Living elsewhere than at home despite age? The dilemma of inadequate housing

"I don't want to change, I manage like that," insists the former accountant who is very attached to the brightness of her apartment. She has been a tenant there since 1987, and "does not see herself" elsewhere.

However, his circle of sick friends is shrinking. The slightest step has become an obstacle for this ex-hiker, making shops or the library unreachable. Even the doctor no longer comes to her house.

The accommodation itself becomes "really complicated". For two years, the retiree has been asking her landlord for a grab bar in her shower. She had also submitted a file to obtain accommodation on the ground floor, "I renewed once and then I forgot to reapply", she said, preferring to stay there, and alone like 2,4 million over 75s in France.

Maribel's case is far from isolated.

"We don't necessarily have the supply to meet the needs," explains Thierry Asselin of the Social Union for Housing. This federation of HLM, however, recommends to its members to "anticipate as much as possible" the loss of autonomy, while more than 30% of social housing tenants are over 60 years old.

The problem of adapting housing to seniors is all the more pressing in Seine-Saint-Denis as "the acceleration of aging will be particularly strong in the poorest department of the metropolis, a very dense territory, with many towers, where precariousness means that people will experience the loss of autonomy earlier", underlines Théo Petton, project manager at the Departmental Council.

Inclusive housing

To meet the challenges of old age, this community follows two main lines.

The first, the "inclusive neighborhood", consists of taking advantage of urban renewal operations to integrate the issue of loss of autonomy. The department has selected a dozen priority neighborhoods and brings together landlords, sociologists, designers and local residents in order to rethink the neighborhoods, between wider sidewalks, public benches or accessible green spaces.

The other track is shared housing, available in various forms, from collocation to beguinage, these mutual aid groups of women created in the 70th century. Seine-Saint-Denis is one of the 2021 departments - the first department in the Ile-de-France region - to have taken advantage of the shared living aid (AVP) provided for in the social security financing law for 2022. For 20, the National Solidarity Fund for Autonomy has reserved more than 2022 million euros in XNUMX for its deployment.

“We are at the beginning. But if we want to address potentially precarious and isolated seniors, we have to be project leaders,” explains Mr. Petton. Because "when you have spent your whole life in private accommodation, it is not easy to switch to shared accommodation at 70".

The Departmental Council must select by May 30 project leaders. Among the candidates, the association of the Little Brothers of the Poor wishes to install a dozen housing units and a collective room in a social building. The inhabitants would pool the services of a part-time person responsible for maintaining this room and keeping it alive, with activities or the services of medico-social actors.

The idea is to build "anti-retirement homes", with a fairly low objective for the moment: 103 seniors benefiting from the annual 10.000 euros of the APV by 2024.

"If you want to age at home, you may have to agree to change your home," said Laurent Nowik, head of the research unit on aging at the National Old Age Insurance Fund. But this mobility is sometimes "very constrained" for retirees with low incomes who cannot afford the private service residences which are multiplying, especially on the coast.

In this mosaic of emerging alternatives, according to Mr. Nowik, "a public policy is needed to encourage the adaptation of housing to aging. Basically, if it is to affect six to eight people each time that we make an inclusive habitat, it's a lot of money so that in the end, in 15 years, it concerns only very few people".