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To start with: All forms of density, and especially suburban infill density, have an important role in supporting ageing in place.

Denser neighbourhoods can give older people more options to downsize into housing that’s accessible, low maintenance, more affordable to run, close to the services and public amenity that are (should be) enabled by density, and allows them to stay in neighbourhoods they know. Diversifying Australia’s historically homogenous suburban built form is essential to support ageing in place. This is density at a neighbourhood level rather than just a building level - also impacting the design and delivery of streets and public realm, and of transport and social infrastructure.

Ageing in place is deeply connected to the Institute’s focus on density done well.

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But there's another thing from my research I wanted to weave in.

I completed my PhD with the supervision of Tony Dalton, a long-time housing researcher. Amongst his research, he investigated how homes actually get built, taking seriously the people, firms, institutions, and working practices involved in production. The housing we end up with is shaped by those industry practices. This is the tricky meso-level in between a technology or design solution (gestures small), and the operation of planning / economic levers in response to macro-economics (gestures wide).

If you look at Tony’s publications, he has recently applied this focus to understand housing industry response to Circular Economy strategies. When I met him a decade ago he was studying volume housebuilding, and mapping out its construction through a complex network of contractors that are increasingly fragmented, specialised, repetitive, and how that process leads to longer construction timelines, cost associated with such an enormous list of poorly or well coordinated specialisations, and therefore systemic resistance to design or sustainability or technical change.

It’s the practice of ‘Making housing’: ways of doing things that grew from unique historical circumstances and were then incrementally rebuilt over and over. It’s an open system, constantly reproduced through these everyday activities, so change can be slow, bumpy and incremental.

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My research built on that way of understanding housing, not simply as a rational response to economic and demand drivers, but a historical, geographical, political, human activity. I developed a case study of the retirement housing industry, talking to providers to understand this sub-sector. Made up of small and large companies, for-profit and not-for-profit, from property development, health and charity backgrounds, a mixture of groups, people, actions, relations, beliefs. All involved in making housing. Not only that, but getting involved in the practices of care, in the business of old age. My central finding was that in doing this they were also shaping what are accepted as the problems and solutions of old age.

They constructed a vivid image of the ideal resident that fit pre-existing assumptions of what a ‘good’ old age is, and what a ‘good’ or normal pathway from independence to care via housing should look like.

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My pitch is: just as that housing sector is shaping beliefs about old age, our wider construction and housing industry is always, daily, involved in shaping beliefs about all life stages.

Doing density well requires us to confront our biases about taken-for-granted pathways between housing forms through the life stages. The traditional assumed housing pathway from rental to first home to family home to downsized home, does not acknowledge Australian diversity, affordability pressures, imminent workforce upheaval, climate change upheaval, resultant economic and social upheaval, solo and inter generational living, and the specificities and shape of our cities. We need a collective mindset opening about what normal or good housing pathways are across the spectrum of life stage and affordability. We know what good high density dwelling design looks like (gestures small), we know there are significant economic headwinds (gestures wide), what can change is the meso level, where innovation in financial models, tenure arrangements, construction practices can have real impact on the diversity, longevity, affordability and sustainability of housing and its cities.

Diversity, openness to tenure models, but no matter the typology quality in denser neighbourhoods for the long term.

When I started my research almost a decade ago I wanted to study how the housing industry (my industry) was responding to the big demographic and social changes known as the ageing population.

I knew housing, I knew nothing about ageing. Suddenly it was everywhere in my life, in everything I read - research papers, but also fiction, news, algorithmically generated click bait, wrapped up in my own experience of leaving the elastic end of elder millennial youth.

This is frequency bias  - the sudden reveal of a previously invisible form once you first sense its edges. But my instinct when I began the research was that ageing was in fact largely invisible until forced to look it in the face. Although humans have given a lot of thought over the ages to questions of life and death, ageing is thinly theorised; existing as either economic policy problem or private personal experience.

We are lacking useful philosophies of old age.

Despite this lack, preparation for old age is a dominant practical driver throughout our lives whether we like it or not. Woven into the structures and patterns of working and family life. Knotted into our housing system, underpinning the idealised home-ownership pathway that is now wobbling and fracturing as more people rent for longer. Old age is a motivator and anchor for financial, family, social and geographical life decisions. A lifetime of building the buffers of a good old age. If I have a job, buy a house, save for retirement, have a family, nurture friendships, look after my health… I’ll be ok, right? Well yes, but maybe no.

In this passage a falsehood that the author, Miranda July, unravels: That the first half of life is all possibility and agency, and that ageing ends the same way for everyone. That the second part of life no longer has surprises.

Preparing for an unknown future is the grip and release of control, embracing intention and chance, an act of both hope and fear. It requires us to, directly or subconsciously, imagine our own old age without guarantees: What we want, how we desire the texture of our daily lives, what we feel compelled to seize now and risk paying double later, what we are prepared to sacrifice now, and what we fear may happen to us beyond our control. Because regardless of the buffers built, the trajectory of old age, like life but amplified, is both hopeful and precarious.

Studying retirement housing

When you do a PhD the trick is to have a big topic, and then to find the smallest possible kernel to pin it down and contain it to 200 pages. And that is why my interests in housing and ageing found overlap in Victoria’s retirement villages.

Retirement housing has a big cultural footprint. Retirement villages are a vivid subject of human and social stories like the film that is tonight’s feature. Why is the retirement village so fascinating to writers and film-makers?

• Because it’s interior is somewhat secret, guarded by gated entry permitting only a certain guest-list, and we fill the unknown vessel with our own personal fantasy and phantoms?

• Because phrases like ‘God’s waiting room’ are an unnerving framing of human existence?

• Because we want to scratch the vivid vision presented - of smiles and group activities, maybe because we sense that this manicured image of retirement papers over other realities of old age, and because the distance between these brightened and shadowed perceptions is a disconcerting uncanny valley?

• Because we are holding our breath, worried that any minute the tissue paper hiding the creases of life is going to tear?

• Because with a jolt we experience our own judgements about the lives of old age, judgement of our future selves: that will be me / that will never be me.

Regardless of this ripe ground for imagination and story, retirement villages are a marginal housing choice in Australia, even as our local industry has worked hard to replicate the growth they saw in places like Florida.

It is a physical and social infrastructure that is a direct response to the identified ‘problems’ of old age. Retirement housing is a pathway to downsizing to low-maintenance ease, a curated community and buffer against loneliness, the efficient delivery of support. It is an urban form specifically developed to support a good old age.

I talked to and interviewed the folk who were building, operating, marketing, selling and designing retirement housing around Melbourne. This is an unexpectedly diverse industry, with small family-run businesses, big stock exchange listed property developers, and the not-for-profit sector. They are building different physical forms; single-storey units in the suburbs, luxury apartments in the city, mobile units in fringe suburban and regional areas. In this industry there are healthcare providers building housing, and housing providers getting involved in the delivery of care. And all of them are, through practical actions, shaping what is possible or expected of a ‘good old age’.

And, talking to the industry reps, it was often extremely uncertain exactly what they thought their product was, and exactly who they were selling it to.

There were conflicting images conjured up as they talked about their residents. Retirement villages are defined and marketed as “over-55s” but the average age of residents in Australia is over 80.

The third age and the shadow of the fourth age

As a society we define the collective social imaginaries of old age. These are the images, stories and beliefs that mould assumptions about what old age is, or what it should be. And they underpin the development of practices, products and policy.

We make imaginaries of the third age. This is a time of retirement, comfort, fulfilment. A continued independence. Ideas of ‘active ageing’, ‘successful ageing’, and ‘positive ageing’ are third age concepts and self-help book titles; concepts that put agency and responsibility into the hands of the empowered individual. The evolution of the definition of the ‘third age’ is tied to historically-bound narratives of the baby boomers as a uniquely wealthy and powerful cohort, and to governments’ retreat from care and promotion of market solutions instead.

While the third age is seen as the powerful continuation of independent life, the fourth age which follows it is the opposite. A time of dependence and frailty.

The problem is that these social imaginaries translate ambiguity and diversity into fixed, communicable, singular, simplified, one-dimensional caricatures of the third age, and opposing images of the fourth age. It tends to positive and negative extremes while ignoring the uneven experiences that are the reality.

Another problem: Expectations and veneration of personal agency transfer responsibility for the costs and choices of old age onto the empowered individual. So, what is successful ageing, what is positive ageing, and what is agency in the fourth age of dependence, when third age independence has been so firmly outlined as the singular image of a good old age? The status granted to this particular understanding of agency has consequences for how the needs and desires of the fourth age are realised in narratives, systems and care.

Another problem: The transition between independence and dependence is complex and unique, it can be gradual, layered, messy or very quick and shocking. Not a clear demarcation, nor the ‘smooth transition’ from one to the other – not the myth of the third ager incrementally adding more and more services to buffer their independence and somehow, through their own self-vigilance, dodge the dependency of the fourth age entirely.

Defying negative stereotypes about ageing is empowering. But a third age / fourth age binary is harmful as a philosophy of old age.

Philosophies of old age

Philosophy can tend to edit out the everyday things that matter, becoming fixed wisdom or untethered introspection, rather than a practical way of understanding the world we collectively and continuously shape.

The idea that ageing is a personal and individualised experience that is left unmentioned or detached from our real selves, is damaging. Old age and the meanings and experiences of ageing are shaped by material and social conditions; they are anything but purely personal. Positive ageing does not exist independently of the vectors of wealth, society, and housing. Housing - its design, form, ownership, geography - can help enable diverse choices in old age, or it can lead to unbearably narrow options.

In a practical philosophy of ageing, housing is brought tightly in as an essential infrastructure of care.

Before I started researching housing and ageing, I was certain that old age, especially for women, existed in a philosophical void. It was something that happened in private, hidden. But researching ageing reveals powerful and useful concepts about identity, need, choice, agency, care, human relations, economics, justice, loss, equity, self and society – as necessary in the study of housing as the study of old age. A philosophy of old age holds a mirror to questions of how we are in the world and how we interact and depend on each other.

Housing into ageing, and ageing into housing.

Back to precarity.

The logical response to fears of a precarious situation is the construction of a rigid anchor to secure against it. But security is a false aim in this world. Brief lives crinkle on connected axes outside of our control. What would it mean for philosophies of old age and infrastructures of care to accept fragility in life’s buffers? Challenging the life-long pursuit of an intergenerational chain of property accumulation. Daylighting practices of dependence in family and medical models. Centring care in urban forms, streets, public transit. Acknowledging that individualised security is the wrong method for safeguarding positive ageing. The wafer-thin boundary that protects (natural) fragility from (dangerous) precarity is not constructed of individual security but of social networks and interdependencies that hold us flexibly and adapt through change and crisis.

As a society we define the collective social imaginaries of old age that underpin policy, products and practices. These are the images, stories and beliefs that mould assumptions about what old age is, or what it should be. We make imaginaries of the third age - a time of retirement, comfort, fulfilment – and of the fourth age – a time of increased dependence and frailty. These social imaginaries translate ambiguity and diversity into fixed, communicable, singular, simplified, one-dimensional caricatures of the third age, and opposing images of the fourth age, while ignoring uneven experiences and the transition between.

Before I started researching housing and ageing, I was certain that old age, especially for women, existed in a philosophical void. It was something that happened in private, hidden and thinly theorised. But old age is anything but personal. Positive ageing is not an individual act, it does not exist independently of the vectors of wealth, society, and housing.

Housing. It is impossible to consider old age without also talking about housing. Housing is central to people’s physical and emotional wellbeing as they age. It also has a role in social and economic policy. The Australian housing solution of mass homeownership is embedded in culture and in policy that supports and subsidises this tenure. Homeownership is the ‘fourth pillar’ of Australia’s retirement income insurance (joining the age pension, mandatory and voluntary superannuation). Homeownership is a solution to providing an affordable and secure old age because, by retirement and with outright ownership assumed, housing costs are minimal and households can live frugally on a state-provided pension that can be kept low relative to other countries.

Yet, the homeownership pillar is wobbling. Increasing diversity and disparity in contemporary housing pathways, through the life course and for different generations, unsettle the foundations of this solution.

A crisis of housing affordability and changing (delaying, declining) patterns of home ownership are likely to limit choices for younger generations (X, Y and Z) as they reach retirement, as well as for current retirees whose housing histories have not followed widely assumed norms. More are renting across all age groups, including low-income older Australians, and disproportionately older women. Housing and ageing are deeply entwined - in unsteady social structures, in concomitant quality of life, and in the stories we tell about baby boomers and their assumed housing wealth.

The ageing population (demand), and assumptions about wealthy baby boomers (capacity to fund demand) motivate the housing industry (along with other industries) to engage with the business of old age.

The retirement housing industry provides an example

Retirement communities (both ‘villages’ and apartments) are a housing outcome that is, by definition, a market response to needs and choices of older people. This industry’s constituent companies operate within overlapping property and aged care interests. They are currently reconsidering what was historically a clear distinction between retirement housing (for the third age) and aged-care services (for the fourth age), motivated by growing demand as their residents age, and by a major transformation of aged care towards a market-led system.

Industry representatives describe retirement housing as a quality-of-life solution, offering appropriate housing to support residents ageing in place, and a ready-made community to counter social isolation. They describe it as part of the solution to reducing the growing cost of the ageing population, providing relief for government budgets by delaying entry to aged care, utilising the private sector and the personal wealth of retirees, and building targeted local community infrastructure. And, they describe it as a housing supply solution, setting out a path to downsizing and more efficient use of existing housing stock in growing cities. Concerns about old age and care are weaponised in the familiar and politicised housing solution of more supply.

The process by which  industry groups reproduce and gradually transform social imaginaries of old age is circular; ideas, discourses, beliefs and norms underpin social structures and shape the commercial housing-and-ageing outcomes produced, which in turn reinforce those norms.

Three vignettes illustrate housing industry engagement in shaping beliefs about old age.

1. Shaping a ‘good’ old age

Industry actors reproduce the imaginary of the third age in marketing, in the way they talk about housing-and-ageing, and in the products they develop. They (along with the rest of us) collectively construct social imaginaries of what a ‘good’ old age is, layering personal perspectives, pre-existing beliefs, commercial interests, and dominant cultural ideologies including noisy narratives about the ageing population and baby boomers’ housing wealth.

In the third age imaginary of an independent, healthy, social old age, retirees have the resources and agency to make individual choices to meet their desires and needs. The industry’s political and consumer messaging claims that by making good housing choices older Australians can enrich their quality of life, use their housing wealth efficiently (for example by downsizing or through reverse mortgages), and ultimately save government money by reducing their later life healthcare costs. A ‘good’ old age for all.

Meanwhile, a cultural obsession with autonomy and choice marginalises ‘other’ experiences of old age. The focus on the third age can push the subsequent fourth age into the shadows. This perspective treats dependence as a clinical and individualised need, rather than as an essential aspect of relations between social beings throughout life. It also defines the third and fourth ages as binary conditions, when the reality is that the transition from independent to dependent is diverse, uneven, susceptible to exogenous events and luck, and mediated by social buffers (wealth).

Reinforcing a third age / fourth age binary, and a narrow imaginary of what a ‘good’ old age is, limits outcomes that can serve increasingly diverse older Australians. Third age aspirations will not adequately meet fourth age challenges.

2. Positioning housing (beyond design)

Urban and built outcomes reproduce and reinforce accepted views of third and fourth ages. Professionals involved in the production of housing, and especially in the development of retirement housing, embrace established positions (hopes) about housing and old age:

• That supportive housing delays the need for aged care, prolonging the third age.

• That supportive housing enables aged care (when it is needed) to be delivered through home-care services, limiting the need for residential aged care.

• That housing-and-care outcomes can match changing housing-and-care needs, creating a gradual transition to increased care.

The belief that changing housing and care needs can be matched efficiently by housing and care supply is the myth of a seamless transition. This perspective is a myth because it doesn’t acknowledge that supply of services (and housing) is locally uneven, nor that there are many emotional, social, financial and cultural barriers to changing housing through the life course.

Because the structural problems of housing-and-ageing are knotted and complex, physical design solutions (accessible homes, smart homes, universal design, retirement villages, and innovative precincts that co-locate aged care with other multi-generational uses) are often seen (promoted) as panacea. Supply and design solutions provide a practical course of action for policy makers, non-contentious and with few policy trade-offs, and more tangible and immediate than addressing structural demand-side and supply-side issues of housing affordability, taxation and welfare.

The benefits of designing for longevity through universal design are glaringly self-evident; this should be embedded in all apartment, house and urban design. But, design will never provide a solution to the social problems of housing-and-ageing.

3. Redefining care

Aged care policy and philosophy – defining who provides care and how - has transformed during the past century, from a private family activity, to a professional nursing service often delivered in institutions, to a range of care services that can be purchased in a market.
The topic of aged care registered internationally in political agendas in the late 1970s, during the crisis of the welfare state that questioned the sustainability of state-supported systems. The ageing population ‘problem’ is a political, social, ideological and economic construction of resources and scarcity, rather than a purely demographic calculation. An ideology of individualism, personal responsibility, small government, and privatisation of services has supported major recent reforms that aimed to de-link care from accommodation and encourage ageing in place; to give older individuals more power in choosing their care; and to encourage private market involvement.

‘Care’ is a wide spectrum of services. Some is regulated and funded as clinical aged care. Care also includes services that simply make living more supported. Some of these are government funded, via a needs assessment and waiting list, but they can also be purchased privately in a growing care service market. The aged care industry actively redefines care as an individual service and product. Morphologies such as retirement housing can be infrastructures of positive ageing that support access to this wider, limitless, definition of care, for older Australians who can afford it. As providers pursue services that are profitable and that attract wealthy retirees, choices and support will widen for some.

There are risks and potentials of redefining care in this way, and they follow the creases of uneven housing wealth.

Longer and more diverse lives mean there is cause for optimism. However, there are tensions between a global ageing population ‘problem’ and the individualised uncertainties of growing old. The risks of the enmeshed housing-and-ageing system are that property market conditions challenge the equity and resilience of the intergenerational social compact and undermine the wellbeing of older people. Housing wealth underpins unequal experiences of old age, yet the housing behaviours of older individuals are not to blame, and nor will they correct these imbalances.

The idea that ageing is a personal and individualised experience is damaging. Old age is shaped by material and social conditions; it is anything but purely personal. To make progress in supporting an ageing Australia, practical philosophies of old age can better centre housing systems and outcomes, and reconceptualise them as essential infrastructures of care beyond design and market responses.

First, a brief history of retirement housing, through four phases:

Phase 1: Emergence (1860-1950)

In 19th-century Australia, housing and financial support for older people was provided by family, or by mutual or friendly societies. Friendly societies pursued benevolence over charity, allocating funds to those members judged to be deserving. Mutual societies and community groups developed and leased housing to older Australians of modest means as part of their wider social mission. Growth was slow until after World War I. However, it was significant in the longer term because it established not-for-profit organisations as retirement housing providers able to leverage reputation and land holdings in subsequent historical phases.

Phase 2: Expansion (1950-1975)

The federal government reshaped retirement housing after World War II by funding increased provision as part of a suite of post-war social policy measures. The Aged Persons Homes Act 1954 (Cth) provided capital to not-for-profits for housing that enabled ‘independent living’ for pensioners of modest means, to be constructed on land provided by local government and community groups, often supplemented by resident contributions. Through this program, not-for-profit groups constructed independent living units (ILUs) between 1954 and 1986, mostly small clusters of one-bedroom units.

However, subsidies were increasingly used to fund residential aged care. Like many liberal industrialised nations, by 1975 Australia had a highly institutionalised and subsidised aged-care system. In response to the growing cost of aged care, Australia joined much of the world in de-institutionalising aged care in the late 1970s and expanding the use of home care services. The federal government wound back universal welfare and direct involvement in older persons’ housing.

Phase 3: Growth of a cottage industry (1975-2000)

Debt-free home ownership at retirement (the ‘fourth pillar’ of retirement insurance) and appreciating house prices introduced the option for many retirees to ‘downsize’ within the market, releasing funds for lifestyle and care costs. Not-for-profits first developed the resident-funded model in the 1970s, responding to localised demand, to reducing and ceasing government subsidies, and to growing financial capacity of home-owning retirees. The long-term lease tenure model encouraged retirees to move by reducing the initial cost of entry and by offering benefits of secure community living. The residents purchased a leasehold with a lump sum that was below market rate, paid ongoing maintenance costs, and shared in the costs of refurbishment, resale and capital gains of the housing at the end of their tenure. The intricacies of the model evolved incrementally in an ad-hoc way during the 1980s through various contractual arrangements.

The resident-funded model became an attractive proposition for businesses entering the industry in the early 1980s. These included not-for-profit and for-profit aged-care providers who added resident-funded retirement housing to their offer, both to address community need for small single-person units and to connect a stream of future customers to their core aged care service. House builders and family businesses also entered the industry – for example early industry pioneers Ian Ball and Zig Inge, who were small-scale suburban house builders prior to becoming retirement housing developers and operators. Through the 1980s and 1990s, private-sector providers differentiated their product from the modest ILUs that had come before them by increasing dwelling size and amenity to appeal to more affluent retirees. Retirement villages had already matured in the United States (Sun City opened in Arizona in 1960) and Australian providers sought to imitate the success of the ‘55-plus aspirational play’, inaccurately assuming the local industry would echo the market in the United States.

Phase 4: Entry of investment capital (2000-present)

In the 2000s, listed for-profit property development and aged-care service companies began to acquire existing retirement villages and to develop new villages. Much of the change and growth in the retirement housing industry since 2000 has been a result of these activities, characteristic of listed companies pursuing shareholder return. Large property development and investment companies entered the industry and grew their market by acquiring packages of both private and not-for-profit existing villages (and their contracts and residents). Retirement housing was attractive to property and investment companies for reasons beyond the straightforward aim of business operating profit. They sought exposure to the growing baby boomer market, viewed it as a ‘property play’ to accumulate well-located assets on their balance sheets and as tax-effective investments that could offset obligations in other diversified interests. Demand for their product is supported by the projected number of older Australians, and by rising property values (strengthening capacity to pay). Increased housing wealth means many operators have focused on well-off retirees (and high-value established suburbs) and have retreated from the industry’s early role in providing housing for older people of modest means.

Overview of the retirement village model

The profit for retirement community operators derives from the initial sale and subsequent rotation, or ‘churn’, of residents entering and exiting. A unique element of the resident-funded model is the deferred payment arrangement, known as the Deferred Management Fee (DMF). This sum is generally a percentage reflecting duration of residence, calculated upon exit from the retirement community and deducted from the unit sale price after the resident’s tenure. Residents therefore pay a lump sum at entry, a weekly or monthly maintenance fee, and a sum when they leave. The terms are managed by a range of historically complex and often unique contracts.

Central to the system is a ‘downsizing differential’ that encourages retirees to change their housing - generated through a cost differential (unlocking cash from the sale of the family home), and through support and amenity (attracting the resident through either ‘push’ or ‘pull’ factors of need or lifestyle).

Three stories about growth and change

1. Growth since the 1980s has overwhelmingly been in the private sector, with limited new contributions from the not-for-profit sector.

Government policy catalysed the post-war provision of ILUs. When subsidies from the Aged Persons Homes Act ceased in 1974, the continued construction of housing for older people of modest means became unviable for not-for-profits. Instead, many have become more business-like in their approach and have intentionally broadened their offer from serving older people with modest resources to also participating in the ‘premium’ market.

2. Village growth slowed and transformed in the early 2000s with the entry of listed for-profit companies.

The listed companies ‘cannibalised’ some of the villages developed by small-business providers, acting quickly and speculatively through acquisitions. Then, risk-averse and new to the operation of villages, they took time to assess the model’s performance, its return on investment and alignment with their consumer brands. The longer development times required to meet bigger yield expectations of large property developers also slowed new supply, and the 2008 Global Financial Crisis further limited new construction. The acquisitions of the 2000s were not an end to their buying and selling – retirement villages continue to be sold, bought, consolidated in investment moves.

3. Private and listed for-profit companies have grown a market of manufactured housing estates (MHEs).

MHEs are an evolution of the caravan park targeting the over-55s market. MHEs are not a new model, but new investors and operators have acquired, redeveloped and marketed these specifically for older people. Listed companies have grown the MHE subsector in Australia aggressively since the early 2000s. Companies identified an investment opportunity to accumulate land assets and lease them to a growing market of downsizing, home-owning households with a low net wealth. The tenure model (operators lease small lots of land for individually-owned relocatable homes) and cheap regional or urban-fringe land costs mean that capital and risks are lower and timeframes shorter than for standard village development.

Retirement housing companies and sub-sectors have continually redefined their offer. They establish their identity to align with a particular type of consumer and to differentiate themselves in relation to other providers. Industry representatives talk of their organisation’s identity as being ‘in their DNA’ - fundamental to how they operate and deliver their products and services. This identity is not static but is constantly being reproduced and reshaped.Retirement housing companies and sub-sectors have continually redefined their offer. They establish their identity to align with a particular type of consumer and to differentiate themselves in relation to other providers. Industry representatives talk of their organisation’s identity as being ‘in their DNA’ – fundamental to how they operate and deliver their products and services. This identity is not static but is constantly being reproduced and reshaped.

Built outcomes of retirement housing have transformed from clusters of small ILUs in the 1960s, to suburban villages with larger units and facilities in the 1980s and 1990s, and more recently new high-density retirement apartments and MHEs. Luxury retirement apartments and affordable manufactured housing are not innovations from the broadacre outcomes of the 1980s, but are variants of ‘business as usual’ industry practices. Their development is geographically segmented between the well-serviced inner ring of the capital city Melbourne and a poorly serviced suburban and peri-urban fringe. This urban segmentation challenges the ability to ‘age in place’ in some localities and locks choices and needs of old age to property market problems and solutions.

Retirement communities can be horizontal (‘broad-acre’) or vertical (apartments). Communities range from clusters of 6 homes to over 200 units. With greater scale comes expectation and capacity for expanded communal amenities. Supply of land and local household wealth makes development of certain housing outcomes more or less attractive in different localities.

Three stories about changing spatial arrangement and built form

1. Suburban villages: ubiquitous to marginal

As Melbourne grew in the post-war period, small-scale housebuilders built suburban housing in new greenfield developments. Retirement housing developed in the 1980s and 1990s followed this suburban house-building practice. Retirement villages comprising single-storey detached or semi-detached units in affordable, suburban-fringe locations suited the construction practices of small-scale operators. Providers built villages ‘just a little bit further out’, beyond the edge of recently established suburbs. The price differential between the family home and the new unit was large enough to entice retirees to downsize.

Communal amenities in retirement villages provide a further incentive to downsize. A pool, gym, spa, community lounge and garden are the ‘bare minimum’ expected as part of the value of downsizing to a retirement village rather than within the standard housing market. The residents’ in-going contribution and regular maintenance fee pays for the construction and maintenance of amenities. A large (fringe-suburban) plot of land is necessary to spatially accommodate amenities in villages, and to achieve the required number of residents to fund them.

Urban densification and changing consumer expectations of housing and retirement challenge the suburban greenfield retirement-village solution. Housing density increased in the suburban-housing market, the supply of greenfield land became constrained, and retirees’ expectations of floor area increased, along with their capacity to pay for it. Consequently, it has become more difficult for retirement housing providers to compete with volume housebuilders for affordable land in outer-suburban areas. Slimmer margins for retirement housing providers in the suburban fringe opens up these localities to competition from manufactured housing and makes retirement apartments in urban-infill locations a relatively more attractive proposition.

2. Retirement apartments: Developing density and selling service

The development of higher-density retirement apartments in the past decade reflects the aspirations of larger organisations (supply) and the capacity of retirees with housing assets in central well-serviced suburbs (demand). Two types of retirement housing providers have become involved in developing retirement apartments: established not-for-profits and listed, property-focused companies. The property-focused companies that entered the sector in the early 2000s seek land assets with dense development potential and they have the construction and funding capability for large projects. Established not-for-profits and care-focused providers develop retirement apartments that densify, and gentrify, the assets that they established as ILUs in the 1950s, or where they are co-located with aged-care facilities.

Retirement apartments feature a similar downsizing differential evident in the suburban villages model, transposed to the inner suburbs and reflecting higher prices and expectations of housing, lifestyle and service in retirement. Inner Melbourne’s housing prices increased tenfold in 25 years between 1993 and 2018, providing a cohort of home-owning retirees with significant housing wealth and the capacity to make choices about their accommodation. Higher-density living is increasingly accepted across all age groups as an alternative to the Australian legacy of suburban living, rather than as a transient housing choice reserved for younger people. Downsizing has never been simply about releasing housing wealth for retirement; it has also been an idea that retirees are redefining their daily lives to be easier while remaining connected to the social and cultural amenities central to their lifestyle.
Providers foresee the continued trajectory of greater service and amenity as part of the enticement to downsize, saying “it will be like living in a 5-star hotel.”

As universal and accessible design features gradually become standard in apartment design and customer expectations, the physical difference between apartments provided in the market and those operated as retirement living narrows.
Apartment developers will increasingly market and design in ways that attract the cohort of baby boomers. There are few barriers to developing and marketing apartments to downsizers within the broader housing market, outside of the special arrangements of the Retirement Villages Act. These would form a high-density urban variant of the ‘naturally occurring retirement communities’ (NORCs) that are common in the United States. Industry actors from outside of the retirement sector are also able to provide other retirement apartment differentiators, such as bespoke tenure (including through build-to-rent models) and access to care through a rapidly growing private personal services and care market.

3. Manufactured Home Estates (MHEs): Affordable housing for shareholder return

MHEs are more affordable than standard retirement villages because the providers have developed a unique model with three key features: an outer-suburban and regional land market (cheap land), cheap dwelling construction and a tenure arrangement whereby the resident owns the unit but leases the land it sits on, thus establishing eligibility for government income support payments which support the model’s viability.

Features of affordability have developed from the model’s caravan park legacy. MHEs are generally clusters of 30–60 homes with a community club house, located on suburban fringe and regional sites that are often poorly connected to public transport and community services. Modular housing is produced in factories and assembled above ground rather than on a slab foundation. The tenure model also follows the legacy of caravan parks; the resident purchases their movable home and rents the land by paying a site fee. Purchase of the unit requires payment of a lump sum, usually realised through the sale of a home, as banks do not offer mortgages for this depreciating asset. In-going residents are predominantly homeowners from suburbs where house price increases have been modest.  

The three necessary features of the MHE model – its tenure, house design and geography – all present challenges to ageing in place. The land rental model does not provide security of tenure, allowing the operator to change conditions of lease according to the (landlord-privileging) regulations of the Residential Tenancies Act. The policy definition of ‘movable’ or ‘relocatable’ housing does not reflect the built reality or the way that residents understand their (permanent) home. The resident owns rather than leases the unit so reselling is the responsibility of the resident. This can be a long process, often the resident feels financially locked into housing that is no longer appropriate. Physically, the dwellings are raised off the ground – necessitating steps – and are small, with minimum internal dimensions. Fringe suburban geography can limit walkability as well as access to support services, to social participation with the wider community, and to hospital and rehabilitation services after falls or illness.

While MHEs for people over 55 years provide shareholder returns and elicit enthusiasm among some companies within the industry, they are not a supportive housing solution for ageing Australians.

The consolidation that has shaped the industry direction since the early 2000s has narrowed rather than expanded the housing solutions being delivered.

New retirement housing models are not innovations but are shaped by a ‘business as usual’ property formula to calculate development costs and risks against the local demand implicit in appreciating house prices. Retirement housing choices, in both demand and supply, reflect broader property market dynamics and interests. Segmented housing outcomes link the ability of ageing Australians to access care, and their capacity to continue to participate in their wider community, to wealth and geography.

There are four geographical dimensions to inadequate housing choices for older people in Victoria: First, there are limited opportunities to downsize in rural and regional areas. Second, housing in well-serviced middle-ring areas is often homogenous and does not include diverse (and smaller) options for downsizing. Third, housing can be locally disconnected from community services. Fourth, there are few housing choices for older people in private rental in all locations.

What about solutions to address this last challenge, the seemingly intractable challenge of a growing proportion of older people who do not own their home? The simple answer is that this is an inevitable and foreseeable private market failure to fill a known gap in the interconnected housing-and-ageing system. Home ownership is entrenched in systems (pensions) of old age and public housing has been residualised over many years in Australia, limiting the capacity of both markets and policy to respond to the increase in the proportion of older households who are housed through the private rental market.

By developing retirement housing, health and care organisations engage in housing market dynamics, and property and house-building companies engage with care. During the past decade, retirement housing operators have reshaped their involvement in aged care, developing less clear distinctions between the needs, choices and solutions of the third age and fourth ages. Retirement villages were not historically developed as places of care. Yet, their residents are ageing. Retirement housing solutions have undergone a rhetorical recoding, reflecting ‘ageing in place’ expectations and the growth of market-led home aged care services. Providers have understood the ageing of the population as demographically assured demand and, as their resident populations age, see an opportunity to augment their property development interests with the business of care. (Chapter 6.1 in the thesis discusses this in more depth).

The retirement housing sector claims an economically important role in the business of downsizing and the business of looking after older Australians. Yet, this housing option and its up-take (remaining around 6–7 per cent of people over 65 years) has not changed appreciably in 30 years. The industry is waiting for disruption; either at a tipping point of innovation through engagement with care to serve an ageing baby boomer population, or  ‘stuck’ as a minor housing option.

Will the ageing of the baby boomer generation, understood as a demanding and discerning driver of market change, motivate the industry to develop new forms of housing, and new ways of buying it and using it to support a longer old age? And, will that innovation come from the companies that currently constitute the industry?

Three avenues of possible future innovation

1. Implementing more flexible ways of purchasing a lease

Some companies are already exploring this with pre-paid or pay-as-you-go options. These release the model from the rigidity of its deferred payment structure and challenge assumptions about housing ownership in later life; however, they are essentially contractual changes for the same product and the same customer. Innovative ownership models (including through government investment) can widen the customer attraction, broadening from a focus on the wealthiest retirees to the full and part pensioners currently served only by the MHE market.

2. Targeting a service offer to meet the needs and desires of ageing residents living longer in their homes.

Again, many companies are already expanding their involvement in service and care. And, again, this has tended to target the more profitable parts of the service and care market, pursuing wealthy baby boomer customers seeking a ‘five-star’ lifestyle. Reconceptualising housing-and-care services together as essential infrastructures of ageing can help us think about the interdependencies between finance, geography, design, service, labour, welfare and markets.

Both these avenues require government investment to expand the market and deepen the integration of care.

A third avenue:

3. Universal design and age-friendly cities

This is the obvious one - improving the design of new housing delivered in the general market, and improving urban environments that can support walkability, social connection, access to community services, and proximity to care providers. Housing and towns, once built, are fixed and long-lasting, so this change will be slow and gradual. We’d best do it now.