Best Ideas For Age-Friendly Cities
When respondents are asked to pick the one idea that they think would make cities and towns more age friendly, the following list emerges:
It is clear increased home care services wins this measure by a large margin followed by a range of municipal planning amenities, which would indicate personal services are more important to members than infrastructure.
CARP Age-Friendly Cities Index™
Respondents were asked five questions which touch on the key areas of concern spelled out in the WHO Guidebook to Age-Friendly Cities. These dealt with ease of:
• Overall life in respondent’s town
• Using transit
• Obtaining low-cost housing
• Being a pedestrian
• Accessing health care and home services
All respondents were asked to think of their town, or the nearest town, and relate these ease of use questions to “older people”. Questions used a four point semantic scale ranging from 4 equal to very easy to 1 equal to not at all easy.
To derive the CARP Age-Friendly Cities Index™, we subtract the bottom two negative responses from the top two positive responses to yield an index score on each attribute. Index scores are summed across attributes to yield a Total Index Score.
Below are shown the Age-Friendly Indices for 17 major Canadian cities:
Note: Whereas the “All Cities” total corresponds to the total for all respondents who lived in one of the 18 cities listed in the poll.
“Total” corresponds to the total for everyone who answered the poll.
Peterborough, Winnipeg and Montreal score significantly higher than other cities for their ease of life, and this is primarily due to affordable housing. Victoria also receives a high score, but housing is more problematic there.
Affordable housing is a challenge in every city shown, except Peterborough and Montreal, and this brings average scores down. Calgary and Kelowna score significantly worse than other cities primarily for their lack of transit, affordable housing and pedestrian amenities.
Respondents in cities give higher scores for their homes than rural or town residents, primarily because of access to public transit.
More than 2300 CARP ActionOnline readers responded to the poll. The margin of error for a sample this size is plus or minus 2.2%, 19 times out of 20. That is, if you asked all readers of CARP ActionOnline who respond to surveys the identical questions, their responses would be within 2%, either up or down, of the results shown here, 95% of the time.
Keywords: seniors, housing, transit
