security or stability of real estate markets will define their quality of life in the Fourth Age and have a large impact on New Zealand’s political and economic situation.

The debate and statistics surrounding ageing populations is unarguably negative, but demographers Julia Huber and Paul Skidmore warn against a conversation that confronts purely economic and political inequalities. “…population aging is too often considered a point of socioeconomic crisis rather than as a resource with embedded potential.”31 The Baby Boomers have been at the forefront of radical

social, economic and political change at every stage of their lives: within the family, within the education system and within the labour market. Now as an ageing population they will assert themselves again, searching for individualism, altering preconceptions of the life-course and rejecting previous generational approaches. Naturally how the Boomers redefine this phase of their life-course has both urban opportunities and implications. But how architecture responds to the Boomers agenda is equally crucial. Architecture needs to offer options beyond perpetuating suburban growth or retirement typologies that exacerbate age division.

Jeffery Inaba presents an optimistic yet quite satirical take on the Baby Boomers’ agenda, describing it as an ‘urban conspiracy’. Believing their individualism is a smokescreen to conceal their efforts towards an unselfish social end.32 Inaba implores the reader to not let the greying hair and the seemingly quiet lives fool you; “It is no co-incidence that we are experiencing an ageing society at the same time as we are seeing an abundance of well-groomed parks.”33 Inaba accepts the Boomers’ agenda is motivated by need to remain vital, engaged and relevant; a belief in their own importance affirmed by media, politics and a lifetime in a consumer society. However he

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suggests that perhaps the Boomers are not quite sold on this quest for personal fulfilment in ageing, instead describing them as civic defenders driven by a desire for liveable, accessible cities with an abundance of public space.

grey cause yet in fact developing it for the general public and imparting it to the next generation seems naïve. But the Baby Boomers’ affluence, agency and self-interest could be constructively exploited. The architecture of the independent Baby Boomer will be inherited. And the Third Age of the Baby Boomer could act as a catalyst for a reassessment of current domestic models and a search for new urban conditions. So whether it is a conscious effort or not, the Baby Boomer agenda presents an opportunity to challenge Auckland’s density, amenity, activity and ability to meet the consumers’ demands.

The Baby Boomer population holds significant political and economic influence; their approach to ageing will ultimately impact subsequent populations. Add to this the Boomers’ denial of ageing, refusal to retire, rejection of civic associations and penchant for consumption and the result is a public debate that is highly negative. But discussion should not be centred on whether they have undue economic or social influence, but on how they will choose to exert this influence. Private property will act as a vehicle for the Baby Boomers’ economic and personal freedom in ageing and this implicates architecture and the city. The current response to an ageing population is a series of homogenous and nostalgic retirement typologies that fail to satisfy the Baby Boomer’s individualistic nature. The variety of the Baby Boomer demographic should be encouraged; their agency and demand for specialization provides an opportunity to test new ways of negotiating space and proposing new typologies, new densities and new levels of urban activity.

The New-Old

The proposal that Boomers are slowly accumulating land and power under the premise of self-serving the

NOTES

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

18 19 20 21

22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

Bruce Ansley, “Not Fade Away,” The Listener 2006, 21. ibid.

Deane Simpson, “Third Age Urbanism: Retirement Utopias of the Young Old” (ETH, 2010), 12.

Ansley, “Not Fade Away,” 15.

Julia Huber and Paul Skidmore, The New Old: Why Baby Boomers Won’t be Pensioned Off, (London: Demos, 2003), http:// www.demos.co.uk/files/thenewold.pdf.

Simpson, “Third Age Urbanism: Retirement Utopias of the Young Old,” 12.

Jeffery Inaba “The Senior Moment” (paper presented at the C-LAB Symposium on Aging and the City, New York CIty, 2012), 1.

Huber and Skidmore, The New Old: Why Baby Boomers Won’t be Pensioned Off. 67,68.

Hugh Bartling, “Tourism as Everyday Life: An Inquiry into The Villages, Florida,” Tourism Geographies: An International Journal of Tourism Space, Place and Environment 8, no. 4 (2006), http://www.informaworld.com/openurl?genre=journal&is sn=1461-6688.

Huber and Skidmore, The New Old: Why Baby Boomers Won’t be Pensioned Off. 37.

Ibid.

Ibid., 36.

Ibid.

Shane Murray, “The Ageing of Aquarius,” Architecture Australia 96, no. 3 (2007): 95.

Andrew D. Blechman, Leisureville: Adventures in America’s Retirement Utopias (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2008).89.

Deane Simpson, “Deep Slice Urbanism,” Volume 29(2011): 75.

Dave a resident of The Villages explained to Blechman that diversity was more about interests and background than age or racial demographics noting, “There are very few blacks –although I did play golf with a nice man, and I don’t think I’ve seen any Orientals…” in Blechman, Leisureville: Adventures in America’s Retirement Utopias: 6.

Eric Klinenberg, Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone (New York: Penguin Press, 2012).

209.

Huber and Skidmore, The New Old: Why Baby Boomers Won’t be Pensioned Off. 67.

Bernard Hickey, “Boom Bulge won’t Budge “, The New Zealand Herald(2011), http://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/ article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=10747822.

Andrew M. G. Coleman, Squeezed In and Squeezed Out: The Effects of Population Ageing on the Demand for Housing, (Wellington: Motu Economic and Public Policy Research, 2009), http://ndhadeliver.natlib.govt.nz/contentaggregator/getIEs?system=ilsdb&id=1395766.

BBC, “Plan to Remove ‘Granny Flat’ Council Tax,” in UK Politics (BBC News: BBC Worldwide Ltd., 2012).

Inaba “The Senior Moment.”

The Economist , “Ageing Populations: A Slow-Burning Fuse,” June 25th, 2009, http://www.economist.com/node/13888045.

Huber and Skidmore, The New Old: Why Baby Boomers Won’t be Pensioned Off. 34.

Ibid., 37.

ONE News, “Lobby Group Mulls Starting own Power Company,” in Business News (TVNZ, 2012).

Jeffery Inaba, “The Urban Conspiracy,” Volume 2011, 2.

David Fisher “Your Pension is Being Dicussed,” The New Zealand Herald(2011), http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article. cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10752530.

Murray, “The Ageing of Aquarius,” 95.

Inaba “The Senior Moment,” 1.

Inaba, “The Urban Conspiracy,” 2.

Ibid., 3.

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CARICATURES

A comic portrayal of the Baby Boomers’ need for differentiation and reinvention in ageing; the athlete, the The New-Old

beauty, the mature student, the capitalist, the nanny, the jet-setter and the activist.

27 The New-Old

Fig. 3.

The Athlete*

* Large rise in testosterone or “T” prescriptions in the US in the quest for ageing men to remain active “Testosterone; Fountain of Youth for Men?” One News - 20.09.2012

Fig. 4.

The Beauty*

* The Golden Years, Polished With Surgery - The New York Times 8.08.2011

29 The New-Old

Fig. 5.

The Mature Student*

* Out the way students, the baby boomers are coming to campus! - The Guardian - 17.2.10 - 63.4% increase in the number of mature applicants for undergraduate courses

Fig. 6.

The Capitalist*

* “Work ‘til You Drop”, “the Silver Dollar” - The Economist 25.06.09, A Greying Population, a Greying Work Force – the NY Times

31 The New-Old

Fig. 7.

The Nanny*

* Taking the Kids: When the grandparents are leading the way - Chicago Tribune 21.10.12, - The future is caring, Don’t panic. An ageing population is good news for childcare

Fig. 8.

The Jet-setter*

* Non -profi t Road Scholar Educational travel and tours, previously called Elderhostel - http://www.roadscholar.org/

33 The New-Old

Fig. 9.

The Activist*

* More Strikes Loom in France’s Pension Showdown - Time Magazine 13.10.10, Baby boomers need their own online voice to fi ght prejudice as they get old - The Guardian 8.05.11