Sustainable Living Environment in Retirement Villages: What Matters to Residents?

Abstract

The elderly population people in Australia is growing rapidly as the result of existing population aging and lower birth rates. The steady increase in an ageing population has been regarded as a looming crisis for Australia, particularly how to house and care for older people. As a viable accommodation option, retirement villages can enhance the independence, choice and quality of life for older people. Nevertheless, the current Australian retirement village industry fail to meet the unique housing requirements of potential residents mainly in terms of affordability, environmental friendliness and social life-style. Our prior studies have demonstrated that retirement village developers need to provide sustainable living environment for their residents, whose social, economic and environmental needs of sustainability should be fully addressed. However, it will not be achieved unless a thorough understanding of retirement village residents’ preference towards various features of sustainable living environment can be obtained.

The aim of this paper is to explore the retirement village residents’ perceptions of a sustainable living environment through a broad questionnaire survey. A total of 25 sustainability features, which were grouped into social, environmental and economic categories were ranked by respondents based on the importance to their daily life. Based on 65 responses from ten retirement villages in Brisbane, the independent living, public transportation accessibility, affordable living were identified as the most important, whereas the religious & spiritual support and capital gain sharing were least likely to be preferred. Understanding the underlying implications of older adults’ preference regarding those sustainable living environment features is essential in enhancing the sustainable development of the senior housing industry in general and the retirement village industry in particular. It is hoped that findings of this study will contribute towards the management and development of sustainable retirement villages, which will eventually lead to the improvement of the quality of life (QoL) for older people.

Keywords: Retirement village; Sustainability perception; Older people; Australia