by Elizabeth M Young

Created on: August 12, 2009   Last Updated: June 04, 2011

A few months ago, I spent a wonderful time at our community garden with an elderly lady who had just moved in to our apartment complex. This place started out as a 55 and older joint. Later, the age was lowered to 45 with a goal of housing "active seniors".

I stayed with the lady for an extra hour, just to be a friend until she could get settled in. It's the thing to do here.

She was lonely and was having trouble finding her way through the large complex to the clubhouse where the people and activities are. She was lost when it came to choosing a cable television plan. She was bewildered about all of the features of the phone services and was lost when confronted by the other aspects of a state-of-the-art life.

Her son had encouraged her to move to our city and to our apartment complex in order to be closer to him, but his visits were becoming more and more infrequent. When he was here, the lady would often would forget to bring up things that she needed help with.

When I moved in, so many elderly people were here that younger people were moving out. They could not stand the atmosphere of a rest home or nursing facility. The elderly truly didn't want to move into assisted living facilities or to be around sick old people. They wanted to live independently in a "normal" community for as long as they could. But many of them required far too much assistance and should not have been living independently.

The problem was: the truly debilitated elderly were not supposed to be living here at all. The tenants were supposed to be "active seniors" who were capable of fully taking care of themselves and their affairs in their more healthy and self sufficient retirement years.

But the management was, and still is, more interested in renting apartments, getting their commissions, and lying if that is what it took to get new tenants.

Sometimes the problems were so serious that some of the older ones would wander around for hours at night, unable to find their way home. Others were well into the violent or wandering stages of Alzheimer's and Dementia. Some were recovering stroke victims or were physically and mentally handicapped. Others were profoundly deaf. Many had lost their driver's licenses and had no transportation of their own.

Ambulances used to arrive here on a frequent basis to take someone to the hospital, or just out of here.

When I and other younger seniors moved in, other "active seniors" moved out. There were few options for fun and friendships with people

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