Consultative Housing

Consultative Housing

 

By John Taylor; 2006 May 12

 

Our Philosopher's Cafe meeting in the Wainfleet Library had a topic suggested last month by Sharon, "Cooperative Housing for the Elderly." Sharon arrived late, and for a while we discussed general issues of old age and the plight of the elderly, not knowing precisely what the proposed topic was. Just before Sharon came, Mark gave his vehement opinion that we are living too long in this time for our own good; he and his siblings have taken care of an Alzheimer's Disease victimized mother for twenty years, and he so fears entering his dotage that he loudly declared that he would be better off initiating a fatal car accident or otherwise doing away with himself rather than go through what his mother has suffered. To lose your memory of everything, of who you are, your past, is, for him the ultimate indignity, a fate much worse than death.

 

Finally Sharon arrived and laid out in detail the topic that she had suggested for the evening. Her idea was inspired by a friend who all her life has taken in boarders and in an informal way match-makes roommates for a cooperative household. She has learned over the years who will fit in. She can test a potential roomer and know in a day or two whether that person's habits and proclivities are compatible. Sharon is middle aged but looks upon her upcoming senior years with more than the usual dread, though not nearly as much as Mark does; as an only child and a member of a childless marriage, she cannot look forward to the company and support of family in the years left to her.

 

So her purpose in coming to the Cafe was to float the idea of a cooperative rooming operation for the elderly. Instead of the way things are, a private company taking you into forcible custody and sucking away your last funds (this just happened to my Aunt Marguerite; much to the dismay of herself and certain acquisitive family members, her funds, their promised inheritance, is now being rapidly burned up by the caretakers in her "retirement home") in order to offer minimal professional support as you grow ever more feeble, she would like to arrange for something like her friend's rooming operation.

 

Stu mentioned a group called "Seniors for Seniors," which offers helping hands for chores around the house from hale and handy seniors to homebound older seniors at a minimal fee. Sharon said that this is a start on her idea, except that she would like to involve every age group in her coop. What she would like to do is actively plan her old age now; she would like to get together with other middle aged people and pool funds to buy a large building or farm compound in the country. The manager would be her matchmaking friend, who would judiciously introduce young families and other young people into the cooperative housing compound as required. The young families would benefit by babysitting and wisdom from the older coop members, as well as relatively cheap housing; in return they would provide chores and services to the old and feeble coop members.

 

Since we were speaking in a rural area, Wainfleet, the people there knew the obstacles to this very well. Few communes succeed longer than a decade, they break apart from within. Sharon objected, "Ten years, if it lasts ten years is that necessarily a failure?" But the most serious barrier, one that seemed to flummox Sharon, is the one that frustrated creative reformers like Buckminster Fuller and Jane Jacobs all their lives: interested bigwigs, complicating bureaucrats and lawyers, the plan eating plans and illusions of professional planners, public space eating private developers, ubiquitous red tape designed specifically to put the kibosh on alternative lifestyles. In a word, greed.

 

For one thing, zoning laws and building codes are designed to block the flexibility that such a coop would require. Even on a farm, you cannot put up more than one residence; those farm compounds that already have several residences cannot build and take away home units at will. Everything has to be approved. Such laws were intended, Mark pointed out, to avoid slums and shanty towns but are now used by municipalities and town governments to assure a lucrative tax base. In other words, corruption. The overwhelming conclusion of the evening was that greed and self interest on the part of those who make up or influence law making are blocking not only this scheme but all good ideas for social improvement.

 

Uncharacteristically, I said little that evening. I was put off by the orgy of blaming everything on money, blatant greed and profit making, especially at the end of the discussion. The only thing I squeezed in at one point was a brief mention of Fuller's idea of what he called a "black box," a modular room, not unlike a mini-motor home, self-contained and updated periodically, that everyone would be given at birth and would live in from cradle to grave. Being modular, of a standard size, it would be easily transported and fit into every dwelling, from a family compound in childhood to campus residences in schooling to work place residences, back to the family compound, and finally to special care retirement residences in old age. Sharon liked this idea, saying that she had always liked the idea of living in a trailer.

 

I have been reading two complementary books, both directly to do with housing, architecture and planning. I figured that since I tried abortively to write a book on it last fall, I might as well read up on the subject. Maybe my ideas are not as original as they seem in my ignorant illusions. Hope not. Also, although computer games have become anathema to me (too sedentary), I would like to try out again the old game, SimCity, as a testing ground for my ideas. Anyway, here are the books:

 

Moshe Safdie and Wendy Kohn, The City After the Automobile, An Architect's Vision, Stoddart Publishing, Toronto, 1997

Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Vintage Books, New York, 1961

 

Safdie is the designer of Habitat in Montreal, his book offers an up to date overview of town planning and promises a visionary proposal for the future, which I have not got to yet. Jacob's book is now a classic in the field, passionately written, truly a great work of literature. When she died recently I read the obits and tributes to her life and was enthralled.

 

To me Jane Jacobs is a sort of intellectual superhero. She leads grassroots campaigns in the 1950's and 1960's to save vital neighborhoods there from the plots of developers in New York, then does the same for Toronto, threatened by a superhighway cutting through its best features. She moves to T.O. and lives in one of the neighborhoods she saved until the end of her days. You see her on TV from time to time involved in the nitty-gritty decision making of City Hall, admired and consulted by all as a guru of good planning. It just doesn't get any better than that, unless perhaps you want to talk about a Baha'i martyr or pioneer. Now Safdie's book, not to mention just about everything you read or see on TV coming out of Toronto is suffused with the ideas in "Death and Life." Now that I am reading that book, I see where these ideas were born.

 

As a Baha'i, I am thrilled to see how consultation fits into her critique of the modern city. Until Jacobs came along, planners planned for cities and regions peopled by mindless sims, humans who did not plan for themselves but were mindless automatons. For example, seminal French planner in the 1920's and 1930's,

 

"Le Corboisier was planning not only a physical environment. He was planning for a social utopia too. Le Corboisier's Utopia was a condition of what he called maximum individual liberty, by which he seems to have meant not liberty to do anything much, but liberty from ordinary responsibility. In his Radiant City nobody, presumably, was going to be his brother's keeper any more. Nobody was going to have to struggle with plans of his own. Nobody was going to be tied down." (Death and Life, 22)

 

Compare this with the planning plans of the Universal House of Justice! The Baha'i plan is not the kind of autocratic planning that professional planners cookie cut into being, no, the basis of everything is this "Son of Being" statement:

 

"Bring thyself to account each day ere thou art summoned to a reckoning; for death, unheralded, shall come upon thee and thou shalt be called to give account for thy deeds." (Arabic Hidden Words, #31)

 

This is not the anomic mysticism you see spouted by would be mediation counselors, this is practical, it is an expectation, no, a demand for a life plan, a plan that you update and revise on a daily basis, cradle to grave. Yes God has plans, but He is a planning planner, not a utopian like Le Corboisier. Like Fuller's Black Box, this plan is something that you carry with you and revise constantly, a special haven of communion with God, a little shrine of responsibility from babyhood to seniority.

 

The reality of a living city is just what the traditional planner tries to stifle: people as planners, independent thinkers and entrepreneurs, acting together to develop on their own, thriving on diversity, cooperating in a thousand little ways to make and keep a better world. For example, she points out that professional protectors, police and security guards, are like band-aids compared to the much more sophisticated but invisible immune system of the protective operations of a vital neighborhood. In a poorly designed area nobody can stop crime from taking place; it soon empties out as people rightly learn to fear to tread there. But consider this poetic description of what it is like in a properly designed neighborhood. I will let this be the last word for today.

 

"In speaking about city sidewalk safety, I mentioned how necessary it is that there should be, in the brains behind the eyes on the street, an almost unconscious assumption of general street support when the chips are down -- when a citizen has to choose, for instance, whether he will take responsibility, or abdicate it, in combating barbarism or protecting strangers. There is a short word for this assumption of support: trust. The trust of a city street is formed over time from many, many little public sidewalk contacts. It grows out of people stopping by at the bar for a beer, getting advice from the grocer and giving advice to the newsstand man, comparing opinions with other customers at the bakery and nodding hello to the two boys drinking pop on the stoop, eying the girls while waiting to be called for dinner, admonishing the children, hearing about a job from the hardware man and borrowing a dollar from the druggist, admiring the new babies and sympathizing over the way a coat faded. Customs vary: in some neighborhoods people compare notes on their dogs; in others they compare notes on their landlords."

"Most of it is ostensibly utterly trivial but the sum is not trivial at all. The sum of such casual, public contact at a local level -- most of it fortuitous, most of it associated with errands, all of it metered by the person concerned and not thrust upon him by anyone -- is a feeling for the public identity of people, a web of public respect and trust, and a resource in time of personal or neighborhood need. The absence of this trust is a disaster to a city street. Its cultivation cannot be institutionalized. And above all, it implies no private commitments." (Death and Life, 56)

--
John Taylor

badijet@gmail.com