Senior Co-Housing in the Netherlands: Benefits and Drawbacks for Its Residents

Abstract

Senior co-housing communities offer an in-between solution for older people who do not want to live in an institutional setting but prefer the company of their age peers. Residents of co-housing communities live in their own apartments but undertake activities together and support one another. This paper adds to the literature by scrutinizing the benefits and drawbacks of senior co-housing, with special focus on the forms and limits of social support and the implications for the experience of loneliness. Qualitative fieldwork was conducted in eight co-housing communities in the Netherlands, consisting of document analysis, interviews, focus groups, and observations. The research shows that co-housing communities offer social contacts, social control, and instrumental and emotional support. Residents set boundaries regarding the frequency and intensity of support. The provided support partly relieves residents’ adult children from caregiving duties but does not substitute formal and informal care. Due to their access to contacts and support, few residents experience social loneliness. Co-housing communities can potentially also alleviate emotional loneliness, but currently, this happens to a limited degree. The paper concludes with practical recommendations for enhancing the benefits and reducing the drawbacks of senior co-housing.

A Multi-Criteria Decision-Making Model for Evaluating Senior Daycare Center Locations

“…Experts are invited to rate the importance of each merit with respect to each strategic criterion using a five-level scale. The linguistic term and the triangular fuzzy number of each scale are: very high (7,9,9), high (5,7,9), medium (3,5,7), low (1,3,5), and very low (1,1,3). Experts' opinions are aggregated by the geometric mean approach, and the centroid method is applied to defuzzify the fuzzy numbers.…”

“…Some common long-term care service options are: home and community care, palliative or hospice care, board and care homes, assisted living (non-medical senior housing), subsidized senior housing (non-medical), and continuing care retirement communities (CCRCS) [1]. Policies aims to enable "aging in place" are present in many countries that encourage older people to remain in their community to face the challenge of an aging population [2,3]. Societal alienation experienced by seniors is correlated with health risks and negative well-being, and thus, increasing the support and empowerment of seniors so that they can proactively improve the quality of life for themselves and for other seniors around them is recommended [4].…”

Quality of Life: The Interplay between Human Behaviour, Technology and the Environment

“…In a special issue of the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health on "Quality of Life: The Interplay between Human Behaviour, Technology and the Environment", a total of eighteen papers [6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23] were recently published on different topics that are related to this subject matter.…”

“…Of the published papers, four papers [6][7][8][9] were on age-friendly environments, describing the relation of how the environment and technology influences people as they age. A total of seven papers [10][11][12][13][14][15][16] were published regarding how technology can support (older) people in their daily lives in various ways.…”

“…Rusinovic et al [8] presented a qualitative study on senior co-housing communities in The Netherlands. Such communities offer an in-between solution for older people who do not want to live in an institutional setting, but prefer the company of their age peers.…”