Livable Communities for Aging Populations E-Book

M. Scott Ball

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 437

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

An innovative look at design solutions for building lifelong neighborhoods Livable Communities for Aging Populations provides architects and designers with critical guidance on urban planning and building design that allows people to age in their own homes and communities. The focus is on lifelong neighborhoods, where healthcare and accessibility needs of residents can be met throughout their entire life cycle. Written by M. Scott Ball, a Duany Plater-Zyberk architect with extensive expertise in designing for an aging society, this important work explores the full range of factors involved in designing for an aging population--from social, economic, and public health policies to land use, business models, and built form. Ball examines in detail a number of case studies of communities that have implemented lifelong solutions, discussing how to apply these best practices to communities large and small, new and existing, urban and rural. Other topics include: * How healthcare and disability can be integrated into an urban environment as a lifelong function * The need for partnership between healthcare providers, community support services, and real-estate developers * How to handle project financing and take advantage of lessons learned in the senior housing industry * The role of transportation, access, connectivity, and building diversity in the success of lifelong neighborhoods Architects, urban planners, urban designers, and developers will find Livable Communities for Aging Populations both instructive and inspiring. The book also includes a wealth of pertinent information for public health officials working on policy issues for aging populations.

Leseprobe

Contents

Dedication

Foreword

Introduction

Preface

Acknowledgments

Part I: Challenges and Opportunities

Chapter 1: The Longevity Challenge to Urbanism

The Challenge

The Scale of Response: Pedestrian Sheds and Neighborhoods

Seniors Housing Communities as Change Agents

Toward the Development of Lifelong Neighborhoods

Conclusions

Chapter 2: Access and Urbanism

Introduction

Go Forth Boldly

On Whose Behalf We Regulate

Advancing Accessibility Aspirations Beyond Minimum Standards

Stewardship

Chapter 3: Health, Healthcare, and Urbanism

Environmental Health, Safety, and Welfare

Reestablishing a Healthy Land-Use Paradigm

Knowledge and Action: Finding an Institutional Basis for Public Health and Land-Use Planning Integration

Beyond Intent and Toxicity: Establishing Frameworks for Planning Action

Beyond Planning: Healthy Environment Implementation Frameworks

Chapter 4: Neighborhood Wellness and Recreation

Urban Design and Wellness Industry Market Research

Aging and Wellness

Redefining the Lifelong Environment: Wellness in Community

Conclusion

Part II: Networks and Diversity

Chapter 5: Connections

Connectivity

Pedestrian Access and Transit

Chapter 6: Diversity

Planning for Diversity

Zoning for Diversity

Building Codes and Housing Diversity

Part III: Seniors Housing

Chapter 7: Evolution of Senior Development Types

Early Senior Care Models

Institutional Neglect

Diversification of the Senior Housing Type

Chapter 8: The Lifelong Neighborhood Market

Market Study Elements of Critical Importance to Lifelong Neighborhoods

Factors That Contribute to Residency in Age-Restricted Communities

Factors That Deter Older Adults from Moving to Age-Restricted Communities

Lifelong Neighborhoods and Influencing Factors

Chapter 9: Seniors Housing Components

Initiating Lifelong Neighborhood Design with a Market Study

Seniors Housing Components

Service Policy Components

Built-Environment Policy Components

Part IV: Urban and Rural Case Studies

Chapter 10: Penn South Norc Case Study of Aging a Dense Urban Core

Lifelong Summary

Context

Innovations in Health and Wellness Programming: Penn South Discovers the NORC Concept

Connectivity and Access

Dwellings and Retail

Health and Wellness

Community Building Spaces

Jeff Dullea Intergenerational Garden

Chapter 11: Beacon Hill Case Study of Aging and Town Centers

Lifelong Summary

Context

Innovations in Health and Wellness Programming

Connectivity and Access

Dwellings and Retail

Health and Wellness

Community Building Spaces

Chapter 12: Mableton Case Study of Aging and Neighborhood Center

Lifelong Summary

Overview

Context

Redeveloping as a Lifelong Community

Mableton Elementary School Redeveloped as a Civic Center

Chapter 13: Elder-Centric Villages: Exploring How Senior Housing Can Incentivize Urban Renewal in Rural America

Lifelong Summary

Evaluating Small-Town Living and Walkability

Providing an Elder-Centric Village

Color Plates

Index

Copyright © 2012 by M. Scott Ball. All rights reserved.

Unless otherwise noted all images are Copyright © 2012 by Milner Scott Ball and Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Ball, M. Scott.

Livable communities for aging populations: urban design for longevity / M. Scott Ball.

p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN 978-0-470-64192-7 (cloth); ISBN 978-1-118-19726-4 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-19727-1 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-19728-8 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-18104-1 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-18176-8 (ebk)

1. Retirement communities. 2. Older people—Housing. 3. Older people—Dwellings. 4. City planning. 5. Community development. I. Title.

HQ1063.B34 2012

307.3'370846—dc23

2011033590

This book is dedicated to Milner Shivers Ball, June McCoy Ball, Jill Marie Lawler, and William Thomas Lawler and to the strength, grace, and dignity with which they have led their lives.

FOREWORD

Urbanism is a uniquely sympathetic framework for addressing needs that will arise over the horizon. In this, urbanism is often misunderstood. Because cities are large, it is commonly thought that urbanism is like architecture, only bigger. This is not so. What makes urbanism a completely different field of activity from architecture is the element of time. An architect must complete a building within, say, two to five years; the design is constrained by the realities of the near future. Urbanism, on the other hand, operates over the very long term. To give an illustration: our firm is completing its very first new town—and it is thirty years since it was designed. Indeed, what makes urbanism so challenging, but also so promising, to those who practice it is that we must think into the future as in no other endeavor. Most businesses must deliver the goods within a week or a fortnight. Most businesses work within the time frame of the next payroll, or the quarterly or yearly report. Scott and his colleagues are usually thinking ten, twenty, and thirty years out, making plans now that will prepare us for the future. And so when he writes a book about the aging of America the reader must undergo a translation into the fourth dimension—that of time. It is not about now—it is about things to come, both good and bad, and the preparations we need to make today.

This book is timely because it is just now possible to discern the outlines of the twenty-first century. The centuries don’t really turn over at the double zero. The twentieth century, for example, did not begin until the First World War, which is to say, its second decade. The first decade of that century was an extension of the nineteenth century. The nineteenth century itself did not begin until Napoleon had been defeated at Waterloo and the new and more peaceful order had been set up by the Congress of Vienna. Few before 1815 could have predicted whether Europe would consist of many nations or just a French empire.

Take our current situation. The first eight or so years of this century were a seamless extension of the twentieth and then on or about 2008 everything changed. There came a series of overlaid crises that unsettled certainties and awoke us to a scenario very unlike that which we had known. The crises consisted of (1) the real estate bubble; (2) the increases in the cost of petroleum; and (3) the consciousness of climate change. Their convergence has convinced us that we are not the nation of infinite wealth that we thought we were. And so here we are in 2012, a nation that is publicly and privately less confident about its future than we were one hundred years ago.

Now, for the good news: the twentieth century has endowed humans with more life than we have ever enjoyed before. We live nearly twice as long now on average than we did at the turn of the twentieth century. The effects of increased longevity will peak when the baby boom generation is fully in its retirement years, from 2015 to 2045. But it is not just a boomer phenomenon: the graying of the population is a permanent new reality that will be with us for as long as we continue to provide modern healthcare. This book offers opportunities to improve our standard of living as we age while simultaneously mitigating the challenges that confront us. It points to the easiest and perhaps most effective avenue for social, environmental, and economic activism ever offered to a generation. All of these crises insofar as they affect the American people can be ameliorated by what John Norquist calls “the convenient solution to the inconvenient truth.” The kinds of communities that are described in this book—the ones that are walkable, compact, complete, and convivial—mitigate all of these crises while supporting us better as we age. By walking to satisfy their ordinary daily needs, residents use less petroleum and produce less carbon. They live more affordably without incurring the cost of automobile dependency. They will also be healthier and more able to sustain a social life in their community, and they will forestall or entirely avoid the extraordinary costs associated with specialized “seniors” housing.

Society will be returning to an earlier time when we were poorer but, perhaps because of that, smarter. The good, old-time, diverse, walkable community will allow an aging population to thrive, offering more dignity, mobility, and independence at lower cost for housing, with less need for petroleum, and with less environmental impact, as compared with the socially isolating development patterns of suburban sprawl. These communities will be attractive enough that our children and our children’s children will be happy to visit and indeed to live among us.

The ultimate result of the intersection of increased longevity with these three major crises is that we are actually returning to the times and places in which life was simpler but more pleasurable, where things made more sense. I am personally looking forward to the great rearrangement that began in 2008—I think it will have brought us to our senses. This book offers the opportunity to prepare for our successful aging in a manner that creatively and ethically engages the major challenges that confront us.

Andrés Duany

INTRODUCTION

We know that Americans 65 and over like where they live, with nine out of ten saying they want to stay in their current home as long as possible. This is good. It means that people have invested heavily in the communities in which they live. Remaining at home continues to be the preference of eight out of ten people 65 and older even if they believe they will need help caring for themselves. And there is a good chance they will need help. Despite declining disability rates, 68 percent of people past the age of 65 will need assistance with two or more activities of daily living or a cognitive impairment at some time.

This need for assistance can either be minimized or amplified by the communities in which we live. Simple things such as unsafe or unwelcoming sidewalks, traffic problems, and lack of accessible public transportation can unintentionally double the risk of functional loss for older people. And doubling this risk increases the likelihood that they will not be able to remain in the community or that their quality of life will be degraded. In fact, the loss of mobility and related independence is what older people say they fear most.

Unfortunately, many of the predominant planning principles of the past half century are now widely acknowledged to have created unintentional barriers to people remaining in their home or community as they age. These barriers limit pedestrian and vechicular mobility for older people, prohibit needed housing and care options, and complicate service delivery and public transportation due to enforced low-densities. These barriers lead to significant induced disability and substantial personal and governmental costs as we try to overcome them with additional programs.

The good news is that through the thoughtful observation and creativity of planners, services providers, advocates for the aging, researchers, and policy makers over the last twenty years, there are new approaches and best practices that can help new and existing communities evolve to support the needs and preferences of their aging residents. While successful approaches will require time and a myriad of planning and physical modifications, elements can be implemented incrementally that will have impact immediately.

So with the population age 65 and older on track to increase from 40.2 million in 2010 to 72.1 in 2030, Scott Ball’s Livable Communities for Aging Populations could not come at a better time. Scott’s work offers a compendium of lessons drawn from our collective successes and failures as well as his and many others’ creative solutions. Its significant contribution is to assemble these lessons and insights into a coherent framework for communities and leaders to use in analyzing their needs, selecting successful approaches, setting priorities, and beginning the work.

Robert Jenkens

Director, The Green House Project

Managing Director, NCB Capital Impact

PREFACE

West Hagert Street in Philadelphia is gifted with urbanism. The street is lined with old row houses—two stories high and pulled up close to the broad sidewalks and street. Stoops and porches present attractive spots for passing time. Still living in these row houses is a group of women who have worked for decades building the West Hagert Street community. The women have, without exception, outlived their husbands. Some have outlived a series of husbands. All are now over eighty and they occupy these homes alone. Every morning after the women awake they go downstairs, open their front doors with storm doors still closed, and leave them open for most of the morning. The open doors are a way of signaling that the women have made it through another night and everything is okay. Each watches for these signals from the others.

The open doors are a small gesture that reflects the uncommon strength of the community on West Hagert Street. Through years of worshiping, singing in the choir, working on each other’s gardens, cooking for the needy, organizing, and running voter registration drives, the women of West Hagert Street have developed a collective identity and sense of interconnection. They have also developed a sense of defiance. The doors issue a challenge: Bring on old age, deteriorating health, economic fluctuations, disinvestment, ailing spouses, good times, bad times, whatever—the door is open and they are ready for it.

Many characteristics of the four-block long West Hagert Street community make the open door gesture possible. The street is safe enough to leave a door open. People are around and close enough see the signal. People care enough to look for the signal. Help is near enough to respond if the signal doesn’t come. The houses are not falling down. There are parks and stores nearby enough to create foot traffic and populate a street life. Transit connects the neighborhood to the larger surrounding city so that it does not feel isolated. The space of the street is intimate and well defined. Three-car garages do not obscure the front doors. The homes are not divided by large tracks of front yard. The street is open and airy enough to make one want to leave the door open in the first place. A very simple gesture reveals much about the quality of urbanism available on West Hagert Street and the dignity with which aging can be supported there.

Livable Communities for Aging Populations takes cues from places like West Hagert Street and begins with the premise that neighborhood places can provide a wealth and diversity of supports for the entire life cycle. This book provides a lens through which aging concerns can be reinvented as integral aspects of urbanism. It is for policy makers, developers, planners, health professionals, and advocates for the aging who seek to expand health and wellness opportunities for older adults across the common spaces of traditional urban neighborhoods. Livable Communities for an Aging Population:

covers how healthcare can be repositioned as a lifelong, continuous function of urban environments that integrated into daily life and provide services along a seamless continuum, ranging from wellness to acute care;builds the argument that many lifelong services can be delivered in neighborhood environments more effectively and cost efficiently than those delivered in clinical settings;details critical political and economic leverage points where these types of changes can be best affected;provides innovative tools and references some of the best practices in lifelong neighborhood development; anddetails how the best practice achievements can be replicated along a contextual range of urban to rural to provide healthy neighborhoods of choice.

Organization of This Book

Part I lays out the challenge that increased longevity poses for the built environment. Chapter 1 introduces the challenge, the most strategic scale of response, and the role that planners and seniors housing developers can play in responding. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 touch on some emerging policy and implementation leverage points at which broad changes might be effected in the way we relate healthcare to the built environment. Chapter 2 reviews the positioning of accessibility in regulatory structures. With increased longevity, the majority of Americans will experience an extended period of disability at some point in their lives. Disability has become a majority concern and it now makes sense to base accessibility regulation on general consumer protection, which is focused on the entire population, rather than the protection of a minority class’s civil rights. Chapter 2 lays out a framework for approaching disability as a population-wide, urban, lifelong concern rather than an individual, minority condition.

Chapter 3 reviews the positioning of health in regulatory structures. Public health professionals have introduced the “ecologic framework” as a collaborative, multifaceted mode of inquiry and operation, and this framework could also be utilized to structure interdisciplinary coordination between health and planning professions. Coordination and cooperation between real estate developers and community service agencies could be an effective implementation strategy capable of cross leveraging efforts and making the most efficient use of limited resources. In order to pursue these types of interdisciplinary strategies, challenges will first need to be overcome on multiple fronts: from differences in institutional culture to the ways in which these professions are positioned in government and industry organizational structures. The goal of creating lifelong neighborhoods can serve as a coordinating theme that helps us overcome these differences in institutional culture and separation in governmental structures.

Chapter 4 reviews market trends in the health and wellness industry. Americans have sought in recent decades to integrate health supports, fitness opportunities, and wellness routines into our daily lives, and we have most frequently done so through regionally scaled, big box, and campus opportunities. The neighborhood gym has been displaced by the regional fitness and recreation campus facility, the retirement home has morphed into the retirement community, and the nursing home has swelled to near-hospital proportions. Medical attention is primarily provided on sprawling hospital campuses or in nearby satellite clinics. As healthy environments result from a careful balance of regional and neighborhood concerns, the wholesale movement of health and wellness industries to regional models of service delivery has had the effect of divorcing health concerns from environmental considerations and even contributing to the further degradation of our environment.

Part II examines some of the street and building relationships that must be in place in order for lifelong neighborhoods to gain footings and flourish. While the main focus of this book concerns healthy environments at neighborhood scales (half- and quarter-mile distances that can be easily covered in five- or ten-minute walks), many transportation and land-use policies need to align at the regional scale in order for healthy urbanism to emerge at this local scale. Chapter 5 reviews connectivity and access as prerequisite conditions for lifelong neighborhoods to emerge. Good connectivity and access ensure that a neighborhood can tap into critical regional forces without being overwhelmed by them. Chapter 6 reviews building diversity within the neighborhood as another prerequisite issue. Lifelong neighborhoods must accommodate a wide variety of building types and uses in order to make daily needs and routines more accessible and more socially integrated. The ideal urban structure for a lifelong neighborhood is locally complete but regionally connected.

Part III examines the role of senior housing in supporting lifelong neighborhoods. Chapter 7 reviews the evolution of seniors housing to help provide a context for its building types and culture and to reframe them as community-based medical institutions rather than institutionally based residential communities. Chapter 8 reviews the complex financing structures of seniors housing that integrate healthcare, support services, and real estate industries. Both the complexity and value of these financing systems should not be underestimated. Even so, seniors-housing financing cannot simply rest on the predictable economies of mass industrial repetition of single use, single demographic, and single trend building types. Though the market for these repetitious forms is predictable, it is becoming predictably weaker as the resulting urban fabric fails to provide the complex urbanism that the market is now demanding. Market analysis has evolved over the past few decades, and whereas once it was used solely to judge the feasibility of a proposed project, today it is often used to proactively gauge markets and shape a project to reach them. Chapter 8 reviews market-study techniques that can help nudge the industry toward applying the existing seniors housing financing, development, and service systems in a manner that does not lead to specialized and segregated development responses. The end goal is not to dismantle the seniors housing industry, but rather to open it up and expand it. The integrated systems and expertise maintained by the seniors housing industry are too valuable and too hard won to ever replace or abandon wholesale. Chapter 9 goes on to lay out the individual building types and building components typical of seniors housing developments. The types are laid out as modular elements that can be integrated into a neighborhood rather than drawn together into a complete, autonomous facility. Along with these modules, a suite of policies and services typically utilized by community service agencies to support older adults in the community is provided. The integration of community services and housing development components can be an effective means of opening up and extending the seniors housing model to whole communities.

Part IV surveys some of the most progressive examples of lifelong care integrated into the built environment. The first two examples, the dense urban neighborhoods of Penn South in New York City and Beacon Hill in Boston, are reviewed because of the notoriety they have gained for advancing cooperative living models: the Naturally Occurring Retirement Community (NORC) and Villages models, respectively. Both of these best practices have been the subject of large-scale replication efforts, but in each case the efforts have attempted to replicate only the organizational models without much consideration for the role of the built environment context from which they arose. Part IV reviews some of the organizing principles and achievements alongside a discussion of their urban contexts. Older adult led community efforts in Mableton and Indiana are reviewed as prospective efforts to influence both urban form and service delivery in a combined manner. These are both community-planning efforts and are just beginning to generate results. All four best practices reviewed will cover issues of built forms, business models, and policy frameworks that have enabled achievements.

Longevity concerns and opportunities manifest themselves differently in various urban contexts. The best practices are selected to cover a range of urban-to-rural contexts. The longevity possibilities inherent to these different contexts primarily result from the different market catchments each context provides: Urban centers have sufficient density and consolidated purchasing power to demand a wide range of home- and community-based support options based on the immediately surrounding market alone; town centers can often serve the immediate community better by drawing from the larger region; and neighborhood centers can incrementally and organically “grow” their own services through cooperative organizations and satellite facilities developed in partnership with their regional service providers.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I must thank first my wife Kathryn Lawler, in appreciation of our lifelong collaboration on this topic, as well as our children Eleanor and Milner in appreciation for their good humor and long-suffering in the face of my time at the computer preparing the manuscript for the book.

This book has been a group effort with significant contributions from Glen Tipton, Duncan Walker, Jessica Wolfe, Susan Brecht, and Kathryn Lawler—all of whom have been uncommonly generous with their time and support. The Congress of New Urbanism (CNU) and Heather Smith in particular have provided many opportunities for members of the book team to make presentations on the subjects covered in this book, test our ideas, and get feedback. Thank you also to Robert Jenkens, John Sanford, and Edward Steinfeld, who have provided thoughtful advice, and Dodd Kattman and Zachary Benedict for their chapter and example of the Elder-Centric Villages work.

Anyone who writes about urbanism is indebted to the work of many others. I am particularly indebted to three groups of colleagues that have helped form my understanding of the subject: members of the Community Housing Resource Center, especially Kate Grace and Mtamanika Youngblood, for their leadership on issues of aging in community; the Atlanta Regional Commission’s Division on Aging, especially Cheryl Schramm and Cathie Berger, for involving me in Aging Atlanta and other pursuits; and Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company, particularly Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Andrés Duany for providing many learning experiences, professional space, encouragement, and the example of their constant daring.

While many more deserve to be thanked for their contributions, I would like to specifically mention: Paul Knight, Saji Girvan, Sarah Ball-Damberg, Phillip Stafford, Larry Frank, David Goldberg, Jeff Rader, Ellen Dunham Jones, Jane Hickie, Henry Cisneros, Nancy McPherson, William “Buck” Baker, Paul Wisner and Eve Byrd for helping to formulate ideas, images, and sentences. And last but not least, thank you to the team at John Wiley & Sons, particularly to John Czarnecki, for pushing me to take on this project and then to see it to completion.

PART I

CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES

The challenges presented by increased longevity and increased percentages of older adults did not spring up all at once—they are issues we have chosen to neglect as they have steadily crept up over decades. Though the issues had been framed many times before, Jerome L. Kaufman’s 1961 report “Planning and an Aging Population” is a particularly eloquent and direct assessment of these challenges. In the introduction of his report, Kaufman states:

Planning for all age groups is an inviolable principle; in practice, however, planners have been unduly preoccupied with certain age groups. Like the post-war housing boom, the approach to community development and planning has been child- or family-centered. Most significant advances in school and recreation planning, in subdivision design, and even in neighborhood planning, sprang originally from a conception of the needs of the young family with children. . . .

The impact of this pronounced shift in age composition on community services, on urban form and on economic activity is beginning to be realized. For the community planner, sooner or later, it will necessitate some reshuffling—discarding some outmoded theories, recasting some tenuous theories, and originating some new theories.1

Sun City Peachtree, a 1,726-acre senior community, currently under construction 35 miles south of Atlanta, Georgia.

Kaufman goes on to call out some of the specific issues that will need to “sooner or later” be reconsidered:

Traditionally, planners relegated older persons to a few cursory sentences in the comprehensive plan report; the number and possibly percent of older persons was mentioned, but rarely did subsequent proposals and plans reflect this analysis. Only now is there evidence that the elderly are coming in for more searching appraisal.

Many questions are being asked—some simple, some complex—to which planners can help find answers. What qualities of a community make it more livable for older persons? Should a dispersal or concentration of older citizens be encouraged? Given their diverse backgrounds and characteristics, what kinds of housing and community service accommodations do older people need? Where should housing for the elderly be located? To what extent should urban renewal account for older persons? Should zoning and subdivision control regulations be modified to accommodate housing developments for the elderly? Should local policy encourage the building of special housing units for the elderly or increase their economic capacity to compete for housing in the open market? What impact will an increasing number of older persons have on the local economy, the transportation system?2

In the fifty years since Kaufman asked these questions, seniors have achieved little advancement in comprehensive development planning, and most efforts at environmental planning for older adults have focused on specialized age-segregated retirement and care communities. Over the next fifty years and beyond, these measures will not be sufficient to accommodate older adults without enormous expense and/or neglect; hence, Kaufman’s questions must be raised again.

Part I reviews some of the critical contexts in which answers to these questions will need to be formulated. Accessibility laws did not exist in 1961, but today the basic regulatory structure for accessibility is in place and if repositioned strategically, it could provide a means of addressing critical upgrades to the general built environment. The healthcare system has grown exponentially since 1961, but it has done so with little relationship to the neighborhoods in which most of us will age. A robust wellness and fitness industry has grown since 1961 and has branched out into niche services, including many valuable supports for older adults. Accessibility regulations, healthcare systems, and wellness industries have provided new opportunities to once again raise Kaufman’s questions. Part I provides frameworks for structuring responses with these relatively recent opportunities.

1J. L. Kaufman, “Planning and an Aging Population,” Information Report No. 148 (Chicago, IL: American Society of Planning Officials, July 1961).

2Kaufman, “Planning,” 1.

CHAPTER 1

THE LONGEVITY CHALLENGE TO URBANISM

With contributions from Susan Brecht, Kathryn M. Lawler, and Glen A. Tipton

The Challenge

Longevity was the great gift of the twentieth century. Learning what to do with this gift is the great challenge of the twenty-first century.

Americans born in 1900 would not have been able to drive a car, ride in an airplane, see a motion picture, work a crossword puzzle, use a washing machine, or talk on the phone. But they could do all of this and more by the time they were 30. Within the next forty years, they would have witnessed the construction of the interstate highway system, experienced the great suburban expansion, and even watched the first man walk, and then drive, on the moon. Cross-country and international travel, unheard of at the turn of the century, would have become a regular and frequent experience for thousands by the end of the century.