The downside of age segregation

Thought-provoking excerpts from an interesting op-ed piece at Bloomberg:

For most of the nation’s history, the idea that people over the age of 65 would voluntarily herd themselves into special communities built around their needs would have seemed absurd, even dystopian. Yet a largely voluntary movement towards segregating people by age has reached extreme levels in recent years – and without receiving much attention at all. The coronavirus outbreak could put an end to it.

In 1850, nearly 70% of individuals age 65 or older lived with their adult children. Most of the rest tended to live in close geographical proximity. As a consequence, older people were more or less evenly distributed throughout the country.

This arrangement was highly functional: The elderly needed help as they aged, and children and grandchildren provided it. In return, the elderly took care of young children, and otherwise pulled their weight around the house.

Home was not the only place where people of different ages mixed together in ways they are all too rare today. Prior to the twentieth century, it was entirely normal to have a one-room schoolhouse catering to both teens and toddlers. When rural communities held quilting parties, everyone from young girls to elderly matrons participated side by side. Farmworkers of all ages toiled together, and armies in the Civil War threw together young boys, older men, and everyone in between...

Several developments fueled this [modern sorting into "age buckets."] The first was a growing belief that older people couldn’t keep up in the fast-paced, modern world of work. Mandatory retirement ages – often coupled with increasingly generous pension benefits – helped push workers out the door at a certain age...

All of this took place against a very gradual decline in the number of old people living with their children.  The mix of public and private retirement programs enabled some of the elderly to live on their own, but there’s evidence that in many cases, children moved away from their parents to pursue economic opportunities, effectively abandoning the older generation. So the elderly, particularly those with retirement savings, embraced a new trend that burst onto the scene after World War II: the retirement community...

In 1965, Congress created Medicare and Medicaid, helping finance the creation of low-budget, state-run “nursing homes” that increasingly warehoused the elderly...  By the 1990s, a growing number of facilities designed to bridge the gap between fun-filled retirement centers and grim nursing homes came into being: the rise of “assisted living” facilities, “memory-care villages,” and other facilities for the elderly...

Ultimately, the U.S. became one of the most age-segregated nations in the world. Recent research indicates that a third of Americans over the age of 55 live exclusively among people in the same age cohort...

The pandemic may change that...

More at the link.