1.4 million boomer women who fish 16 million days each year are making their mark on one more of the last bastions of the good old boys.
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Seaside ADUs
Seaside Florida, a unique New Town on the Gulf Coast of the Florida panhandle, has matured since its inception 30 years ago. Seaside was a New Urbanism concept community design that you can read about on the community website. I’m most interested today in the large number of Accessory Dwelling Units that have been built. They are used as vacation cottages and marketed through their website. On the whole the cottages are above garages and very attractive though varied within the community style. Take a look at some of them here.
Seaside Carriage House
A recent study focused on the 30% of baby boomers that are are single, over 23 million of them. 3000 single seniors are turning 65 every day and they don’t want to live alone for the rest of their lives. Dating and mating services are catering to this newly found market. We’ve been watching and waiting for this and now that it’s here some are acting surprised. 
Actually this is only the canary in the coal mine, there’s more to come from the baby boomer crowd. Stay tuned.
Interested in exploring Colorado’s sublime wilderness and catching brilliant Cutthroat Trout from a pristine glacial Lake but just don’t know how to get started?
Here’s How!
Colorado Free University is hosting classes by Mike Kephart in July & August. Each class includes a guided trip to a high mountain lake. To register go to; www.freeu.com; then select search for classes/register, then recreation and leisure, then recreation. It’s classes # 7714A and B, The first class starts on July 13, 2011.
80+ women live long lives in Chernobyl in spite of the danger from radiation, “Home” is that important in their lives? The men died long ago but some 200 women survivors are now outliving their octogenarian counterparts outside the danger zone. (The Today Show, April 18, 2011)
Mike Kephart
A Jan. 2011 survey, Conservation in the West, a bipartisan effort, revealed truths that our politics has all wrong. 81% of voters in Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming, Montana and Utah believe that environmental laws should not be reduced in favor of oil and gas companies. (as repotted in the Denver Post Sunday 4/17/11). Yes we want jobs, but not at the expense of the very reason we live in these beautiful places.
Mike Kephart
Blog Imprints
1 /31/10
Imprints are strong emotional experiences in our lives that have
“imprinted” themselves on our brain to become part of the tapestry of
memories that shape our responses to ideas in our living environment,
such as; comfort, safety, social status, happiness, fun, and the connection
with others. These “imprints” come into play when we think of, the home,
of our childhood neighborhood, or when we first experience a space new
to us, such as a renovated Loft in an urban setting or a new model home
in suburbia. Our reactions, influenced by our imprints, are gut level or
instinctual rather than the reasoned analysis of: location, home size, and
cost. Imprints can be either positive or negative.
If our imprints from the past were largely positive ones from an
experience of rural living, we might have a difficult time seeing that
contemporary downtown loft as an attractive place to live and the
suburban neighborhood, full of tightly spaced homes, could be as
unappealing to us as well. Changing our current imprints is difficult, so
our reactions to experiences will not easily change, but new imprints
are being formed every day as we learn and grow and these replace
those old imprints over time.
You can see why people often choose lifestyles similar to their parents
and are slow to turn to new ideas and forms of living, like lofts, or in the
case of someone who grew up in a city apartment and couldn’t imagine
living in a single family home much less a small town. It takes time to
learn to accept change and imprints, or the lack of them. They are some
of the reasons the design of our homes evolves so slowly, and new ideas
are greeted more with suspicion than acceptance. That’s how it’s been
with my neighbors and their suspicion of accessory dwellings. They say
they are concerned about parking, the potential shading of a neighbor’s
garden, or the design compatibility of the new additions to the
neighborhood architectural fabric. That’s what they say, but they may
be reacting instinctually to old imprints they still harbor within
themselves. Part of our job is to give them reason to develop new
positive imprints with beautiful efficient non‐intrusive backyard
cottages that they can point to with pride.
The ASA (American Society on Aging) and the NCOA (National Council On Aging) are holding their joint conference in San Francisco April 26 to 30, 2011.
Building for Boomers will be there and presenting our seminar entitled Caregiving and the Physical Environment. Judy Schriener and MIke Kephart, co-authors of the book, Building for Boomers, will present the subject material showing how home design can assist or hinder the caregiving function at home. Our workshop is at 11:30 to 12:30 Wednesday April 27, 2011, at the Hilton San Francisco Union Square Hotel.
Jumbo loans, or those with mortgages backed by the US Government from the current limit of $417,000 up to $729,750, may be cut back, as reported in the Feb 4, 2011 Washington Post. The collapse of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, at the heart of the current financial crisis, has sparked a serious review of those systems.
Such a system only made it easier to buy or build a home that is beyond what any one family could possibly require. In fact nearly everything done to make buying a home easier also encouraged people to buy bigger and bigger homes.
With the exception of location, the appraisal of a home became based nearly 100% on size, completely overshadowing quality as part of the analysis. Locations at the limits of development were the only places people could find the homes they dreamed of without considering the great distances they needed to drive each day and the cost of that. Appraisals, of course, couldn’t consider the cost of transportation and time away from family as part of the cost of living at the fringe and buyers ignored it.
When the economy went into recession and foreclosures were everywhere all these weaknesses in the original buying decision were exposed. People were left with large mortgages on cheaply built houses, too far from town.
Nearsighted policies such as the jumbo loans and all the other government programs that encourage larger poor quality homes over small high quality ones should be ended. The benefit to all of us would be more sustainable cities that favor small over large and high quality over the cheap.