SENIOR CHALLENGE: STAYING INDEPENDENT
Making their way around this city built for cars can be frustrating for older Montrealers who want to stay active
For the elderly who choose to stay active, making their way around the city can be a burden because of inadequate transport, sidewalks covered in ice, and a lack of places to sit and rest. René Bruemmer examines the issue
Zorka Jovanovic lived a full life after emigrating to Canada from Serbia in 1963, raising three children and working as a caregiver for seniors. Now 87 and widowed, she is enjoying a happy retirement in Montreal, active at her local community centres, visiting museums, reading the New Yorker online and speaking to friends and family across the world via Facebook and Skype.
Living alone in a big city as a senior is not all wine and roses, however. She recently threatened to kill someone if one of her perennially tardy assisted transit taxi drivers was late again. It was a good-natured death threat, but borne of real frustration at feeling like a secondclass citizen because of her age.
Three times a week, Jovanovic goes for a free exercise class, a $5 hot lunch and some companionship at the New Hope Senior Citizens’ Centre in Notre-Dame-de- Grâce. She’s also a regular at the Contactivity seniors centre in Westmount, and her local legion hall. She lives in a one-bedroom apartment on Queen Mary Road that she loves because it’s close to community services and adjoins a park, so she has a view of leaf-laden trees.
What she doesn’t like is having to rely on a municipal assisted transit service — subsidized taxis that cost $1.60 a ride — that is perpetually behind schedule. Which makes her late for things like exercise class, or forces her to sit for 90 minutes at her local grocery store awaiting her ride, a commute that used to be a 10-minute stroll in the days before she needed a walker.
“I love my house and I cherish my independence,” she says, but making her way around the city can be a burden because of inadequate transport, sidewalks covered in snow and ice, and a lack of places to sit and rest. Particularly fed up by another late pickup one recent morning, the normally affable Jovanovic told a driver she was ready to kill one of them. You can’t say that, said the driver. “Why not? What are you going to do, put me in jail?” Jovanovic asked, her Eastern European accent and fiery spirit rising to the fore. “Good. Put me in jail. Free rent, free food — everybody wins.”
Her lunch companion, retired accountant Joyce Forte Armorer, takes three buses from her upper duplex in LaSalle to get to the New Hope centre. Active in her church, as a drummer in the Golden Stars Steel Orchestra, a volunteer at a seniors centre, and a standup comedian, she praises the city’s bus service (“Two things you never run after,” she quips. “Buses and men. Because there will always be another one coming ”), but worries Montreal’s condominium boom will hike rental costs in a city sorely lacking in affordable housing. Traffic lights that change before she can cross are another concern.
The needs and wants of seniors in urban centres the world over are remarkably similar. They want to be able to age comfortably in their own homes and communities, with safe, well-lit streets, stoplights that give enough time to cross the road, places to sit, access to cultural activities, and the opportunity to be physically active and civically engaged and sociable. They want to be able to walk freely, to keep active for healthier aging and have access to reasonably priced public transit.
The good news is cities the world over are moving to become more age-friendly and are learning to include seniors in the discussion when new developments are planned. But officials warn they cannot do all the work or see all the needs themselves. If citizens want changes in their neighbourhoods, they need to learn to mobilize in order to make it happen.
The problem, especially in older cities like Montreal, is that much of the infrastructure was built when baby boomers were still in diapers and the car was king. The demographic tsunami that is the boomer generation started hitting 65 in 2011. In 2011, 15 per cent of Montreal’s population was 65 or older, representing 250,000 seniors. Sixty per cent were women, and nearly 40 per cent were members of the immigrant population.
By 2026, one in five Montrealers will be 65 or over.
Aging brings a host of challenges often unforeseen by the young, notes Ruth Pelletier, the president of the non-profit Senior Action Quebec, which promotes healthy and active lifestyles for older people.
“As you get older, things happen to you that were never an issue before,” Pelletier said. “You have issues with balance, mobility, flexibility, vision. Heights and vertigo in open spaces can be an issue, so escalators in the middle of a wide-open shopping mall can become unusable.” Bone problems, arthritis and basic wear and tear can mean that things like climbing the steep steps of a commuter train become impossible.
To prepare for the confluence of a rapidly aging global population and a greater percentage of people living in cities, the World Health Organization released a Policy Framework on Active Aging in 2002 to help communities improve their social policies. Building on that, in 2007 it launched the Global Age-Friendly Cities Project to make municipalities the world over easier places to live. Thirty-three pilot project cities were chosen (four in Canada: Halifax, Sherbrooke, Portage la Prairie, Man., and Saanich, B.C.) and instructed to consult with their older citizens, local leaders and gerontology experts to identify the main needs for, or impediments to, active, happy aging.
New York City canvassed 2,000 seniors in 14 neighbourhoods in six languages over a year and a half as part of its Age-Friendly NYC project. It came up with 59 initiatives, such as putting artists in seniors centres to teach classes in return for studio space, using school buses to transport older people to farmers’ markets, and making pedestrian crossing safer by extending the length of green lights and prohibiting left-hand turns in some areas. The pedestrian fatality rate dropped by 21 per cent in those regions over four years as a result.
Efforts were made to change perceptions of older citizens from burdens on society to benefits — they shop in your stores, they travel to your cities and spend money, they have lifelong knowledge they are often willing to share for free in services like translation or accounting, for example, and they are human beings deserving of respect.
Quebec, faced with one of the highest aging rates in the world, has been particularly proactive, creating an age-friendly strategy that financially rewards municipalities and regional communities that reach certain benchmarks. To date, 860 communities have signed on to Quebec’s age-friendly cities project.
Montreal officially became an age-friendly city in 2012, adopting 100 measures to improve the quality of life of seniors. The most significant change for the city administration has been one of mindset.
“We are developing a ‘seniors reflex’ everywhere, in all our organizations,” said Councillor Monique Vallée, the city’s executive committee responsible for social development and seniors. “When someone in development is doing a project, the ‘seniors reflex’ must be there from the outset.”
This means including older citizens and members of seniors organizations on consultative committees for anything from redesigning a park or neighbourhood to reworking arena hours. The city’s new administration included $2.2 million specifically for seniors in its capital works budget last year, a first, shared among the city’s 19 boroughs annually to use as they see fit.
Libraries in Montreal lend out devices that can read books aloud, arenas and pools are adapting hours to allow early-morning slots for older people, and the city is installing more benches on its streets and at bus stops. In St-Léonard, one of the boroughs with the highest percentage of seniors, the community offers courses in everything from painting and sculpture to hot yoga, karate and history of cinema to its older citizens, at reduced prices.
Vallée meets with a round table of seniors organizations on a monthly basis to get feedback and recommendations. Lack of affordable housing remains an issue, Vallée concedes, but headway is being made in other areas. Montreal is in the process of setting up a 2-1-1 information line dedicated to informing citizens about programs and services available or providing aid.
Engineers who work on rebuilding roadways now have to think of the needs of older citizens, such as wider sidewalks and giving pedestrians more time to cross at stoplights, said Aref Salem, the executive committee member responsible for transportation. A senior citizen is on the committee that oversees the city’s development projects.
“Montreal is a city that was built for nothing but cars,” Salem said. “We are trying to rebuild it on a human scale.”
Projects underway include sidewalk extensions that jut out into streets to slow traffic, increase visibility and reduce crossing times; testing non-slip cement for sidewalks; and adding countdown timers at intersections. More than 1,200 crossing lights have been altered in the last three years to make crossings easier. In the Laurentien La Chappelle district of Ahuntsic Cartierville, home to numerous seniors’ residences, the city has started adding trees and urban furniture so residents have a place to relax and socialize outdoors; the district is also designing larger, easier-to-read street signs after several consultations with residents.
“They are small things, but things that make living in a city more manageable, and a place people can be proud to live in,” Salem said.
Most importantly, officials stress the need for individuals to push for change on their own to create age-friendly districts in their community. The World Health Organization, Public Health Agency of Canada, the province of Quebec and even New York City all provide extensive “tool kits” online that show how to consult the public to find the needs in a community, create an action plan and touch base with local organizations to gain support, and approach local community leaders to ask for and receive change for anything from installing more benches and street lights to creating pamphlets advising seniors of the activities, often free, open to them in their districts.
Jovanovic has learned the power of asking. Watching repairmen working on the street lights at the intersection near her Queen Mary Road apartment, she mentioned the lights should be longer to allow for crossing. “You have to report it to your city councillor,” she was told. “No,” she said to the workers. “I’m reporting it to you. You send the message.” One month later, the lights had been changed.
Good-natured death threats may also work. Last week, she had three adapted transit taxi rides arrive on time in one day, she noted with a laugh.
As you get older, things happen to you ... You have issues with balance, mobility, flexibility, vision.