11: The Retirement Farm
A lot of my family friends are now approaching the ranks of elderly friends, and not a one of them wants to go to a retirement home. They are, I'm told: depressing, cramped, "filled with old people just waiting to die," and, in most cases, prohibitively expensive.
Plus, let's be honest: who really wants to go visit grandma in an old folks' home? So on top of all of that, they can be pretty lonely.
So what about a Retirement Farm?
It's a somewhat self-sustaining model, where the elderly can live in a beautiful setting, while remaining vital members of a society. Social Security and Medicare could help offset the some of larger expenses of assistants, utilities and access to medical care, but the retirees themselves would help reduce costs by participating in the upkeep of maintenance, services and production of food.
Pooling their skill-sets and abilities, residents would contribute to the facility's upkeep and success. From gardeners and beauticians to marketers and musicians, every resident would have a way to pitch in. Maybe they could even have real livestock! It would be, to some extent, a working-man's farm, but they are retired, after all, so there'd be built in some limits to the amount of work each resident was expected to do.
And it'd be a great place for the family to visit. They could have resident-run (and revenue-generating), guest housing, like the opposite of a mother-in-law apartment, where the kids and grandkids could come to stay for a weekend in the country. Fun!
There used to be something kind of like it in early 1900s, as an outgrowth of the poorhouse.
Admittedly, the poorhouse didn't really work out.
Initially introduced as a part of a welfare prototype, the poorhouse was a publicly-funded program, in which the down-and-out were given room and board, and were ideally assigned jobs that would ideally keep the program self-sufficient.
Poorhouses got a bad name in a big hurry. Funding was minimal, people -- both in charge and in the system -- took advantage, and conditions weren't always ideal. Disagreements over who should qualify for public funds were hotly disputed. No one knew what to do with the children and the disabled. So, basically all of the same debates over welfare we see today.
After most of the poorhouses were disbanded and children and veterans were whisked away to their own respective programs, there yet remained, for a short time, a handful of poor farms that housed and employed the elderly.
Portlanders, you know Edgefield? It used to be a poor farm!
My mom read an article about one of these places earlier this year, and cut it out for me to read. Until its infrastructure changed, it actually sounded kind of nice. I'm not elderly yet, but I'd love to go visit my retired friends there -- maybe make a spa or wine-tasting weekend out of it? -- and when I do get old, I'd be thrilled to think that there's a place where I could graciously go out to pasture.
