A house –whether made of branches and mud or cement and brick– is that safe and familiar place that no one would want to leave. David Byrne joyfully sang it: "Home is where I want to be". That's why it's not surprising that, according to the study Aging at home. Better in the village or in the city?, conducted by sociologist Irene Lebrusán Morillo in collaboration with the "la Caixa" Social Observatory, 96.4% of older people prefer to age in their homes. The problem is that living longer and longer is a fairly recent phenomenon and many old houses are not prepared for this new scenario.
The study indicates, for example, that more than 5 million people over 65 years old in Spain live in buildings with accessibility problems, which makes it difficult for them to participate in social life and even to be attended to in case of emergency. Another 3 million do not have heating and 431,818 people do not even have running water. The conditions of a home and the physical and mental health of its inhabitants are closely related throughout life, but even more so in old age. So the motto is simple: healthy homes for healthy aging.
Furthermore, the report reveals that homes in small towns (first place), due to having a wider range of solidarity forms of access to housing, and those in large cities (second place), due to benefiting from greater measures to combat substandard housing, are the ones that meet the best conditions. It is in medium-sized municipalities where the elders of the tribe have it most difficult: no less than 37.1% of elderly people in extreme residential vulnerability live there.
This does not mean that older people should abandon their homes, those refuges where they have lived all their lives, and move to the village. What it means is that those homes that do not guarantee minimum habitable conditions must be improved. That telephone lines must be installed where there are none, elevators instead of steep stairs, ensuring that each house has at least one private toilet, and repairing buildings in poor condition to be able to live an autonomous and quality old age. Because, as Le Corbusier said –for whom building was giving the human being its shell–, the house must be the case of life, the machine of happiness.
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