Senior Housing
Rationale and Overview

Over the last 60 years, older Americans age in circumstances of incremental isolation and loss of control. Moreover, while support needs gradually increase, there is a concomitant rise in emotional consequences of increased suicidal risk, anxiety, and depression that cause rapid decline in reasoning skills. The more we compensate, the greater the obstacles. In addition, the longer elders live, the more fragile their financial condition becomes. The inevitable crisis that makes them overwhelmingly vulnerable brings catastrophic costs that threaten to render them paupers.

With its promise of hope, providing all of their end of life support needs, housing and care, the long-term care industry became the 20th century's answer to government's central planning role in systematically robbing livelihood of younger generations to pay for ever increasing costs of aging. The benefits disbursement society, raised in a culture of entitlements and welfare were no longer capable of sustaining the support that generationally belonged to the family. Thus was born the two wage earner society. It now delegates the care of their most fragile family members, children and elders to strangers. For our elders, the consequences have been a disaster. Institutional living has brought an abundance of misery. Emotionally and culturally challenged people who are frequently from impoverished and unsettled backgrounds staff the need of some 49,000 long-term care facilities that include assisted living and nursing homes. The long-term care system has literally become a culture of one at risk population taking care of another at risk population. When our support needs place our financial security at risk, our elders sacrifice their remaining resources, their home, their savings and income to acquire a residence in one of America's elder institutional living environments. And, that is where they die.

If we had a choice, wouldn't we rather be financially stable, have services provided on our terms, live and die in familiar circumstances and have an environment that invites the companionship, closeness, warmth and intimacy of family and friends.

The world of living things is built on well-documented rules. We know that thriving produces positive emotional consequences and is a function of being in control. We also know that having our world ordered and delegated to us produces loss of control. Common to the comfort, experience and circumstances of civilization is the production of livelihood, a process that results in specific economic consequences that enhance the ability to make choices. In fact, being in control is the soul of quality of life.

Elder LifeCare Foundation respects the values that promote self-control and rejects processes and social systems that rob control in favor of systematic disciplined delegation that makes dependency the centerpiece of aging. Social dependency is built on the idea that as a function of age determined groups, there are pre-ordained expectations. At age 65, we are expected to retire. From ages 20 to 65 we work, from 5 to 18 we are in school and prior to age five many of us are in day care.

On the macro scale, successful societies have built an economic system that is replete with success measured by livelihood sustaining capital. ELF believes that a healthy alternative to social planning and loss of control is to harness the power and energy of the capital markets that can enhance quality of life. While building meaningful social opportunity for Elders, the interest of the capital markets can be sustained by realistic growth incentives that result in success for all. Elders can be released from the prison of central planning, companies can realize capital returns sufficient to maintain their continued interest in efforts to provide essential financing and a private sector advocacy foundation can access the resources to release the potential.