Plan retrofits 5 communities for active-adult living

If aging is a natural process, generating senior-friendly neighborhoods is not.

In Atlanta, where the population is aging faster than the national norm, this is about to be a problem.

“Isolation and a lack of transportation are huge issues for many older Atlantans,” Kathryn Lawler, a consultant of the Atlanta Regional Commission, said Wednesday. “What we need is a fundamental reinvention of building our communities.”

Creating town centers along major roadways, connected to neighborhoods by walkable spaces, will make the region more senior citizen-friendly, according to a new report released Wednesday by the ARC.

The report, published by the ARC and Miami-based Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company, includes plans to retrofit five local communities and one mall for the rapidly growing 55-and-older population.

“When you are young, you may want to live in the city. And once you have a family, you may want to move to a more suburban area,” said Andres Duany, an urban planner who has helped shape cities across the world. “But when you get older, you may want to move back into the city again and this plan will make those transitions easier.”

The ARC and the Duany company used a nine-day workshop last February to plan the communities, geared toward meeting the needs of older metro residents. A resultant “lifelong communities” plan contains housing types and amenities for all age groups, because those are the surroundings many baby boomers prefer.

The city’s 55-and-older population is increasing faster than the population at large. In Gwinnett and Cherokee counties, for example, the senior population growth rate topped 72 percent between 2000 and 2007, according to the ARC. An estimated 78.2 million Americans (25 percent of the total population) are boomers born from 1946 to 1964.

The changes Duany proposes will require changes in building and planning codes as well as more cooperation between governmental agencies.

“The philosophy behind this is that planning departments lead planning, they don’t respond to it,” Duany said during a presentation of the plan. “Master-planning is key and until planning departments start doing it like private developers do, they will be at a serious disadvantage.”

Plans also call for more connectivity, pedestrian access, transit options, neighborhood retail and social interaction — elements many current communities lack.

The five targeted communities — Boulevard Crossing in Atlanta; Mableton in Cobb County; Conyers in Rockdale County; Toco Hills in DeKalb County and Stella Place in Fayetteville — are redesigned in the report, using existing developments, mixed with new elements.

Stella Place, for example, is described as “a historic train depot town … in need of better regional traffic management and an enhanced local street grid.” The plan: establish a local street network and develop opportunities to interface this local grid with the thoroughfares, the report said.

Lawler, the ARC consultant, says the five local governments are “very committed” to implementing the lifelong community plans. She said the plans are very ambitious, but with good reason.

“If we don’t build these things, we won’t really learn what we need to have learned,” she said. “The scale of the response has to meet the demographic change. And this is so big, you can’t think small. The kinds of innovations have to be scaled up to meet the demographic needs.”