How To Handle the Looming Shortage of Senior Housing

The U.S. senior housing market is poised to shift from a surplus to a shortage in the next five years, as the oldest baby boomers turn 80 by 2030. In this Upzoned episode, Abby is joined by Norm Van Eeden Petersman, Strong Towns’ director of Movement Building. They unpack the implications of this market shift and discuss what building more options for older adults could look like.

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  Abby Newsham 0:04

  This is Abby, and you are listening to up zoned.

  Abby Newsham 0:18

  Hello, everyone. Thanks for listening to another episode of up zone to show where we take a big story from the news each week that touches the strong towns conversation, and we up zone it. We talk about it in depth. I'm Abby Newsham, a planner in Kansas City, and today I have my friend on the show norm, Van Eden Peterson, who is the director of movement building for strong towns. Welcome back to the show norm. You have a very strong name, and I'm always afraid I'm going to mess it up when you're on and I'm doing this intro.

  Norm Van Eeden Petersman 0:53

  It's mercifully phonetic, and so if you spell it out and sound it out, you'll get there eventually. But I've been called many things, but I'm definitely happy to take on whatever it is that people want to call me, so long as we can talk about strong towns. And so that's why I'm excited to be on the off zoom podcast today. Yeah, it's great

  Abby Newsham 1:11

  to have you. I am, you know, Chuck and I are usually the ones interviewing with each other every week, and it's always fun when another member of the strong towns team is able to jump on these and talk about different articles, so glad to have you. So today, we are going to be covering an article that was published in The Wall Street Journal by Peter grant. It is entitled, aging boomers are about to rekindle the senior housing market. So the article explores how the US senior housing market is on the verge of shifting from a glut to a shortage as the oldest baby baby boomers turn 80 by 2030 which is five years from now, if you can believe that the population that is age 80 and older is expected to grow by over 4 million people, so that's leading to a significant increase in the demand for senior living facilities. Yet high interest rates, inflated construction costs and history of over building have made developers kind of hesitant to invest in new projects, and instead, really major players are focusing on acquiring existing communities which are cheaper than building new ones. And this trend kind of raises some questions about affordability and accessibility, especially for seniors that are on fixed incomes, as developers are going to be really prioritizing luxury housing for wealthier retirees. So we're going to unpack some of the implications of this market shift and what it means for building kind of more inclusive options for seniors, which is going to be a huge market in the next five years. Norm, I'm really glad to have you on I think maybe we can start by defining what we're talking about when it comes to senior housing, because that was a little bit of a quibble that that not everybody thinks about senior housing in the same kind of way. So what are we talking about when discussing this article?

  Norm Van Eeden Petersman 3:17

  Yeah, I think if you read the article, maybe you're going to feel like oh, there's a little bit of looseness on the term. But at the beginning in the photo caption, it says upscale luxury retirement community. So that's one image that we can have in mind of the luxury retirement community. And this is the idea that there's going to be a hot market for these types of projects, and that there's going to be a lot of willing buyers. Then in the second paragraph, it's implied that it's a thing that people seek when they can no longer live comfortably or safely at home, and seek a senior facility and further down, as described as senior housing communities. But you can see that there's quite a range there. And I think this is maybe the challenge that I've even experienced personally with a congregant in the church that I was pastoring who was in her 80s living in a home, and was probably pushing up against the question of whether she should continue to live independently, in her own in her own space, and yet looked at the options that were available for her and just said, I don't want to live in some tower and be packed in like sardines. Now, there are better versions of seniors housing communities, but in the article, it's much broader than that. I think it's even like 65 plus or 55 plus, sort of retirement communities, all the way up until you get to like senior care homes that are available for people. So there's it was interesting that the article frames it as there's going to be a huge demand for these types of spaces, because we've also run an article on our site about the short sale, or the likely glut of single detached houses that are going to come onto the market, and an article that Arthur Nelson from the University of Arizona had written called the great senior short sale, or why our inertia will short change millions of American seniors, describing the fact that by locking so many people into existence. Single Family neighborhoods. Now, all of a sudden, when they need to step out of those spaces, because they finally need to move into another space, it's going to leave a large surplus of these types of housing units available as a renter. I'm hopeful that that will actually happen. But I'm very interested also in the idea that at the top end of the market, in terms of the age demographics, that there's actually a massive gap in what is available versus what's going to be required. What does that look like for in your area? Abby,

  Abby Newsham 5:29

  good question. I mean, I can't tell you the particulars of the, you know, large suburban house market in my metropolitan area. It's definitely something that I have wondered about for a really long time. Is what happens when all of these people start selling their house? Is there going to be a kind of mass sale at some point where we have a period of five to 10 years where all of these houses become available? I think that we have found that a lot of people are aging in place and staying in these houses. And you know that obviously can't happen forever. There's going to be a shift before we get into that. Though, something that I do want to, I do want to kind of go back to this, this conversation about what is senior housing to begin with? Because, to your point, there's different types of senior living facilities, right? And in this article, it is loosely defined, and I always think about it in terms of the actual level of care and oversight that is being provided or not provided. And I think the luxury communities that you know are being built and developed are really in that same camp of you know, it's independent living, right? It's for people who are probably 55 plus, who can live independently. Those are the same kinds of people who might live in a roommate roommate house, or they might live in accessory dwelling unit, and there's other options for them. I think what gets trickier is when you get to that type of senior housing where you know, at the worst case scenario, it's hospice care, but there's a lot of different levels of care that that older people need, and that's when you start to muddy the housing, real estate market with health care, which is a very complex issue. And I can't tell you, I have the answers to that, but that's just something that, that I had in my mind as I was reading this, is that I think there's, there's more options and adaptability for people who are living independently, and I get a little more anxiety for the people who can't live independently.

  Norm Van Eeden Petersman 7:50

  But the thing that stands out in in the article is sort of that there's a general, you know, understanding of what we mean by senior housing, which, you know, we're unpacking that a little bit to say, like, actually, it's more complicated than that. It's not just luxury retirement communities that you go into and maybe age in place, and there might be additional facilities where you can begin to receive nursing care. Because one of the challenges that we have, if we look at this large demographic, sort of surge into this final or I shouldn't call it final category of aging, but like advanced years, is is we also need to take into account that in time, in a couple of decades, there will be access capacity if we attract only a single type of a facility or a single type of managed care facilities, we actually are setting ourselves up for yet another type of over dependence on a singular type of product. And maybe this is one of the applications of the whole quest for more diversity of housing choices within existing neighborhoods, is that we can meet many of those needs. And those you know that triplex that suddenly hosts a senior that is receiving care from the nurse that lives next door, and there's a young family in the third unit that triplex rapidly adapts to become suitable for other types of users, versus the senior care facility with its, you know, luxury sort of spas and things like this, that actually could suddenly see after about two decades, which, you know, from our perspective, feels like so far away, but not that long. Long from now, we could have committed significant amounts of public capital, because there will be a huge cry for public investment of these types of projects because of need, but at the same time, we may actually be over committing ourselves, and I know I'm worrying about future problems, but like when we've got big problems right now, but it does speak to that, to what you're describing is bringing neighborhoods in to become places that people can really thrive. I wrote a piece on somebody that I met who became really interested in our local conversation group because she was able to sell half of her property, so 50% equity in her property to her niece, who moved into the main house, and with a remainder, she was able to build for herself a age in place unit in the. Backyard that she loves, and she's like, I have seniors that are jealous of me. They just wish that they had that option available to them. And so we have a backlog that we can actually rapidly respond to with these types of incremental development projects that would go a long ways. And I think that that is one of those elements that if we, if we so commit to sort of a single use version of senior housing, we may actually realize, oh, we now have too much. You know, we had too little. The Boomer generation created the glut, or the surplus demand. Now, all of a sudden, we create the situation where it's back to oh, we can't even find enough people to live in these spaces.

  Abby Newsham 10:40

  Yeah. And to the point about the large suburban houses, and what happens with all of those? There's a lot of equity that's on paper, right? There's a lot of assumed equity in this market, and it would be really unfortunate if people are shortchanged of the equity they think they have in all of these houses. I do wonder if there are other opportunities to actually reuse some of these, these housing types. I think to Monty Anderson, who is an incremental developer in South Dallas, Texas, he has an experiment right now, actually, that he is living in where he it has a roommate house. He's taken a, you know, suburban style house that has a pool, actually, and I'm pretty sure it has an accessory dwelling unit on the property, and he has all seniors living in it. And it is apparently a working out really well, um, and, yeah, I wonder if there's more ways to actually support people who are aging, who may not want to just live in a in a community with a bunch of other people who are aging. You know that it's interesting that we, I don't know if it's just in this country or in other places too, but there's this idea that, like, once you once you hit a certain age, you are, like, put out to pasture, and should just go live like on a golf course and be cast away from society. And you could also just build neighborhoods where every age category can live in it in a supported and comfortable way.

  Norm Van Eeden Petersman 12:25

  Yeah, and I have seen that in my own family's life, where my OPA in the Netherlands was after my OMA had died, he was living on his own, and in that condition, was becoming rather lonely, quite grumpy to be around like, kind of was in a troubled time, and was able to move just much closer to a network or a cluster of other seniors in a facility that was available. And it was, it was quite I think it was adapted, like there were various generations that were in this space, and all of a sudden, like, You brighten up, and he was the guy getting groceries for everybody. And then I saw something similar with my mom when she had cancer, and she was at the house, she was receiving home care and not having to be sort of taking up an extended care nursing bed, and yet was able to receive that right up until she died, so that she actually died in the house. And so there are those paths that don't require sort of large facilities or things like this. And I think what's interesting is just the amount of complex adaptation that is going to be required of our communities in order to really help them to thrive. Is the urgent need that we have as we ask the question, can we provide something more suitable for end of years to match and mirror many of the things that people have assumed is necessary for them in their earlier years, a good street to walk on, a great neighborhood, to connect with other people, whether thin relationships or thick relationships with other people, and then just that sense that I belong here, and all of those things I think are going to come to the foreground in our communities.

  Abby Newsham 13:59

  Yeah, I would imagine that's the case. One thing that I'm really curious about that I don't have a lot of knowledge on, is, what is it that seniors actually want? I'm sure that there's been some kind of research done on this. I I'd be curious what what seniors say they they want, and if it's different than what anybody else really wants, if the preferences of that, you know, quote, unquote market is is so different than the way you and I might think today about how we imagine ourselves growing old, because I don't know that many of us really think about where do we want to live when we're 60, 7080, years old. It's not something I've thought about and in a great amount of depth. So I do wonder, I do wonder what, what it is that people actually, actually do want for themselves.

  Norm Van Eeden Petersman 14:54

  I think they want things that resemble a village. You know, I feel like they're that's not. Just an esthetic preference that there actually is sort of a core human psychology that wants to dwell in these types of places. And perhaps we've come across, you know, Alzheimer's villages. The Dutch have pioneered this, but there's one in Langley, British Columbia near me, where the the idea of it is you create just the conditions of village life. You have the barber, you have you the residents go and walk over to the grocery to pick up additional items. The only difference is that there's much like The Truman Show You can't escape in the case of memory care, that's necessary. But I also, when we lived in Escondido, California for three years, there was a project that was under development by a fairly visionary, long time construction owner and developer, and he said, I want to create a Dutch village right in Escondido. And so there's a windmill, and the windmill has a little coffee shop in it. There's a on site restaurant as well as like nursing care facilities. But then there's also clusters of cottages around and what's interesting is that there, it's so much more compact than the neighborhoods that many of the people that have moved in there previously lived in, and yet, that's what makes it delightful for them. They're They're excited by the fact that their neighbors are nearby, and many of the concerns that they previously had about privacy kind of begin to walk away when you realize, oh, it's actually good for me to be known. It's good for me to be recognized. It's good for me to be around other people. And there's a real benefit in that. What stood out to me in the end of the article is the project that was described as 172 unit senior housing project in Rancho Santa Fe which is near escadio in the San Diego area, that features, and then the article says golf cart paths as the first thing that is the feature a private wine room, art studio, movie theater and sports lounge. This is likely what seniors have said that they want. And it's interesting to me that it's actually the capacity to use those golf cart paths that I mean, are obviously not only going to be for golf carts. It's going to be for everybody to be able to navigate their space in a way that's dignified and honorable and and I think that that is something that our city planners need to be considering, that many, many people are going to be either giving up their driver's licenses or losing their driver's licenses and needing access to the public realm, and we can actually provide that through these types of low speed spaces, or, you know, places that people can mix and mingle. And I think there will be so much value in that, so that the public realm can actually provide many of these types of public luxuries, so that the burden isn't on the 172 unit master plan community to be the only place where you get to take a nice walk.

  Abby Newsham 17:34

  Hmm, yeah, and I do. It does make me think about whether losing a license at some point may be what makes people leave their house and leave their neighborhood that maybe they've lived in for 30 plus years. They maybe they raised a family there, and they live on a cul de sac and are in this development pattern that's very much detached from anything but other houses, obviously, and, and, and, you know, once you don't have a house, you're kind of confined, or once you don't have a car that you can drive, you're kind of confined to your house, and that would be incredibly isolating. But

  Norm Van Eeden Petersman 18:16

  I do also think that our sense of change aversion, being averse to change is a consequence of just especially as you age, is a consequence of seeing so much change around you. I, you know, I just turned 40, and it's the first time in my life where I actually feel that I am younger than my ages. Always, I've been an old man, but now all of a sudden, I was like, Oh man, this is, this is catching up on me, and I can see that instinct to be change averse, and this is one of the areas with a project that I'm hard at work on with a small steering committee in my community in Ladner, is we're trying to get a housing Co Op started, but in a very modest, sort of on a single property, or on a single family lot, to be able to actually, we're working on our pitch. But the idea is to seniors that are in our city, that are housing rich cash poor, also finding themselves increasingly isolated and with more property than they can manage to keep up to say, sell to us. We will then ensure that you are the first person to move back in, and they would move back into a six unit complex that was on their property. The interesting thing about it is then nothing else changes, except for, you know, they temporarily are relocated, but then they're still next to their neighbor that they still know. They're still as far from the grocery store as they ever were. They still get to see the same owl that dwells in the tree, like all of those sort of key features of why you want to stay in a place. And I think this is one of the challenges that the Wall Street Journal article is saying, like, hey, there's a hot new market, and if we could just get the right doo dad that will attract all of these people to come, like, flocking to it. And it actually raises the question, is that, to your question, is that what people want, is it, you know? And certainly, there's a whole segment of people that are like, yep, that's exactly what I intended. I'm a freedom 55 financial person, like I've got everything mapped out, and this is the final stage, but I think for a lot of other folks, they're looking at it with a lot of uncertainty. And this is where my brother in law, Mitch, on the dear Winnipeg blog, has a great article on his neighborhood, and he calls it a neighborhood full of illegals. And it's not because they're all undocumented immigrants. It's actually the housing types are all illegal because the neighborhood had been down zoned in the 60s and the 70s, so that all of the existing apartments, the backyard sort of units, the duplexes, all of those were actually no longer functionally allowed in that neighborhood, even though he said, Look at my neighborhood. It's got seniors, it's got families, it's got children, it's got this whole range. And you can move next door and actually improve your condition because you were given a new option in most of our neighborhoods, you know, it raised the question, like, if you move next door, would anything change? It's like, I still have too much house if I bought the house next to me, or I still have too large of a yard, or I still am too far away from services. And so we can actually take that question, what would make every neighborhood not just the destination neighborhoods that the Wall Street Journal are identifying it as an investment opportunity. How do we make every neighborhood a great senior housing neighborhood? And I think a key part of that is improving the public realm and but then allowing the private realm to really begin to match the various needs that are present.

  Abby Newsham 21:22

  Yeah, that's really interesting to think about, and it makes me think about the argument that people will make sometimes about, you know, single family neighborhoods, and how you know, when you talk to people's parents, you might say, Hey, your child can't afford a house in this neighborhood because it's not adaptable enough, or it doesn't provide other options. But when you think about it from this perspective, it's really the lack of adaptability that may push people out, who are the parents who live in these places, who don't want to live, they don't want to leave, they love their neighborhood, they love their house. I think of my dad, and he always says that he is going to leave his house, but I don't think he will, until he's forced to. He wants to stay, and he loves that house. So I'm sure there are so many other people that if there was another option for them, if they could adapt their house in some way that enabled them to stay in it longer, enabled them to not be alone and to have some help. Maybe that would be an appealing option, but I guess only time will tell,

  Norm Van Eeden Petersman 22:35

  and if we look at our policy requirements for existing developments or new development within our neighborhoods, frequently, there would actually be space to put a great cottage in either the front yard, and you adapt it with landscaping. You actually make that space that we've set you we have these large setbacks. You could actually put the housing right in the front yard, or put it in the backyard, or put it above the garage, like all of these different spaces, and you would actually be able to unlock the potential of that particular site, much like the person that I mentioned in the article who said, like, I was able to put the ideal property. And the interesting thing in her circumstance was that it was because they had wrongly poured the footer for the garage that there was extra concrete that extended. And a really clever house designer that was working with her said, I think we can count this as an attached unit, because we're using that same sort of concrete footer it was. And it's absurd that like they had to go to such lengths to be able to have this loophole that allowed her to flourish. And this is where, with the housing Co Op that we're working at, part of the design is and this is where the policy question of parking requirements really looms large is ground level units are not suitable when you have a parking requirement and you're trying to do any kind of density. How many townhouses do we see that are just parked, you know, the garage and then the stack on top? And so part of our vision is that the core units, the ground level units, are the ones that are going to be single bedroom or even studio. Two or three of them, we're going to find ways to be creative in the way that they're laid out. And the parking is just going to be on the perimeter, on the side, and it's going to be exposed, you know, out in the air. And we need to knock down the parking requirements. And in a co op setting, one of the cool things is, you can say you get to be a parking you know, you get to have a parking spot if you contribute additional funds to the Co Op, otherwise, no parking spot for you. Well, that's actually putting a price on parking, even at the lot level, and that is one of the ways that we begin to actually assess how much do we value this. And many people will take on the opportunity to say, I can live car light, or I can, you know, use an Uber in my community, it's walkable enough that you can get most of your needs met, but all of the townhouses going in around us lack that ground floor accessibility. And so then you take a whole, like, a really adaptable type of of development, type of the townhome, and you use go look at row houses in Boston, or go look at, you know, row houses in. Other places, they're fantastic at that ground level, because you can just walk right in, walk right out. It's accessible. But we've made that impossible through parking requirements. Always saying, Well, you got to put it somewhere, so stick it underneath the house, and then just jack it up, but then you've got stairs, and that's, that's the next level of the problem for a lot of places. Yeah,

  Abby Newsham 25:17

  exactly. Um, one thing that I do want to talk about and go back to is what you mentioned at the beginning of this episode about kind of being short changed, and the status of these houses and the sell off, I think, is what you called it. Can you kind of expand on that idea, and what some of the perspectives have been around around that, and how it might impact the broader housing market.

  Norm Van Eeden Petersman 25:44

  Well, I'm going to take a page out of Chuck's playbook, which is to predict decline and then be surprised when it doesn't happen quite as soon as predicted. And this is the situation of, you know, the insolvency crisis facing most of our communities, and them limping along or sort of hiding it well. And Peter Zion is has written a great book called The End of the World is just the beginning. And his core thesis in this book is that the demographic sort of decline of many of our advanced economies is going to just wreak havoc on the capacity of each place. And so if you ever follow any of his stuff, he's talking about the fact that if your birth rate is not keeping up, and not in a nationalist sense, but just from an economic perspective, if you don't have sufficient amount of workers, it raises all of those workers ability to generate higher wages for themselves, but also creates this, this scarcity in other aspects of your market and and the whole idea that we have a large generation of people that were basically fortunate enough, through the growth Ponzi scheme and other various means to be able to buy homes and still be in them, it will result in just a smaller group of Gen X ers that are Looking to buy those homes, and the millennials are not content with the prices on offer. Many Millennials are stuck, really struggling to find homes. And so in that situation, if you have a squeezed buyer pool in terms of the millennial generation, and you have a small buyer pool in terms of Gen X, the question is, who do the boomers sell to, especially if most of those homes are, you know, little boxes made of ticky tacky, you know, like there's an element of of the same. Why requiring a similar consumer, rather than sort of a diverse supply, where you've got a lot of different things that might bring about the opportunity to really, like, just see that trickle its way through the existing sort of markets. The other challenge is, we have committed a considerable amount of resources to subsidizing people whose incomes, you know, in my area, your income is below, I think, $90,000 you're now eligible for public housing. Well, that means we've raised the threshold of what level of our population, we are committed to trying to provide housing to even though the wait lists are extremely long. And you know, the likelihood of you actually getting that place is very low. Now, what's going to happen is you've raised the ceiling for prices, but now all of a sudden, a lot of our resources are going to have to go into providing long term medical care to a large population of boomers. I don't know how we find the money for this, especially if, because in these golden years, we've not actually put aside enough money, we've borrowed, we've bonded, we've done all of those things to actually burn through what reserves might have actually helped us in the face of coming economic ruin. Might be too strong a word, but, I mean, I don't know so, but maybe I should take perverse comfort that, like Chuck has been saying, you know, and I'm not calling him out, but he's saying he will say, like, I think I've expected the collapse to come sooner. It hasn't yet. Maybe it never will, but I just don't see how that's not possible, especially when you think, when you think how many homes are going to soon be not fit for the purpose of housing somebody that says, hey, it's got a walk up staircase that I just can't navigate, or it's in a neighborhood that I just am too far away from the core services that I require on a regular basis. I lose my license. What am I going to do there? Will, you know, again, I just don't know if I need to be saving up all my cash to wait for the market to really crash or find a way to

  Abby Newsham 29:29

  build. It's a good question, right? I mean, predicaments have outcomes, and I think when, when people think about collapse, they think about, like, the zombie apocalypse, and like, I mean, I think, I think outcomes are going to be felt at very micro levels, right, and not as broadly as we may as we may think, right? And so if you're not feeling it, you it might feel like things are pretty normal, or. You know, we've slowly adapted our perception of normal over the past 10 plus years, probably beyond that. I'm pretty young, so that's my frame of reference as a long time. But yeah, it's, it's certainly something I've, I've thought about before. What happens with all those houses, and even if people, if seniors do end up keeping their house until the their graduation, a lot of people have reverse mortgages and home equity loans and second mortgages to supplement income during retirement. And so when those houses are inherited, you would think that, you know, maybe their kids could take that house and live in it, and it could just be, you know, a happy ending, but there might be debt on that property that forces them to sell it more quickly and maybe sell it for less than they expected people to buy it for. So, you know, these are all generalizations. It's going to be totally different in every situation, but it's something I think just to be looking at. And hopefully there will be data. There certainly will be data collected on on home sales in the next 10 plus years that may give us some interesting outcome or insights.

  Norm Van Eeden Petersman 31:17

  And so I think an element of it is if I were to invest in the types of senior housing projects that they're describing here, I would make sure I'm only putting in five or 10 year investments, nothing longer, because I don't know that the market holds for the types of projects that are assumed to be sort of the next sort of Mecca for money to Go.

  Abby Newsham 31:39

  Yeah, and I wonder what they're thinking happens after that, that whole generation does graduate, you know, if they're building whole communities for for this market, who? Who's the next market to inherit these these projects, these homes, these places to live?

  Norm Van Eeden Petersman 31:56

  Yeah, but isn't that the parallel of a lot of the production home building that we see, which is build it cheap enough to sell it to in poorly enough to sell it to whoever is willing to pay for it at the prices that are at the prevailing market, and then leave the municipalities with the obligation to keep everything. Like, there's sort of a so long as you come in, make your money and move on, you're okay. And I think that there's kind of that, like, why would you care who owns this 20 years from now? And I'm like, that's the problem of many of our suburban communities, is that in their first life cycle, they're excellent places to live in many respects, but the long term obligations that we incur by doing this are born by others. And there's a short termism that I think is is looming large, even in the way that this is described.

  Abby Newsham 32:44

  Hmm, yeah, that's that's totally fascinating to think about it that way. Okay, well, any, any concluding thoughts here? I do feel like this is something to be looking at now for the next five years, because they say 2030 is really when this population will be looking, looking for these alternative options, either by choice or by by force. Unfortunately,

  Norm Van Eeden Petersman 33:12

  I I'm hopeful that a large generation of boomers are going to make excellent advocates. However, they also were going to have a lot of cloud and be able to suck up a lot of the oxygen and money in the in our systems that may actually create even more fragile systems. But where I look at, you know, things like advocating for more cycling, for example, the greatest advocates in our city are people that have gotten an E bike, they're retired, and now they're realizing, oh, we need to remake the physical environment. And the thing is, they're getting it done. And this is, you know, they're getting the will of the public realm to, sort of like shape, to their to their desires. And so I have hopes that actually, as more sort of human impulses emerge, of we need more safe, livable, walkable communities, so long as we don't forget that we also need them to be financially strong and resilient. So maybe that's my appeal to everybody, especially the folks that are like the local conversation leaders that I'm meeting with more regular frequency are folks that are in their professional years. They've basically come to the conclusion of their working years, and are like, I want to get a group going talk about these issues, think it through strong towns ideas, and put them into action where I live, and I think there's something really an open door. And I hope for those that are listening like there's a wide open door for you to be an advocate at the local level, to help make your place stronger in these ways, and to give thought to these things. And because I think you're going to find a greater audience for this type of these ideas at the local level. Yeah,

  Abby Newsham 34:43

  absolutely. Well, norm. Thank you so much for joining me to talk about this today. Before we wrap up, I want to go into the down zone, which is the part of the show where we can share anything we have been reading or watching. Listening to or otherwise, uh, taking up a space in our our minds lately. So Norm, I'm going to put you on the spot. What? What would you like to share for your down zone? All

  Norm Van Eeden Petersman 35:12

  right, I'm going to take two slots here. Um, first one is just a shout out that there is a book coming out by my brother in law, Mitch that I mentioned in the talk. So a little bit of a plug there for a book called You'll pay for this, how we can afford a great city for everyone forever. It's on pre order right now. It's coming out this spring. I've been looking at it, and it's fantastic. So you'll pay for this, how we can afford a great city for everyone forever. Very strong towns. He is regular contributor to the strong towns blog and a strong towns member. The second book that I have been enjoying is a gift that was given to me by my mother in law. And the book is called streams of consequence by Lauren Fitch, l, O, R, N, E, fit and then Fitch is f, i, T, C, H, and this book is he's a long time conservationist and a public servant, and imagine sort of the experience of like having a glass of wine and a bit of dark chocolate, and just like working your way through it and just enjoying it. His writing on questions of conservation, on sort of the natural world just are setting off so many strong towns, like thoughts and ideas as well about, how do we build lasting prosperity? How do we avoid sort of these short term boom and bust cycles that actually begin to really harm our communities? What does it mean to actually value the spaces that are given to us and entrusted to us and places that we are to be good stewards of? And so streams of consequence? There are so many, like wonderful anecdotes and stories packed into it. It's him reflecting on his career over over many decades, on the these questions. And it's written in southern Alberta, so that was also where I grew up. And so there's just a lot of layers there. But if you're looking for a good book, kind of like a glass of fine wine and some dark chocolate, that is a book for you, you're not going to be able to read all the way through it in one sitting. Instead, you're going to enjoy it. They're almost broken out into distinct essays. And really recommend

  Abby Newsham 37:07

  it Excellent. Well, is that a challenge to try to sit and read it all in one sitting,

  Norm Van Eeden Petersman 37:14

  I suppose, but that feels like trying to challenge yourself to drink through, you know, an entire cask of wine in a sitting. Like,

  Abby Newsham 37:23

  yeah, don't do that. Well, that's that's very cool. Thank you for sharing. I think the something that I wanted to bring up for my down zone today actually has to do with an article that Chuck and I talked about a few weeks ago about the Town of Milton, so I think Edward may have sent me somebody's email that they sent to me, and I actually got a few emails about this show, because it's one of those articles and stories that has so much local detail, and is very political that we got a lot of feedback on. And so I just wanted to acknowledge that there, there were a couple people that kind of felt like, you know, they're they're in this, this fight, they're in this conversation, and that the articles that are written about the story leave out a lot of local nuance, and then, therefore, through the game of telephone that we we play here, sometimes we are not able to express the level of nuance that I think people who are in it would would like to hear from a show like this. And so I do want to acknowledge that, because it's like, you know, we don't always get it right, and sometimes these these stories have so much more to them than than a media article will will be able to express. And, you know, unfortunately, we we missed some things. And so, yeah, just wanted to to acknowledge that and give a shout out to the people who gave that feedback, I appreciate when we get feedback. And yeah, I that's kind of all I wanted to share.

  Norm Van Eeden Petersman 39:09

  But that's not a down zoned item. That's that's Abby as host. What about just enjoying something?

  Abby Newsham 39:14

  Me enjoying something? Well, what have I been enjoying? It's February, and it's very snowy outside, and I've mostly just been painting, and so I think I've used that as my down zone quite a bit. Here we're on video. I don't think we're gonna post the video, but I will show you. This is what I am working on. Whoa,

  Norm Van Eeden Petersman 39:39

  that's incredible. So it's a scene. It looks like a banquet. Looks like a whole bunch of people having a wonderful time. The amount of detail in that Abbey is incredible. For those that are listening, you'll have to track down on Abby social media feed, maybe a work in progress image, or something like this. That's. That's next level. So well done. Thank

  Abby Newsham 40:02

  you very much. Yeah, it's a cafe scene with like, you know, foreground and a background just filled with people. It's kind of like a Where's Waldo kind of scene, is the way I'm thinking about it. I do post these, and I don't mean to promote, like, the art hobby that I do, but I do post these on Instagram, on Abby cat paint, so a, b, b, y, k, A, T paints, so I do post them, but I don't have, like a professional following or anything like that,

  Norm Van Eeden Petersman 40:34

  but you'll have a loyal zone following, so that that's what counts.

  Abby Newsham 40:40

  Yeah, yeah, it's like, one of my many, my many little pursuits and interests. But yeah, the painting is going well. I'm just got, you know, a cycle of like, 20 canvas paintings that I'm constantly working on, especially now, because it's the middle, middle of February, and it's windy and cold and I am not built for this weather. I'm ready to paddle board. So,

  Norm Van Eeden Petersman 41:06

  so what you're that painting is an expression of one element of your happy place? Yeah,

  Abby Newsham 41:11

  I want to be in a big, crowded place with tons and tons of people, where I can sit and have a coffee in a village somewhere. So this is me, me longing for the weather, for crowds again. Mm,

  Norm Van Eeden Petersman 41:26

  hmm, yeah,

  Abby Newsham 41:29

  you, and a lot of other Yeah, they Yeah, and a lot of other things and everything else that makes me and many other people happy. So, all right, norm. Well, thank you very much for joining me for up zone, and thanks everyone for listening and you have a lovely weekend.

  Norm Van Eeden Petersman 41:46

  Thanks having you. You too. Thanks.

ADDITIONAL SHOW NOTES

• “Aging Boomers Are About to Rekindle the Senior-Housing Market” by Peter Grant, The Wall Street Journal (February 2025).

• Read more:

  • “Seniors Have Large Suburban Houses To Sell. Does Anyone Want Them?” (Strong Towns).

  • “The Great Senior Short Sale or Why Policy Inertia Will Short Change Millions of America's Seniors” (Journal of Comparative Urban Law and Policy).

• Abby Newsham (X/Twitter).

• Norm Van Eeden Petersman (LinkedIn).

• Theme Music by Kemet the Phantom.

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