Housing for seniors in spotlight
Developers of retirement villages may be required to provide some affordable units in their complexes as the number of people aged 65 and over is tipped to soar.
Seniors Minister Tracey Martin on Friday opened the Positive Ageing Expo at Richmond, near Nelson, where she announced the Government would develop a new Positive Ageing Strategy to shape the policies affecting older New Zealanders including housing.
Before the announcement, Martin said she had been involved in conversations ‘‘around retirement village developments and how can we, the Government, require a proportion of affordable units inside retirement village construction’’.
‘‘Those are the conversations I’m having with my Cabinet colleagues,’’ she said.
‘‘If we can say to a housing developer: ‘You must have 40 per cent of affordable housing when you’re building separate housing’, why are we not having the same conversations with retirement village developers?
‘‘So, it’s sort of like State housing for our seniors, I suppose, but inside an environment that they should be able to go inside with their peers.’’
Martin added that she ‘‘absolutely’’ thought there was a role for local government in the provision of housing for older people.
‘‘What we know to be true is that if we can keep our senior citizens in their homes, whether it be a rental property or their own home for longer, connected to community, it’s a good use of money so how can we help support local government to actually keep providing what was great – like the pensioner flats of old and community housing – so that these citizens don’t have to leave the communities they know.’’
Keeping people in their homes for longer made sense for the wider community, too.
‘‘The level of unpaid work that gets done by people who are committed to their communities, who are in this age demographic would leave an enormous gap if they all got forced out.’’
The first Positive Ageing Strategy was created in 2001 when there were nearly 50,000 people aged 85 or more. Now, there were more than 85,000 aged 85 or more.
About 725,000 people were aged over 65 and that was expected to climb over 1.2 million by 2036.
‘‘We need a strategy to ensure that we are in a good position to deal with these demographic shifts and the wider changes that are happening in society, and that are going to happen,’’ Martin said.
‘‘Along with having a positive environment for the individual people represented in these figures, our ageing population has implications for our economy, for employment and housing, health and aged care, and social services.’’
Two key areas the strategy needed to examine were supporting older people workforce and promoting housing options appropriate for older people.
Public consultation would be held from June until late August before the strategy was developed. That would include workshops throughout the country.
Labour and the Green Party, with Grey Power, held meetings nationwide in 2017 as part of a national investigation on the state of aged care.
Their findings were released in September.
When questioned on whether that investigation was enough, Martin said: ‘‘I don’t think it is enough because I want to engage further into different ethnic communities, I actually want to ask the question: ‘If that’s what we need, what are you combined with us going to do about it’.’’