NORCs

What is a NORC?

A Naturally Occurring Retirement Community (NORC) is a geographic designation describing areas with a natural density of seniors. Since 2015, OpenLab has explored how NORCs might support aging-in-place, and this work has become its own multi-arm project: the NORC Innovation Centre.

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Jen Recknagel

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The Need

Throughout most of the 20th century, older adults were a fairly small proportion of the Canadian population, and most did not live in cities. Today, older Canadians represent the fastest growing segment of the population, and most live in major urban centres. In 2016, 4 million Canadian seniors (66 percent) live in census metropolitan areas, a number that has risen 21 percent from just five years earlier, and is expected to intensify over the next two decades as the seniors population doubles in size.

Sources

Canadian Institute on Healthcare Improvement. Seniors in Transition. Exploring Pathways Across the Care Continuum. CIHI (2019).

Government of Canada, S. C. Census Profile, 2016 Census - Toronto, City [Census subdivision], Ontario and Ontario [Province]. https://tinyurl.com/ycytk4u9

National Seniors Council. Report on the Social Isolation of Seniors, 2013-2014. https://www.canada.ca/en/national-seniors-council/programs/publications-reports/2014/social-isolation-seniors.html (2014).

Canadians want to age in place, and remain living independently in their homes for as long a possible. And yet some amount of support is needed to help them do so. The vast majority of older adults dread the prospect of living in institutional settings, such as long-term care homes, and there is insufficient capacity to accommodate them. For low- and middle-income Canadians, the high cost of retirement homes remain unaffordable to many.

These social and economic trends have given rise to a large number of naturally occurring retirement communities (NORCs), in particular high-rise buildings that house a large density of older adults. These are apartment buildings that were not originally built for seniors, but have become home to a high density of older adults due to multiple reasons: difficulty maintaining a single-family home on one’s own; higher than anticipated costs of living; and greater ease of mobility for aging bodies.

Nowhere is this phenomenon more apparent than in Toronto where, in the downtown core alone, there are now almost 500 high-rise apartment and condo buildings where at least 40 percent of the residents are seniors. A similar trend towards high-density living is happening in big cities like Vancouver, Montreal and Ottawa, where one in five seniors live in high rises.

We’re witnessing a pivotal shift in the way seniors live in this city. Suburban cul-de-sacs are giving way to towering slabs of concrete — ad-hoc retirement communities in the sky. This is reshaping the social and physical environments within which aging takes place, and poses some important questions about what liveable communities for seniors could look like over the coming decades.

Behind The Solution: Seniors Empowering Seniors

The Approach

Since 2015, the OpenLab team has been learning from and collaborating with seniors to understand how they practice aging in place in their communities and their hopes for what aging could be like. Our work in this space began with Aging Well: Senior Social Living, a research-through-storytelling project aimed at uncovering grassroots models of aging in place. The Aging Well research took a lead-user approach to explore and describe new models of senior living and supportive care. In 2020, OpenLab published the Vertical Aging: The Future of Aging in Place in Urban Canada report, an exploratory design project that presents 3 high-potential concept models that could shape the future of aging in place in urban Canada. The proposed models take the concept of NORCs and reimagines them within the context of the tech-driven world of today and the near future. This work reimagines aging in place with due consideration for enabling seniors to age in place with choice and dignity, and without losing sight of what it means to be human. Collectively, these projects have provided a strong foundation of information to inform future NORC projects.

The Multiple Design Solutions

The NORC Ambassadors Program aims to partner with senior residents to transform their high-rise NORC buildings into vibrant communities that support healthy aging in place. As part of the Program, senior residents form ‘aging in place’ groups, and the groups plan and facilitate increased connection and support between neighbours. The NORC Ambassadors Program is not trying to replicate the work of social service agencies or home care agencies; it aims to address other levels of support — ones often left out of seniors’ care, but equally important: meaningful social engagement, help with everyday living, and building inclusive communities.

The research and in-community senior-led aging in place work led to the idea and start of the NORC Innovation Centre (NIC). The NORC Innovation Centre builds on the years of research OpenLab has done on NORCs to further advance a 21st century model of integrated care in NORC buildings across Toronto by, and developing health, social, and technology interventions that support healthy aging. NIC takes advantage of the opportunity vertical NORCs offer through the co-location of seniors with high-needs.

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