To help us understand the situation better, I’ve asked Peter Lobo to join us. Mr. Lobo is deputy director of the Population Division at the Department of City Planning. In short, he an expert in the demographics of New York, a topic so broad and deep that we could devote the entire semester to it. My focus will be on how a growing share of our population is considered aging (usually defined as 60 years old and up, though 60 is looking younger and younger to me by the day).
The Times did a brief interview with Mr. Lobo a few years ago. Here it is:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/22/nyregion/thecity/22cabb.html?_r=0
He will join us for the first part of the session, so please, please be on time to enable us to get rolling right away and not keep our guest waiting. He has a power point presentation for us. I’ll try to have someone from the Hunter tech staff on hand to handle any possible problems. But just in case that doesn’t work out, this is an appeal to the techno-wizards among you to be ready to come to the rescue.
We will then explore not just the demographics but what sorts of measures the city might take to deal with its aging population. The session will also include a look at the problems of an aging infrastructure and housing issues. Technically, housing is a separate matter, but this would be a good time to examine some major issues in play.
And if there’s time, I’d like to hear if there are any thoughts/problems/issues in regard to either the group Macaulay project or your personal final project that you want to raise with me. We’ll also do that in the following session.
Here are readings for you.:
This is a 2013 (but still relevant) report from the Center for an Urban Future, a local think tank, on numbers of NY seniors and issues that they face. More and more, they are immigrants, often with limited English ability. Below the first link is another link that offers a fuller version of this report for the more ambitious among you:
https://nycfuture.org/research/publications/the-new-face-of-new-yorks-seniors
https://nycfuture.org/pdf/The-New-Face-of-New-Yorks-Seniors.pdf
Related to that, here is testimony that a senior official of the Center for an Urban Future gave before the City Council last year on city plans for an aging immigrant population:
https://nycfuture.org/research/publications/planning-for-new-yorks-aging-immigrant-population
The city’s Department for the Aging had a long list of initiatives, 59 of them, on practical ways to deal with the growing number of elderly here. Some are not terribly specific. But this gives a sense of the extent of what may be needed to be done:
http://www.nyc.gov/html/dfta/downloads/pdf/age_friendly_report13.pdf
Specifically, mobility is a big issue: difficulties in getting around town, whether it means bus service, or subway stairs that are too steep for aging knees, or traffic lights than don’t allow slower-moving elders to cross streets safely. Here are some initiatives proposed in some cities, not just NYC:
http://www.nyc.gov/html/dcp/pdf/transportation/mobility_initiatives_aging_06.pdf.
Here’s some other material on policies for aging city populations that are both specific to New York but also involve other cities:
http://www.who.int/ageing/projects/age_friendly_cities/en/
And here is some thinking from Transportation Alternatives, an advocacy group principally for bicyclists and pedestrians:
https://www.transalt.org/issues/pedestrian/safeseniors
While we’re at it, here are two columns that I wrote on seniors and NYC traffic, the first one from 2010, the second from 2008:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/02/nyregion/02nyc.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/12/nyregion/12nyc.html
Physical structure is aging, too, not to mention crumbling. You may recall a deadly gas explosion in East Harlem two years ago. It was but one example:
https://nycfuture.org/research/publications/time-new-york-city-is-crumbling
This is a long-ish report from the Center for an Urban Future that looks in detail at the city’s aging infrastructure. Be sure to read it in full. There is a lot of detail here. I hardly expect you to memorize all the statistics that it contains, but they will give you a sense of what the problems are:
https://nycfuture.org/pdf/Caution-Ahead.pdf
On the heels of the East Harlem explosion, Huffington Post did a video segment with several city planners. It’s not great, but it has thoughts and insights worth listening to. This is not quite 20 minutes long:
