May 31, 2008

County mulls baby boomer housing needs

Officials bracing for influx of retirees by 2030

By Tim Simmers / Bay Area News Group

As the first surge of baby boomers began retiring earlier this year, the fact hit home that this huge demographic bulge is about to change San Mateo County dramatically.

By the year 2030, nearly a third of all residents in the county will be 60 or older. One out of four will be 65 or older.

Where are they going to live? How are they going to get their needs met? How are they going to get around to the doctor, pharmacy or library, especially with no end in sight to soaring gas prices?

These boomers are the people who protested the war in Vietnam, fought for equal rights, tried to save the whales and invented the Internet and computers, and they're not about to sit around playing shuffleboard as they age. They want to be close to cultural amenities and services.

That's why nearly 300 local residents, community leaders and politicians met Friday at the San Mateo County Event Center to start developing a housing and transportation plan for the demographic shift.

Nobody's trying to reinvent the wheel. They're out to create "Livable communities for successful aging," which was the theme of the conference.

The ideas so far are not brand-new. They're a continuation of the push to create transit-oriented housing communities that lie close to bus and rail lines along El Camino Real. These apartment-condominium communities also need to be near grocery stores, laundries, recreation, medical offices, bookstores and other community services aging people need to live.

Part of the dramatic shift coming countywide involves more ethnic diversity among seniors. Today, two-thirds of San Mateo County's residents over 65 are white. That will drop to 48 percent in 2030, as Latino and Asian/Pacific Islander groups age.

The goal of the transit-oriented housing push is to cut traffic congestion and get people walking more, group leaders said. And with such diversity, the leaders say the search is on for developers who don't throw up cookie-cutter housing.

"We don't want to say everybody has to live in the same way," said Dena Belzer, principal at Strategic Economics and the event's keynote speaker. "But we need walkable neighborhoods, and options."

Belzer pointed out that people who live within a half-mile of transit lines are five times more likely to walk to those spots.

But there's still plenty of resistance among residents to transit-oriented communities.

"There's not a lot of good examples, so lots of folks are fighting it," said Belzer. "(Cities) have set the bar low, letting developers make money and get in and out. The cities need to set the bar higher."

Some of those transit-oriented communities mentioned as being decent by participants included the Crossroads complex on El Camino Real in San Bruno near BART, and the condominiums built on former Bay Meadows property in San Mateo near Caltrain. Other similar complexes exist in Redwood City near CalTrain, and near the BART stations in Colma and Daly City. There are also transit-oriented complexes planned for Millbrae near the rail line and BART station.