As we documented last week, the Niagara-on-the-Lake seniors housing study revealed a broad consensus on basic requirements.

Essentially, seniors want to retain as much independence as possible within their existing NOTL community. The ready availability of health care and incremental access to other supports as needed are critical to ensuring quality of life and reasonable independence through the aging process.

Despite wide agreement on these core requirements, addressing seniors’ housing needs will require a multi-faceted approach. Complexity is elevated by the array of personal desires and circumstances exhibited by seniors. These fall into five broad categories.

Geography: Seniors living in different parts of NOTL vary significantly in terms of proximity to services and amenities, transportation dependence and dispersion of social networks.

Community engagement: Some seniors have very dense and localized social networks and multiple points of community engagement — and want to retain them.

Others have smaller networks of friends and family that are easier to maintain, but can become deleteriously sparse as people age.

Household structure: Seniors living alone (typically women) have unique needs that are not necessarily shared by others. Those needs can become more critical with social isolation, when there are few family or friendship supports available.

Health condition: Physical and cognitive health issues tend to become more acute as one ages, requiring progressive growth in supports. Beyond this, however, the situation is further complicated by the broad range of physical and mental difficulties that exist among the elderly.

These are often experienced in unique combinations of comorbidity and severity, resulting in a wide array of health outcomes that must be addressed within a residential setting.

Financial resources: While some neighbourhoods in NOTL have a reputation for affluence, this should not mask the reality that many of our seniors are of modest means.

Some live in financially precarious circumstances and almost half admit to some degree of financial apprehension.

Not all can, or even wish to, pursue the gold standard of assisted living. Care should be taken to remain sensitive to the needs of the less affluent and to avoid a tendency for “high-end,” high-profile housing proposals to distract from consideration of more modest options and creative rental, ownership and co-operative approaches.

These sources of variability intersect, creating a wide range of expectations, desires and fundamental needs among seniors when it comes to current and future housing requirements and related supports.

Clearly, seniors do not represent a single homogeneous group with respect to this issue or, in fact, any other. They exhibit a least as much heterogeneity as does any other broad segment of the population.

It follows, then, that the most effective approach to meeting seniors’ housing needs will involve establishing a network of multiple housing forms and integrated flexible supports that allow each individual to travel with dignity on a personal journey from full independence through to aging in place, assisted living and possibly long-term care.

As NOTL’s seniors housing advisory committee consistently emphasizes, and as our research confirms, there is no “one size fits all” solution to the town’s seniors housing challenges.

This becomes even clearer when it is considered that the integration of housing, health care and living supports defines a much broader concept — seniors living rather than simply seniors housing.

When contemplated from this loftier viewpoint, no single project or development could possibly provide the answer on its own. Importantly though, each could certainly contribute to a satisfactory solution in combination with others.

The diversity and complexity of need also suggest there must be an openness to fostering cross-project integration and to considering innovative design options and financing structures.

This takes some pressure off of individual projects since no single one needs to aspire to be THE solution.

There is also the implication that seniors living solutions could function quite well as modest complements to larger multi-use developments, such as might be contemplated for the old NOTL hospital site.

The seniors housing component would both benefit from, and add colour to, the community vibrancy that emerges from such multi-use sites. The same holds true for multi-generational and accessible housing possibilities.

All of this may sound daunting from the perspective of the municipality and other levels of government. Certainly, seniors wish to stay here and the vast majority (90 per cent) feel local government should be doing more to help them do that.

It should be pointed out, though, that the study did not uncover any sense that seniors are looking for a “handout.”

Instead, there seems to be an expectation that government step in directly when required, but more importantly provide leadership in creating the conditions necessary for appropriate development to proceed with the goal of establishing a housing ecosystem that benefits all seniors and the community as a whole.

Michael Ennamorato is a social geographer, retired researcher and former president of TNS Canada. The NOTL seniors housing survey was designed and analyzed by Stephen Ferley and Ennamorato, both NOTL residents with extensive research design and related executive consultancy experience. Fieldwork and data processing were conducted by Niagara College.