The local government in Beijing has decided they have too many seniors living in the centre of the city and they want them to move out to free up housing and services.
To make it more attractive the government offers to subsidise medical costs and provide new suburbs on the city fringe. But the seniors are saying ‘no’, they want the vibrancy and familiarity of their old neighbourhoods.
Like all things Chinese, the scale of getting things wrong is massive.
A billion-dollar suburb for seniors
In 2010, for example, the Yanda Golden Age Health Nursing Centre in Langfang, 30 km east of Beijing, was opened. A suburb dedicated to seniors, it has retirement village type accommodation, aged care homes, hospitals and supermarkets spread over more than 40 high-rise buildings. Six years later, less than 10% are occupied.
It cost $2 billion to build and virtually no seniors have come.
They want community not luxury.
The need for community
We have the same situation in Australia where planners look to elderly couples downsizing from the four-bedroom family home to an apartment or a retirement village.
We are moving into both if they are part of a real community. Because as we age, we increasingly need the familiar around us.
An example is the number of Victorian retirees who have moved to Queensland only to move back to Victoria in their later years. Having left the Melbourne housing market they have to come back into lower value suburbs like Cranbourne in Melbourne’s south-east which has a large number of retirement villages.
It’s not luxury that counts, it’s the community.
