Going Gray: Boomers and the Coming Crunch (July 14-19, 2008)
The convergence of so many boomers retiring and uncertain times in which we’re living led me to write a series looking at what some of the key issues are, from housing to savings . It’s an area of inquiry that still remains open.
At 29, fresh from Jersey City, N.J., Anne Perkins moved into the backwoods of Wendell to start life anew after the breakup of her marriage.
The year was 1972, within a decade of building a new Interstate 91. The highway helped funnel a “back-to-the-land” migration by people like Perkins, who’d been a mother and part-time coordinator for a church-based volunteer organization in Manhattan.
Together with some friends in Wendell, near where she’d met her former husband, she bought nine acres on an unimproved dirt road off New Salem Road. She learned carpentry skills by building cabins, which she used to build two houses on the property and launch a career as a contractor.
Meanwhile, Perkins grew her own food, cut her own wood, enjoyed baking, canning and learning to identify the birds.
On her own, raising her daughter away from Jersey City, “There was a euphoria being independent,” she recalls. “The idea of being out in the woods was very satisfying to me. It was quite wonderful to be on a back road in Wendell and not hear cars, and to learn to identify birds and bird songs.”
But about five years ago, during “one of those brutal winters” when she got tired of parking her car half a mile down the end of the snowed-in road, shoveling a path through the snow to her house and hauling cordwood, “I just said, I’m going to move to town,'” recalls Perkins, who was turning 60 at the time.
She thought first about moving to Greenfield, but wound up buying a single-story house in Amherst — not far from the center of town “because I thought, this is probably the last house I’m going to buy, because I’m getting older. Obviously I can walk up and down the stairs, but I’m old enough now to see that the time will come when that’s going to be more challenging.”
As a “pre-boomer” now turning 65, Perkins is hardly alone.
She’s slightly older than the 80-million-strong Baby Boom generation, born between 1946 and 1964, which numbers over 22,000 in Franklin County.
Census estimates show the population of Franklin County’s 65-and-over population in 2006 at 13.8 percent — a full half-percent higher than for the state as a whole, but by 2025, Massachusetts is projected to go from one in eight residents over 65 to one in five — part of “a nation of Floridas,” in the words of Franklin County Home Care Corp. Executive Director Roseann Martoccia.
Boomers — the largest cohort population in history — began this year to file for Social Security benefits, triggering what some planners are calling the first sign of what will be a tidal wave of seniors in the decades ahead.
Shutesbury is expected to see its share of over-60 residents more than triple over the next 20 years, according to projections by the Massachusetts Executive Office of Elder Affairs, while Leyden’s over-60 population segment may nearly triple, and Wendell and Heath’s may more than double. Greenfield and Montague, where the population “65 and older” already approaches 25 percent, is projected to retain about that proportion.
Beginning slowly, the line of boomers who are now anywhere between 44 and 62 will continue claiming retirement benefits, changing work and seeking out medical and social service programs over the next two or three decades, said Martoccia. The ranks will continue to swell, just as the birth rate in the years following World War II increased.
Many of these are programs that boomers can hardly imagine themselves ever needing, she said.
“We age, grow older and plan for that as much as we can, but one moment you slip and fall, and you may be in for another kind of setback,” she said. Boomers crossing the threshold into what has been thought of as the age of “retirement” may not begin needing any type of assistance until their 70s or 80s, perhaps, and may not consider them even then, Martoccia said.
But boomers, born at a time when Greenfield Tap and Die and Millers Falls Co. factory buildings bustled with hundreds of workers instead of apartments, are coming of age as public resources are less assured and as families are smaller and tend to live farther apart.
“We live in a time when people have gone through more than one marriage and have children from different marriages, and people aren’t as close in distance or family ties,” Martoccia said. “How does that impact who will help?”
The Franklin County agency, created in 1972, typically looks five years ahead in planning for programs that include nutrition, personal care and transportation services for seniors.
But now, faced with shrinking public funding and a burgeoning population, Martoccia said her agency is poised to look further — and work with Franklin Regional Transit Authority and Franklin Regional Council of Governments — at a phenomenon the Social Security Administration has dubbed the “senior tsunami”
“Now we’re saying, Whoa! This is like global warming. We need to pay attention here,'” said Martoccia. “This is uncharted territory for how people are going to manage.”
The agency has already held a workshop for area lawyers and financial planners and has addressed the Franklin County Chamber of Commerce about the need for employers to begin thinking about potential effects on the businesses.
“As we look at the demographics, we have to ask what it means for the organization, but also for people who are going to be getting older who live in our community,” Martoccia said.
“We want to be a little more proactive, raising money and also having consumers understand what their options are in giving, and also how should people be planning for their future.”
Like other publicly funded elder services agencies, which see growing demand and at least a leveling off of funding, Home Care — whose Meals on Wheels program already faces a $150,000 annual deficit that’s expected to grow from the 140,000 meals a year it now serves — is beginning to boost its own fund-raising efforts, in part by encouraging people to think about the agency in their wills.
With a high proportion of home ownership in this area, Home Care is also trying to focus on working with the 30 towns it serves to develop pools of tradespeople and contractors to offer home-repair services.
“If you want to stay in your home, it often becomes an issue of finding someone who wants to do a small (repair) job — someone trustworthy to invite into your home,” Martoccia said.
Other realities
The agency also plans to begin working with local councils on aging and FRTA to plan for improvements in transportation alternatives for an aging population around the sparsely populated county.
“As good as that is, it’s incomplete,” she said of the current transportation offerings for seniors, “because you have to be able to get yourself out to the bus, if you pick it up across the street, or if you call dial-a-ride, you have to be able to go from inside the house to get on the bus. For some people who may not drive anymore, they may also need assistance to get on coats and hats or to get up into the bus.”
Even before a swelling population of seniors and rising gas prices boost the ranks of likely bus passengers, the problem arose last fall when drivers were told to stop helping senior passengers carry packages into their houses or help them get on or off, citing liability concerns.
Home Care has also begun trying to make the aging boomer population more aware of the need to brace for the financial realities they face in a tough economy, by talking with financial planners.
“How are we going to tackle those problems if we don’t see a lot of public resources?” Martoccia asked. “Federal funding for Meals on Wheels and other programs has remained virtually flat for 20 years. If we know there are going to be more people and more demand, how are we going to meet that need? We need to make everyone aware that the numbers are coming and that public resources are not coming.”
When she’s talking with state planners who envision programs for large numbers of seniors, Martoccia said, it’s clear that their urban-oriented thinking about the needs of seniors has to be adjusted for a sparsely populated area where the economies of scale and needs are vastly different.
“Here we are out here in Franklin County, where we’re green and we’re recycling, but we’ve all got to get in our cars to get places,” she said. “We’re really going to have to pinpoint local resources.”
Although retirement may not yet be on their radar screens, the time for making those plans is already at hand.
“When I was 40, I couldn’t imagine being 80,” said Perkins, who at 65 is still hard at work, planning Greenfield Solar Village at RDI. “Now I can imagine being 80. It’s not that far away. And I can imagine being 90. I can imagine being frail elderly. I couldn’t have imagined that when I was swinging a hammer.”
– RICHIE DAVIS