New standards needed for elderly, disabled to remain in homes

June 30, 2008

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — “Build it and they will stay” would be wise policy with today’s growing number of elderly and disabled people who want to remain in their own homes, a new study finds.

By planning ahead, homes built now with features that meet the needs of people who have difficulty getting around will prevent more costly retrofitting in the future and perhaps avoid the trauma of moving to a retirement home, said Stan Smith, director of UF’s and the study’s lead author.

“With the aging of the baby boomers, it’s pretty clear that the number of people who absolutely need these features to continue living in their own homes will rise substantially over the next several decades,” he said. “Unfortunately, there are relatively few single-family houses that will be able to accommodate them.”

Fewer than 10 percent of new homes have features that make them accessible to people who have trouble getting around, despite the large and growing need for those accommodations, said Smith, whose study is published in the latest issue of the
“When accessibility features are designed and built into the initial construction, they are very inexpensive in most cases,” he said. “It’s far more costly once a house is built to widen doorways, remove steps or add bathrooms on the ground floor of a two-story unit.”

Without such features, the elderly and disabled not only face greater risk of injury but have more difficulty entering and leaving their house, adding to feelings of social isolation and loneliness, Smith said.

“If people can no longer live comfortably and safely in their homes, they may be forced to enter an assisted living facility or nursing home, which can be extremely expensive,” he said. “People can very quickly go through their life savings in a nursing home, and once their assets are depleted they may have to go on Medicaid, with the tab being picked up by the public.”

Working with Stefan Rayer, a research analyst at UF’s Bureau, and Eleanor Smith, executive director of , Smith applied a technique he developed to estimate the probability that a single-family dwelling built in 2000 will house at least one disabled resident during its expected life span. “To our knowledge, this is the first study to project the future number of households that will have a disabled resident and the first to estimate the likelihood that a new house will have at least one disabled resident during its lifetime,” said Smith, whose team prepared low, medium and high estimates and projections.

The mid-range projection predicts that by 2050 more than one in five households – 21 percent – will have a resident with a physical disability that makes walking and climbing stairs difficult, and 7 percent will have someone unable to get around without help, he said.

Furthermore, over a dwelling’s lifetime, as people move in and out with changes in ownership, the odds leap to 60 percent that it will house at least one resident who has difficult moving around and 25 percent that it will shelter someone who cannot get around without help, according to the researchers’ analysis. And when the odds of having disabled visitors — such as elderly parents — are taken into account, these numbers rise to 91 percent for those with mobility problems and 53 percent for those requiring help, they found.

Already, nearly one-third of Americans over age 65 – 31 percent – have some sort of mobility impairment, and with aging and population growth the proportion is expected to go up, Smith said. “The number of people with disabilities is expected to rise faster than the population as a whole, more than doubling between 2000 and 2050.”

The most important accessibility features are at least one entrance with no steps, a full or half bathroom on the first floor and 32-inch interior door widths instead of the standard 28-inch widths, Smith said. Additional features include electrical outlets within easy reach, accessible showers and bathroom grab bars, he said.

Although the study did not include short-term disabilities, someone who breaks a leg skiing and is temporarily on crutches or in a wheelchair also would benefit, along with people whose elderly parents move in for brief stays, Smith said.

Some legislation has been passed requiring that certain design features be incorporated into new homes to make them accessible to people with mobility limitations, but it has largely been limited to large apartment buildings and single-family housing built with public funds, he said.