NEW YORK: It makes for a pretty good tale why two guys who run a conspicuously lively old-folks residence suddenly know so much about China’s struggle with its fairly new challenge to provide institutional housing and health care to tens of millions of its seniors.
Tony Fisher and Rob Matthews pinched themselves a few months back to stand in Chongqing, at the confluence of the Yangtze and the Jialing rivers, and watch earth-movers groom bare ground for the construction of a senior-citizen residential development the size of a small city.
“It was just surreal,” Fisher said.
The work site they beheld is envisioned as the eventual home to more than 22,000 elders unable to live with their children or grandchildren…