New Housing Options for Swarthmore Seniors?

It is a sad day when the moving truck arrives on your street and a long-term neighbor’s belongings are packed in for the trip to a new home in another town, perhaps several states away. There goes the couple who kept an eagle eye on the neighborhood children, Jane who would lend you her gardening tools along with some helpful planting advice, Robert who knew the best home repair people in the area or where to find a babysitter. We watch as the seniors leave our little borough because they need to live in a smaller house, or be nearer to healthcare, or to help take care of their own parents.

When seniors move out of your neighborhood, they take with them the history of the area, a community memory that informs the way we live now. Can we afford to lose them? And is it good for the health of seniors to be uprooted from the place they have called home? The Swarthmore Senior Citizens Association wanted to study those issues, and in particular, look at a couple of alternatives for seniors, allowing them to stay nearby.

There is, already, some variety of housing options for seniors in Swarthmore and surrounding communities. There’s the house you already live in; even though it might be bigger than you need and expensive to maintain, it provides familiarity and a place for the grandkids to come back to. There are smaller, single-story houses, though these can be hard to find. There’s apartment living, either rented or purchased, sometimes offering a sense of instant community. There’s independent, assisted, and nursing care, sometimes all contained in the same building. There’s a room or two in your grown child’s home, with the chance to live with your grandchildren. Nevertheless, some people are looking for something different, and not finding it.

Two options seem to be in particularly short supply — or non-existent. One is co-housing, a form of small-group living in which people share space while also maintaining some privacy. The second is appealing downtown apartments, in walking distance of shopping and the SEPTA train. The Swarthmore Senior Citizens Association chose to study these two options at its online wellness fair last November. 

Beth Murray, a lecturer in the communication program at the Wharton School of Business, also serves on the Swarthmore Centennial Foundation board and helped spearhead a recent initiative to envision Swarthmore 2030, out of which emerged the idea for new downtown housing over commercial and retail space. She pointed out that the train station, the Swarthmore Co-op, and the proximity of Swarthmore College help make the borough a desirable location. She spoke of long-time residents who moved to Philadelphia because of the lack of the kind of housing they wanted in town. “We lose the seniors that could stay and enrich the community,” she said.

Murray indicated that mixed-use development would require a certain number of living units in order to be economically viable, noting that current zoning regulations permit building up to five stories in the business district. Conference attendees listed several larger buildings in downtown Swarthmore that might fit the bill. Murray showed slides of building projects in Ardmore, Malvern, and Morristown, New Jersey, to fire people’s imaginations. 

Lynn Gaffney, an architect from Brooklyn, discussed co-housing. Founder of the Cohousing Opportunities Group, Gaffney works nationally to design and foster co-housing developments. To make co-housing succeed, a close-knit group of people must work through a variety of issues including location, development, maintenance, and — perhaps most important of all — community-building. She called co-housing a place “where people really live intentionally and want to connect with their neighbors.”

Gaffney’s experience lies mostly in larger co-housing developments of 20 to 35 living units, but Swarthmore residents attending the talk discussed the possibilities for something much smaller. Many seemed interested in the idea of three or four single people or couples living in a large home — or perhaps two or three adjacent houses — with some private space and some shared spaces. Swarthmore borough council member Ross Schmucki, who attended the fair, noted that senior cooperative housing was authorized by council in a 2019 ordinance.

The day following the presentations, Murray and Gaffney moderated separate workshops on each housing type. In the workshop on co-housing, participants learned more about the details of setting up and operating a co-housing project, and they brainstormed possible locations. Likewise, at the workshop on downtown mixed-use development, participants learned more about the steps involved in developing such a project, the possible impacts on the downtown, and some of the potential hurdles. The result of each workshop was the establishment of a group to continue the discussion and see where each proposal might go next.

Video recordings of the initial presentation and discussion and each Sunday workshop are posted on the SwarthmoreSeniors.com website. Those who would like to participate in one of the groups following up are invited to email SwarthmoreSeniors@gmail.com.

Linton Stables is the former president of the Swarthmore Senior Citizens Association.