Event Details

Professor Rose Gilroy from Newcastle University will be talking about developing housing and housing policies concerning older people's housing issues.

Housing should be at the heart of any conversation about ageing. However, in the present time, housing has become a deep rupture in the inter-generational contract. Stoked by the media but with emergent findings from pilot research, there is anxiety from older people about their grandchildren’s housing futures and hostility from younger people about older people continuing to occupy family housing. Should older owners move to retirement communities?

Waves of research on loneliness and the increasing view that this is an older people’s issue have also suggested that retirement housing is a silver bullet that alleviates both social isolation and loneliness. Does it?

Drawing on more than 20 years research and involvement in older people’s housing issues that has led to the creation of the Future Homes Alliance, Rose Gilroy explores the inter-relationship between housing and well-being and explores how our housing could be better at promoting independence and placing people, not just older people, centrally as their own designer of support.