Cincinnati Neighborhood Summit 2017
Today I attended my 3rd Annual Neighborhood Summit put on by the City of Cincinnati and at Xavier's Cintas Center. As was the case with the first two, I can't help but walk away from the event feeling a great sense of Civic pride seeing hundreds of Cincinnatians (of all different ages, races, religions and incomes) gathered together in a common effort to make our city a better place to live, work, learn and play. The event is broken down into a series of sessions and the following are some thoughts from a session that related particularly well to the Home 2.0 project initiative.
The mission of the Home 2.0 Project and Blog is creating the Next Generation of Home, but that isn't restricted to any particular type or scale of housing. The original Starter Home 2.0 project looked at addressing the Millennial Housing Dilemma, but the aging Baby Boomer generation is facing their own Dilemma that is only going to become more problematic in future years. This was the focus of the session, titled 'Golden Cincinnati: Making the Queen City a Great Place to Age in Place.'
Among the takeaways from this presentation was the 90% of seniors want to remain in their home. Unfortunately, many homes are not designed with Universal Design and Aging in Place being accounted for, making falls in the home a huge problem. Organizations such as People Working Cooperatively in Cincinnati make an effort to upgrade homes with grab bars, better lighting and other measures that help address this, but it is oftentimes not feasible to upgrade many older homes to truly accommodate the needs of most seniors as they age. For this reason, I think there is a great opportunity for the design and development of more new home construction projects that make this a priority and something I would like to tackle in future Home 2.0 project. After all, if you are not a senior citizen today, you aspire to be one someday.
