Gimme shelter

0:00Louise Bardswich:How to Live to 100, or Die Trying, is brought to you by Genical.

0:08Susan Vickberg:Canada's incoming status as a super-aged society, when one in four will be aged 65 and older, poses a really big question. Actually, let's make it two. Where and how are we going to live? Let me explain. Longevity is all fun and games until someone loses their eyesight, or has a stroke, or runs out of money because honestly, whoever imagined they needed to save enough to live past 100? In case life goes amiss, it helps to have a plan. Start early, advocates say, and look for housing that is affordable, creates social connections, and has access to home care support, because you never know when it might be needed.

0:57Susan Vickberg:Secure housing is, of course, good for our health and well-being. That can mean, from a taxpayer's perspective anyway, less time spent in expensive hospitals and expensive nursing homes. The problem is, there isn't enough of the good housing to go around, and that definitely includes the kind that helps older people live well. Housing instability creates an unhealthy old age. The supply of affordable, accessible homes doesn't meet the demand of a massive cohort of older people. We need more options. Shared housing, co-op apartments with sustainable rent, more social and home care programs in Norks, otherwise known as naturally occurring retirement communities, that are existing condos, apartments, or even neighbourhoods with a preponderance of older adults.

1:50Susan Vickberg:They create a fabulously efficient public health opportunity in one geographic area. It's almost impossible to find affordable housing that offers home care and social activities that help us stay healthier and happier. It takes years to move up the wait list, so long that some people joke they'll be dead by the time their name is called. There's no place like home, a good home, if only there were enough to go around.

2:26Susan Vickberg:From the Toronto Star, This is How to Live to 100 or Die Trying. And I'm your host, Moira Welsh.

2:44Louise Bardswich:So let's figure out whose turn it is for dinner. I don't think it's... Who did last night? You did. Susan did last night. Did you do Monday? Monday. Who did? When did I do the pot roast? You did that Tuesday, didn't you? So it's got to be you again. Oh, great. Okay, there you go.

3:14Susan Vickberg:Back in 2017, the Golden Girls of Port Perry captivated housing advocates, media, and politicians after their story appeared in the Toronto Star. Named for the 1980s sitcom about four older women living together, today's version of the Golden Girls tolerates that name, with limits. But first, here are a few relevant details from Statistics Canada. In 2021, there were 1.123 million women, aged 65 and older, living solo in Canada, and the number of men was about half that. All of which means that in order to survive in retirement and occasionally have a conversation with another human, shared housing is a viable option.

4:00Susan Vickberg:It didn't happen without a fight, but more on that later. Today, all but one of the original four golden girls of poor Perry have moved out, each selling their one-quarter share in the house to a new woman, a typical real estate deal with a few added legal agreements. Louise Bardswich, the last of the original Golden Girls, or GGs, gave me a tour. Louise is in her 70s. She worked in Ontario's college system for years and ended her career as a dean at Humber College. For practical reasons, she said, the house is a short walk to stores and restaurants, a key part of the accessibility plan. Inside, the design is beautiful and functional.

4:45Susan Vickberg:Let's let Louise tell us more.

4:49Louise Bardswich:The original was kind of a salt box house, and that's kind of where we're sitting right now. And that's what you see from the street. And we tried to keep sort of the general look of the old house, because it is historical. It's one of the oldest houses in Port Perry. It was located over on the main street and dragged over here with horses and logs. logs. And if you go in the basement right now, you can actually see the ceiling beams in the basement are old hand-hewn logs. It's very, very cool. So when we did the renovation, John lifted the whole house up, moved it, put a new basement in, shifted it back, and then we put quite a large addition on the back.

5:29Louise Bardswich:So there are four good-sized bedrooms with en-suites and walk-in closets that the owners all have. A common living area, which is a decent size, nice big kitchen, you know, a couple, two laundries. The kitchen is, it's a good size. It has a center island. We put in two dishwashers because we were trying to think as we were doing our planning, what are the things that are going to be irritations? What are the things that are going to make it crazy about other people? And dishes left in the sink was one of them. So with two dishwashers, there is never an excuse for a dish left in the sink. And then in the basement, we have two guest suites, one that could conceivably be used if we needed a live-in caregiver or something.

6:13Susan Vickberg:We'll be right back.

6:16Louise Bardswich:Hi, it's the makers of Genicol. Your knee's called again. They're suffering. Please give them a relief with Genicol Anti-Inflammatory. It contains aminolac collagen, biopyrine, and turmeric, which is traditionally used in herbal medicine as an anti-inflammatory to help relieve joint pain. You'll find Genicol Anti-Inflammatory in pharmacies and online. And a coupon is waiting for you at genicol.ca. Give it a try. This product may not be right for you. Always read and follow the label. Genicol makes me feel so good.

6:55Susan Vickberg:One day, many years ago, Louise had an epiphany. Her mother needed a retirement home. During their visits to various homes, Louise started calculating the annual cost of rent increases from the perspective of her own future needs. She got a harsh preview on the cost of a long life.

7:17Louise Bardswich:So I was probably around 60. So, you know, not really thinking in any big way about retirement for myself. But we were moving my mom down to Port Perry. She had been in a retirement home up in Sudbury. And one of the things I did is, you know, kind of doing the research, go around, talk to all of the places, find out how much their rates had gone up every year. And it was pretty much 3 % a year at that point. It's a whole lot more now. Anyhow, I looked at how much my mom was going to be paying, and that was not an issue. But then I have a math background, so I couldn't help doing the calculation.

7:53Louise Bardswich:I thought, well, I'm 60. If I need a place at, say, 75, let's do the compound calculation. And I thought, oh, you know what? I can't afford that. There's no way I can go into a retirement home unless I know I'm going to die really soon. At that point, I thought, gee, I need to find something else. And a friend and I went around, we looked at different options, you know, just some different retirement things that were going on. As part of that travel, we got talking and kind of harkened back to, you know, college days and so on, and just the real saving there is in living with other people. And started kind of figuring out, well, you know, say we had three, four people together, what could we actually afford?

8:34Louise Bardswich:And wow, you could get someplace pretty, you know, amazing for that price. So the primary motivation was financial. And even now, you know, dividing by four is just magic. It's, oh, you know, I would kind of like that new Christmas tree or whatever. Well, it's$200. You know what? That's only$50 each. It's not a big deal. The other motivation for me was I didn't want my family to be worried about me all the time. I wanted them to have some assurance that I was in a safe place. And certainly living with others gives you that.

9:05Susan Vickberg:When Louise still lived alone, quite happily, her adult children would check in, just to make sure their mom was still alive. We don't want the cat to eat your face, they'd tell her. That's a Sex and the City joke about single women living solo. When Miranda moved into a new apartment, a nosy neighbor told her that nobody had noticed when the previous tenant died, but when her body was eventually discovered... Rumor has it the cat ate half her face.

9:35Louise Bardswich:Miranda moves into a new apartment and finds out that the woman who lived there before died. Died in the apartment, and they didn't find her until the cat was eating her face. So somehow it became the short form for, let's check this, Louise is okay.

9:51Susan Vickberg:How many times have we all had a great idea, made a pros and cons list over a glass of wine, and resolved all the moving parts only to let it go? Louise and her friend Martha Casson had an idea for older female co-ownership of a house in Port Perry. It was a great idea, but they weren't quite ready. Neither was local council, which did its best to block an earlier attempt at co-ownership from several older adults and a local builder named John Lusick. Council was apparently concerned that the house would turn into a retirement home. It took the unrelenting enthusiasm of John the Builder and Martha's complaint to the Ontario Human Rights Commission to turn council around.

10:37Susan Vickberg:And while his early plan died, he proposed a new site to Louise and Martha. This time they said yes. It took a few more attempts to find the next roommates, but eventually it all came together as the best plans do.

10:54Louise Bardswich:He contacted me and said, I have a property if you're interested. And while I wasn't really ready to make the move, I thought this is, you know, jump on it. You have to jump on the property when it becomes available.

11:09Susan Vickberg:There is no science to finding the right people for home sharing. But the personalities have to fit. Mutual respect matters. As Louise says, if this house was in the United States instead of Canada, shared space between a Democrat and Republican probably wouldn't work. But here in their Port Perry home, unaligned political views are treated with respect. But the number one rule? Never, ever leave dirty dishes in the sink. Two dishwashers, you remember.

11:44Louise Bardswich:Basically what we did is we sat down and chatted. And if we thought we could get along, then that was good enough. We kind of went into it knowing you didn't have to be best friends, because the house was going to be big enough. We have our, as you can see, kind of our own private space. So you didn't have to end up living on top of each other. You know, it's certainly a situation even now where if I'm going out to a movie, I might ask somebody else in the house. But chances are, no, I'm going out with other friends and there's no sense that we do things together all the time. So you don't have to be best friends doing it.

12:17Louise Bardswich:It was more a question of kind of having your values somewhat aligned.

12:23Susan Vickberg:The shared ownership comes with an important legal agreement. Originally, Louise said, the women sat down together and discussed scenarios. There are agreements to sell when certain health conditions leave an individual medically compromised. Or if an owner decides to leave, the others get to vet the new buyer. After one year, if the seller can't get the other owners to agree on anyone, the remaining GGs can buy out that share. If they can't do that, the entire house has to go on the market, which, as Louise says, is incentive to avoid being too picky.

13:02Louise Bardswich:So all of us, when we first did this, all four of us owned houses. So we were able to sell our houses and have money then to come into this project. It was about$275 ,000 each, the total cost of that construction, the renovation, and so on. But for each of us, that meant we had money we put in the bank as well. So it was already a financial win. And then the monthly charges, we don't have a mortgage because we didn't need a mortgage. Monthly, I put$2 ,000 a month into the joint house account. Of that, about$200 goes into a savings account, which is really our contingency. It's for someday we know the roof will have to be replaced, whether it's us or somebody else.

13:47Louise Bardswich:We want to make sure there's money sitting there that we can do that. And the rest of it covers absolutely every bill, the taxes, the heat, the hydro, all of our food. Cheap wine, not great wine, but cheap wine. And yeah, just, I mean, anything you can think of. So that's it. So really, other than that$2 ,000 a month, it's, you know, pay for my car and my personal shopping. That's about it.

14:14Susan Vickberg:Louise and Martha weren't ready to move into John the Builder's original house when he pitched it in 2013. but they sure wanted to help him fight for the right to build it. When it looked like reason would not prevail, when it appeared that a new bylaw would block the so-called communal living of co-ownership, Martha reached out to the Ontario Human Rights Commission, asking it to weigh in on affordable housing. And then they waited.

14:43Louise Bardswich:For whatever reason, they refused to give John a building permit. We did a whole lot of submissions to the town and, you know, back and forth. And they were actually, they went about changing the bylaws to make sure this couldn't happen, that you couldn't have four unrelated people or six unrelated people living together in a house. And they were getting ready to do the vote. And we got a letter from Ontario Human Rights to the town saying, no, can't do that. It's illegal. It's against the Human Rights Code.

15:16Susan Vickberg:The GGs settled into a routine, busy with their own lives, but also taking turns cooking and sharing meals. As always, people being people, there were, as Louise calls it, rubs. Issues that needed to be resolved. And, she said, they worked through them. There are probably multiple reasons why the original women chose to go, she said. One bought a property on a lake. Another had health issues and moved into a retirement home. And as for the third, Louise isn't entirely sure, but believes it is related to a desire for travel. New women arrived, found their place, and as for Louise, the flow of life continued.

16:02Louise Bardswich:I'm an introvert, so when I first came in, honestly, as I moved in, my stomach hurt. I thought, oh, this could truly be awful. And it hasn't been. I certainly have no regrets. This is great, and I'm hoping that my health stays so that I can die in this house. That's what I'm really kind of hoping. From a financial point of view, yeah, like it's magic. This is terrific. My monthly costs are$2 ,000. That's food, wine, everything. And of that, part of it is going into a contingency fund. So it probably would only be$1 ,800 if we weren't trying to save up some money as well, which is like, really, where could you live for that?

16:42Louise Bardswich:and living in such a nice house, because it really is a lovely house. It's nicer than anything I could afford on my own. I remember just the first week kind of waking up and hearing people downstairs and somebody's making coffee and thinking, oh, this is cool. Going downstairs and being able to sit and have a cup of coffee and talk about what's in the news or whatever, it's a really, really nice start to the day, and we continue to do that. We're all very different, which, you know, it turns out to be kind of a benefit. You learn things from other people, different ways of looking at the world.

17:19Louise Bardswich:Just, yeah, it's nice. And then other people's families and friends. You know, we all have our own circles of friends, but they're starting to overlap because, you know, people come in and you come for supper and you get to know everybody. And, you know, that just becomes part of the circle. I had been a little hesitant about how my family would be with coming here and doing things. But my granddaughter, who's 17, will regularly call up and say, Grandma, are you doing anything? Can I come over and play cards with the old people?

17:53Susan Vickberg:Which is lovely. So many older women live alone through divorce or the death of a spouse. And as time passes, these numbers will grow. So I asked Louise if her living arrangement is a good solution to loneliness and isolation and the risk of depression. Does it really make a difference? And does sharing space give her reassurance that someone is around if she needs help, so her children can find a replacement for that face-eating cat joke?

18:27Louise Bardswich:For somebody who's living alone, there are those things that, you know, the safety is a huge concern. Huge concern. Even at 60, living alone, I used to think, you know, if I fall down the stairs at night, it could be a couple of days before anybody finds me. It really could. And certainly as you get older, that's more and more of an issue. It's a great solution. I think it's a solution that frightens a lot of people. They can't quite imagine living with others. And when we do presentations, you know, at church groups or so and so on, that's often what we hear. I just can't imagine living with others.

19:02Louise Bardswich:And I want to say, you know, honey, at some point you are going to be living with others because your family is going to move you into a nursing home or retirement residence or something. And you're not going to have a choice. And you're not going to have the kind of control that we have in this situation. Yes, we're living with other people, but we can decide that we don't want to have meatloaf on Tuesdays.

19:25Susan Vickberg:We'll be right back.

19:28Louise Bardswich:Hi, it's the makers of Genical. Your knee's cold again. They're suffering. Please give them a relief with Genicol Anti-Inflammatory. It contains aminolacollagen, biopyrine, and turmeric, which is traditionally used in herbal medicine as an anti-inflammatory to help relieve joint pain. You'll find Genicol Anti-Inflammatory in pharmacies and online. And a coupon is waiting for you at genicol.ca. Give it a try. This product may not be right for you. Always read and follow the label. Genicol makes me feel so good.

20:09Susan Vickberg:Wood Green Community Centres is one of those reliable social service organizations that has existed in Toronto for decades. One of its offerings is housing for older people with geared to income rent and options that include assisted living or, for those who are slightly frailer, cluster care with 24-hour support from on-site personal support workers, not the agencies who send a different staffer every day, but the same frontline workers who've been there for years. This makes a difference. Susan Vickberg lives in a cluster care household in a Queen Street East Woodgreen building. Her husband died in 2007, and four years later, in 2011, Susan was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.