AUSTIN: All of us want to stay in our own homes as long as we can as we get older. It’s good for us and it saves on the cost of residential care.
But how can we create homes that enable people to live independently while remaining safe and supported? Here are five tips for creating better supported housing:
5. Innovate, but don’t get carried away
Providing affordable housing for older people that goes beyond residential care is still relatively new, so in many ways everything we are doing is already innovative. Having a single, blueprint approach is doomed to fail. And while it is good practice to look at pioneering new technologies if these can make a difference, there is no point innovating for innovation’s sake.
Don’t be short-sighted and focus on technological developments or fads or you’ll start to hit all kinds of snags at the expense of getting the basics, like the build and tenure mix, wrong.