Don’t Mind the Gap in Intergenerational Housing

CW: This article is behind a paywall

This article from the New York Times showcases the LGBT Anita May Rosenstein Campus project our team is helping achieve LEED certification. It focuses on the benefits of creating intergenerational housing, or mixed-age housing especially ahead of the Baby Boomer generation’s anticipated need for housing.

In fact, the Los Angeles LGBT Center owns and operates one of the most striking examples of intergenerational living in the United States. Its Anita May Rosenstein Campus, off Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood, is billed as the “first intergenerational facility serving L.G.B.T. seniors and youth.” Nearing completion in late August, the cluster of buildings — white concrete boxes and expanses of glass, punctuated by a series of courtyards and plazas — was designed by Leong Leong (a bicoastal firm) and the Los Angeles-based KFA Architects & Planning.

Separate from the seniors’ apartments are 25 new supportive housing units for young people. The center’s chief executive, Lorri L. Jean, said that they were a priority for the organization, because 40 percent of Los Angeles’s homeless youth are L.G.B.T., and that L.G.B.T. seniors were a priority because many who had ended up in more mainstream housing “experienced enormous homophobia from the other residents.”

While the need was clear, less obvious was the idea that younger and older residents, housed in separate buildings, would benefit by spending time together. Despite Covid-19 restrictions, the LGBT Center in Los Angeles has been running a culinary arts training program that prepares both populations for restaurant jobs. Other intergenerational activities, put on hold by the pandemic, include yoga, photography workshops in which young and old participants work together on assignments, and sessions in which participants share their stories of coming out.

Ms. Jean explained the logic of the center’s intergenerational strategy: “L.G.B.T. seniors are four times more likely than their straight counterparts to live alone. And they have no family to support them. And a lot of these youth have lost their families. And so we have this thought of creating families of choice that can help each other.”

Of course, it’s not only L.G.B.T.Q. people who depend on families of choice. To some extent, we all do. And families, by definition, are intergenerational. So the familiar observation that boomers are in denial about aging shouldn’t necessarily be written off as yet another example of archetypal self-absorption. It could be read as a signal that a systemic redesign is long overdue.

Original article here.