And the last of the articles!
Oct. 27th, 2010 12:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
Trying to Follow the Trail of Missing AIDS Patients
KISUMU, Kenya — The young woman perched on the edge of the bed in her tiny hut. She was 29 years old, an AIDS widow who supported herself by frying and selling potato fries by the side of the nearby road.
Yes, she acknowledged to Peter Ouma Mchembere, a young counselor from a local H.I.V./AIDS project, she hadn’t returned to the clinic for her antiretroviral medications in more than a year; no, she didn’t plan to come back anytime soon.
She disliked the drugs, she explained: “The first time I started taking them, I was having the feeling that my heart was pounding and I had no strength.” These days, she said, she chose to rely on prayer instead of medicine to give her strength so she could care for her two young children.
“It’s not bad to pray, but getting care is also important, because this is biological,” advised Peter, who works in Kisumu for Family AIDS Care and Education Services, or Faces. The organization is a joint clinical and research program of the Kenya Medical Research Institute and the University of California, San Francisco.
“It’s very painful,” Peter said to me after we left her home. “She has two kids and they’re at a tender age, and if she dies, who’ll take care of them?”
I was in Kisumu, the largest city in western Kenya, as both a journalist and a public health researcher from U.C. Berkeley. This scruffy but lively port of more than 300,000 people on the eastern shore of Lake Victoria is a regional hub for commerce, transient relationships and H.I.V. infection. About 15 percent of the adults in the region are believed to be infected.
At Peter’s clinic, as elsewhere in Africa, patients who have not come for their medications in recent months are considered to have defaulted from treatment. As a “defaulter tracer,” Peter tries to track them down, find out what’s gone wrong and get them back into treatment, if possible.
Epidemiologists refer to such patients as “lost to follow-up,” and their increasing numbers in sub-Saharan Africa are causing concern among providers of H.I.V. and AIDS care. Interruptions in treatment lead to viral strains that are resistant to the cheapest medications, and to higher rates of illness and death.
Several years ago, during the rapid international expansion of H.I.V. drug distribution, researchers reported very high rates of adherence to treatment in sub-Saharan Africa — as high as or higher than in the United States. More recently, however, studies have found that 15 to 40 percent of those who start treatment are lost to follow-up within one to three years. This unsettling trend has emerged at a difficult time; financing for treatment from the United States and other donors is not keeping pace with the rate of new infections, which has generated waiting lists for the lifesaving medications in some parts of Africa.
At Faces, the loss-to-follow-up rate is around 30 percent, according to Dr. Dennis Osiemo, the organization’s technical adviser for care and treatment. In many instances, he said, problems over which patients have little or no control — like lack of child care, distance from a clinic or the high cost of transportation — force them to miss appointments or drop out of treatment. Others, of course, have died.
But recent research from Uganda found that a significant number of patients designated as lost to follow-up were actually receiving care elsewhere. A similar tracking effort is being started at Faces, but efforts to determine the status of lapsed patients are not always successful. “If a patient is outside the catchment area, it’s very hard to trace them,” Dr. Osiemo said.
H.I.V. programs in Africa are experimenting with various strategies to reduce loss to follow-up — offering a two- or three-month supply of medication per clinic visit, delivering drugs directly to patients’ homes and reimbursing them for transportation costs. Faces is exploring modest projects to raise patients’ income and stabilize their lives, like creating a microfinance system to provide water pumps and other agricultural support to help them grow more crops.
While accompanying Peter on his rounds of the district, I discovered that many cases elude easy solutions — the technological, financial or pharmacological fixes that Western-financed programs seek to carry out.
In search of the defaulted clients on Peter’s list, we rode in matatus — the wheezing, overcrowded minivans that provide cheap local transportation — to outlying neighborhoods, past hundreds of ramshackle storefronts bearing names like Blessed Mum Butchery, Canaan General Retail Shop and the Yes We Can Hair Salon. (President Obama’s ancestral village, Kogelo, is an easy drive from here.)
Peter, a tall, lanky man in his early 20s, lost both his parents to AIDS in 2006. He is supporting two younger brothers and a younger sister, all in their teens, and he struggles to pay their school fees so they can continue their education.
“I know what people are going through, so I have the heart to help them,” he said. He spoke slowly, as if contemplating the import of each word, and wore a black and white rubber bracelet inscribed with the word “friendship.”
Peter says he loves being able to reconnect patients with treatment, but his days can also prove fruitless and frustrating.
On this afternoon, one client was a woman who had stopped taking her young H.I.V.-positive grandson to the clinic every month. When we arrived in their neighborhood, Peter asked passers-by if they knew the family. Most said no.
Finally, a young boy stepped forward, led us across muddy paths and rows of shacks, and pointed out their home. No one was there, and it was clear no one had been for some time. A neighbor said they’d left for somewhere else a month before.
Next was a young disabled patient whose mother used to take her to the clinic. When we located the dwelling, we found the young woman, who was 20, sprawled in the dirt. She appeared to be suffering from serious neurological and cognitive problems.
The woman living next door told Peter that one recent morning she woke up to find that the mother — her sister — had disappeared, with no forwarding information. She knew nothing about her niece’s medical condition, she said, as Peter tried to discuss arrangements to get the girl back into treatment.
But that day it was the decision of the young widow to continue praying instead of returning to the clinic that haunted Peter. Her determination to ignore the medical realities underscored the limitations of his efforts.
When the woman insisted that faith would heal her, Peter challenged her gently. “Even at the clinic, people are praying and still getting medication, because H.I.V. is in the body and blood,” he said.
She acknowledged that she’d recently tested positive a second time, but that did not dissuade her. “I’m still hoping to be tested again and be negative,” she said softly.
Peter and I stood up. He knew there was nothing more to say. He wished her well, encouraged her one last time to return. She smiled and shook her head.
As Populations Age, a Chance for Younger Nations
YOU MAY KNOW that the world’s population is aging — that the number of older people is expanding faster than the number of young — but you probably don’t realize how fast this is happening. Right now, the world is evenly divided between those under 28 and those over 28. By midcentury, the median age will have risen to 40. Demographers also use another measure, in addition to median age, to determine whether populations are aging: “elder share.” If the share, or proportion, of people over 60 (or sometimes 65) is growing, the population is aging. By that yardstick too, the world is quickly becoming older. Pick any age cohort above the median age of 28 and you’ll find its share of the global population rising faster than that of any segment below the median. By 2018, 65-year-olds, for example, will outnumber those under 5 — a historic first. In 2050, developed countries are on track to have half as many people under 15 as they do over 60. In short, the age mix of the world is turning upside down and at unprecedented rates.
This means profound change in nearly every important relationship we have — as family members, neighbors, citizens of nations and the world. Aging populations also alter how business is done everywhere. The globalization of the economy is accelerating because the world is rapidly aging, and at the same time the pace of global aging is quickened by the speed and scope of globalization. These intertwined dynamics also bear on the international competition for wealth and power. The high costs of keeping our aging population healthy and out of poverty has caused the United States and other rich democracies to lose their economic and political footing. Countries on the rise amass wealth and geopolitical clout by refusing to bear those costs. Older countries lose work to younger countries.
To see this process at work, look at China. In its march to prosperity, the country has encouraged hundreds of millions of its young people to move into cities. Chinese metropolises — some, like Beijing, ancient but newly sprawling, others, like Shenzen, built from scratch — are where the factories are. Foxconn Technology Group, for example, the giant electronics manufacturer that builds components for Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Apple in gigantic plants in Shenzen and elsewhere in urban China, will soon employ enough people to fill 60 percent of the jobs in Manhattan. Foxconn has close to 920,000 workers, nearly all of whom are under 25; in August, the company announced plans to add 400,000 more workers in the next year. But China’s is a kind of Dorian Gray economy, its young and footloose global identity hiding a grayer reality. By and large, older workers have been excluded from its remade, globalized economy. They are left behind in their rural villages, or they are pushed from their urban homes into the ghettos of dour apartment blocks on the urban edge to make room for the new apartments and offices occupied by younger urbanites and the companies eager to hire them. Discrimination — “age apartheid” might be a better term — is one way to describe what’s going on here: no country sorts its population more ruthlessly by age.
The problem for China is that it is rapidly approaching the point after which it will no longer be the relatively young country we see today. In 2015, China’s working population below the age of 65 will begin to shrink. Meanwhile, the number of people over 65 will be rising to 300 million by 2050, a threefold increase. Richard Jackson, the director of the Global Aging Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, notes that China will be older than the United States within a generation, making it the first big national population to age before it joins the ranks of developed countries. One of China’s biggest fears, expressed repeatedly in public pronouncements, is that it will grow old before it grows rich.
To avoid this fate, China is doing all it can to lure the world’s production and capital while its work force is young. In large part, it does this by denying meaningful pensions and health care to its people today. Not only do the vast majority of elderly Chinese have little more than their meager savings, but today’s workers have pensions so measly as to be irrelevant. To keep the cost of manufacturing in China low for the rest of the world, the young Chinese work force is, for now, rarely provided more than token pensions, health care or disability insurance. In aging, developed countries, older workers with long tenure are usually at their peak in terms of pay and the cost of their benefits. Here in the United States, for example, health care costs for workers who are between 50 and 65 are, on average, almost two times what they are for their peers in their 30s and 40s. When the median age of workers climbs in the United States, so does the cost of insurance their employers must buy for them. China’s leadership clearly believes its young workers would lose their allure if the future costs of old age were added to their costs today. When state-owned companies trimmed their ranks of tens of millions of workers following the country’s transition to a market economy, older workers — many only in middle age — were often let go with small pensions and replaced by younger workers. So what China offers now is workers with short tenure and negligible benefits (as well as something of a free social safety net in the form of all the relatively young, physically fit grandparents who move in with their children to care for their grandchildren).
Companies that move production to China or buy goods from Chinese suppliers gain the leverage they need to rewrite the terms of employment with their older workers at home or the ability to push those workers off the payrolls altogether. In a 2006 analysis of how aging work forces influence global flows of capital, the economists Ronald Davies and Robert R. Reed noted that because “older” economies have smaller work forces and higher wages, they push investment to younger economies, which offer higher rates of return. And high costs in older economies reach beyond wages — into taxes, which are used to pay for age-related public spending like social security. China’s youthful labor force thus helps the country maintain its low-cost economic ecosystem and attract foreign investment that seeks the higher returns a “younger” economy offers, whether or not any particular pot of foreign money goes to employ young people.
China is not the only country in which a young labor force attracts global businesses and investors. Much of the developing world, particularly in Asia and Latin America, operates the same way. An outspoken champion of outsourcing, Nandan Nilekani, a former head of Infosys, the Indian technology giant, is well known for promoting India as a place to corral young workers in an otherwise aging world. Call it “global age-arbitrage.”
THE OTHER PART of the feedback loop, the role globalization plays in speeding up how fast a country ages, is tied to the two big reasons that populations grow older. First and most obviously, more and more individuals are living longer than ever before. Average life expectancy is increasing nearly everywhere. Longer life is itself a kind of byproduct of globalization, the result of the worldwide exchange of public-health technology, medical breakthroughs and, perhaps the most life-giving development of all, the spread of literacy. Every person who can read has access to the world of health information, including Internet sites and government pamphlets on diseases. Countries educate their people in order to make it possible for them to enter the mainstream of global commerce and that extends their life spans — making the countries older.
Above all, however, for communities or countries to age, people must have far fewer children. Today, almost no place in the developed world has a total fertility rate of 2.1 children, the replacement rate needed to keep a population from declining. The population of nearly every developed country is expected to shrink before midcentury. When emerging nations gear up for the global economy, they tend to take two steps that encourage smaller families: they extend educational and employment opportunities to young women, and they urbanize. Urban women postpone having children until they are prepared for and established in their jobs. Rearing children in the city is also more expensive. Cities serve the global economy, and the global economy drives people to cities. (According to the U.N. Population Fund, about half the world’s population was urban in 2007, but by 2030 nearly 80 percent of it will live in the cities of the developing world.) The world gets older.
Such urbanization and globalization can take hold with remarkable swiftness. Japan was one of the youngest countries in the world until around 1950, and now its population is arguably the world’s oldest. (Its median age will exceed 56 by midcentury, up from 43 today.) The median age in Western Europe today is just over 40; it will rise to near 50 by 2050. Population aging did not always happen so quickly. France was the first country in the world to see its share of 65-year-olds double, from 7 percent to 14 percent; this took about 115 years, starting in 1865. But China will experience the same doubling in 25 years.
One exception is the United States. The country is subject to the same two big trends — longer lives, smaller families — that are aging much of the world’s populations, but we are not growing old as fast as countries in East Asia and Western Europe. Our median age will climb only 3 years, to 40, by 2050, a rate slowed by the arrival of young immigrants, including millions from Latin America.
Of course, immigration for one country means emigration from another — and an older population left behind. Spain, which rivals Japan as the world’s oldest country, was for much of the 20th century one of the youngest nations in the West. Before 2000, it had virtually no foreign-born residents. Today, nearly 12 percent of Spain’s population is foreign born. Among the arrivals are hundreds of thousands of Ecuadoreans (many of them female caregivers for elderly Spanish) whose absence at home increases the median age of Ecuador’s population. More than one in 10 Ecuadoreans has left in search of work, and the loss of so many of the country’s youngest and most enterprising workers means Ecuador has little chance of developing. Recently, its president initiated the Welcome Home Program to lure emigrants back with tax breaks and money to start businesses.
How do globalization and an aging population affect the American workplace? According to the Economic Policy Institute, 2.3 million American jobs were lost to China alone between 2001 and 2007. Susan Houseman, an economist at the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research in Kalamazoo, Mich., notes that older employees in manufacturing jobs who are low-skilled have been among the most vulnerable workers of all. And when older workers lose their jobs, they search longer for new ones than people do in other age groups. They find it hard to remake themselves with new skills and grow less employable over time and more desperate to accept low pay. This, along with the prospect of additional outsourcing abroad, drives down the earnings of those older workers who manage to stay employed. Looking at data ending in 2002, a team of researchers including economists from the World Bank and the National Bureau of Economic Research found that older workers suffered greater income losses because of foreign outsourcing than women and union workers.
Keep in mind that these results predate the recent recession and the even more difficult times that have resulted for older workers. The ranks of the unemployed who are 55 and older grew 331 percent over the decade that ended last December. U.S. unemployment levels for workers over 50 are now at their all-time highs, nearly double what they were three years ago. AARP’s Public Policy Institute reports that from December 2007 to February 2010 the number of workers 55 and older who gave up looking for work rose more than fivefold, to 287,000 from 53,000. Far more people have retired early than anyone predicted. In 2009, there were 465,000 more applications for Social Security and disability benefits than there were the year before, as employers made it clear to older workers that they were not wanted. This increase was nearly 50 percent greater than what the Social Security Administration expected.
One conundrum for aging societies is how to keep older people employed at a time when economic conditions favor the young, whether nearby or far away. The workplace left to itself comes up with some solutions, but they require older workers to accept more “flexible” conditions, which often means joining the so-called contingent work force of part-timers, self-employed contract workers and temps hired through agencies. According to the AARP Public Policy Institute, 21 percent of workers over 65 are part time, compared with 16 percent for the overall work force. Self-employment is also climbing among older workers, and Americans over 50 are the most active group of entrepreneurs, often out of necessity. This partly explains an apparent contradiction: at the same time that unemployment among older workers is at a peak, the percentage of older people with jobs is also near a high, because more people must work to make ends meet.
In the United States, the transformation of older workers into a giant contingent work force is just getting started. This year, as baby boomers begin to hit 65, the “elder share” of the U.S. population begins a sharp climb. From 2010 to 2030, the number of Americans between 25 and 64 will climb by 16 million, but two-thirds of the increase will consist of people 55 and 64. Countries that are older than the U.S., that are further along in reshaping their workplaces, give a glimpse of the future. In Japan, retirees from the biggest companies are well provided for, but for many of the rest — workers at smaller companies, the self-employed — the fear of outliving their money is real. One in five elderly Japanese lives in poverty. So the Japanese stay on the job when they can. Since 2006, the number of Japanese still working after the customary retirement age of 60 has risen by more than 11 million. Most are officially retired but are back at their companies, under contract. They typically earn about half their former wages.
WILL THE WORLD ever grow young again? Perhaps, but not anytime soon. Today, many of the places that are growing old the fastest are in the developing world, largely because that’s where urbanization is most rapid. It is hard to conjure a situation in which people move back to the countryside and again have larger families. Instead, if past is prelude, today’s young countries like China will be the countries that in the not-distant future go shopping for younger workers in younger places. Those places will be transformed by satisfying an older China’s needs, and the cycle will repeat itself: when the world finds its next young place, that country may well age even more quickly than the formerly young countries that preceded it.
The rough adjustments that global aging imposes on populations can sound bleak. Nonetheless, the challenges do not trump what we gain by living longer. Remember, too, that smaller families enable parents to make greater investments in themselves and the children they do have. Still, as the world gets older, we need to anticipate how this extraordinary change might undermine our communities, weaken nations and push able older people to the side. There are also sobering geopolitical consequences to consider. It now looks as if global power rests on how willing a country is to neglect its older citizens. Faults in the welfare states of the West are highlighted by the world debt crisis. Fiscal woes driven by age-related expenses plague every level of government in the United States. Europeans take to the streets, strike and close down governments struggling to cover unsupportable pensions. The most advanced countries owe trillions in age-related public expenses. The most straightforward solutions, like higher payroll taxes to pay for benefits, raise the cost of doing business and chase off investors and producers to lower-cost economies. Mark Haas of Duquesne University has argued that aging forces all high-income democracies into triage mode. They can pay for income support and services for their elderly and drastically reduce financing for schools, defense, infrastructure and everything else, or they can decide older people will have to make do with far less.
China has gained new financial clout in relation to advanced industrial nations because it has grown rich enough as the youthful factory of the world to act as the developed countries’ banker. Yet the Chinese government says the country is still too poor to put a more comprehensive social safety net in place. Perhaps, but it is the financial sacrifices of its people that give China the means to lend trillions of dollars to the United States and other industrialized nations. That’s a bargain China may be happy to accept, but it, too, is caught in the irreversible dynamic of aging, and its demographic denouement is coming. By then, the United States will be older than it is now, but younger than most of the rest of the developed world, younger than much of the developing world and far younger than China. If we understand how aging populations and economic forces interact, perhaps we can make the most of our age and our youth.
The Elusive Small-House Utopia
Every year, in conjunction with a big trade show, the magazine Builder creates something it calls its “concept home.” The house is an exhibition on a theme — the 2004 edition, for example, was called the Ultimate Family Home — but also a commercial venture. Attendees of the International Builders’ Show can walk through a model, and when the show is over, the concept is quite literally put to a test when the finished house is offered up for sale on the open market. During the last decade’s real estate boom, the annual demonstration kept up with the times: designs abounded with baronial features like colonnades, cathedral ceilings and observation towers, and they sometimes topped 6,000 square feet. But then the crash came, wiping out credit lines and shaking the industry’s confidence. For this year’s show, Boyce Thompson, the editorial director of Builder, wanted a look more attuned to curtailed appetites, so he came up with a concept that he called a Home for the New Economy.
The most salient specification of the house was its modest proportions. At around 1,700 square feet, it was the size of the average American home built in 1980. Since then, new houses have on average grown by more than 40 percent, as dens have expanded into great rooms, and tubs and sinks have multiplied. “Houses got too big, because people were chasing investment gains and there was cheap money, and the industry responded by building houses that were too large,” Thompson says. “So we really wanted to focus people’s attention on doing smaller, better homes.” He points to Census statistics that show a slight decline in the size of homes built over the past two years and to a much larger drop in the square footage of those that have just started construction, and suggests that the market may be headed toward a more austere norm.
That’s certainly debatable. If dissecting the causes of the housing market’s crash is a task for economists, predicting its future is a fuzzier matter of sociology. Will Americans re-evaluate cultural assumptions that equate ever-larger houses with success and stability? Or will they invest more in their lived environments, figuring that with the demise of the quick flip, they are now in for the long term? In the absence of much real market activity, imaginations are free to run wild. The Home for the New Economy is one such exercise in speculation, a proposal that the future lies in denser, more walkable, modestly scaled communities. Marianne Cusato, who designed the Home for the New Economy, sees it as a rebuke to the ethic of the McMansion. “We’re not going to go back to 2005,” she says. “What was built then is not going to come back, and this is not a bad thing. What we were building was so unsustainable, and it didn’t really meet our needs.”
Cusato, who is 36, started her career drawing up million-dollar mansions, but she has made a name for herself by going smaller, designing a 300-square-foot Katrina Cottage meant to be a replacement for the trailers the government set up after the 2005 hurricane. When Cusato sat down to devise the Home for the New Economy, she tried to consider how families actually use their living areas. She started with a simple, symmetrical three-bedroom plan, excising extraneous spaces — the seldom-used formal dining room, for instance — while enlarging windows wherever she could and adding a wraparound porch. A result was a house that was compact, comfortable, bright and energy-efficient.
There was just one problem. Usually the concept homes are put up in partnership with a local builder, but this year’s conference was held in Las Vegas, perhaps the nation’s most disastrous real estate market, and it was presumed no investor there would be willing to take a risk, even a small one, on the Home for the New Economy. So Builder put together an interactive Web site and displayed Cusato’s design at a booth inside the conference hall. The concept was a hit with at least one developer, LeylandAlliance, which was working on master-planned communities in New York, Connecticut, Virginia and South Carolina. Cusato began working with the company to bring her idea to life. The Home for the New Economy would be given the opportunity, after all, to meet the actual new economy.
The spirit of constraint that Cusato means to tap isn’t purely a product of the recession. It’s a cultural thread that runs from Henry David Thoreau’s 10-by-15-foot cabin next to Walden Pond all the way to the New Urbanist communities that began appearing in the 1980s, reacting to the spread of soulless suburbanization by trying to recapture a traditional small-town aesthetic. But the wider buying public has never found much appeal in the idea that it ought to make do with less. “Builders have tried quality rather than size, but they always fail,” says Witold Rybczynski, an architecture professor at the University of Pennsylvania. “The market always says: We don’t care. If you’re giving us a smaller house, we don’t want it.”
Rybczynski speaks from experience. In 1990, he and a partner came up with a design they called the Grow Home, a 14-foot-wide row house that could be constructed for as little as $35,000. His intent was to produce something along the lines of Frank Lloyd Wright’s famed Usonians, dwellings devised during the Great Depression as housing for the working man, which later became a model for the tiny tract homes of Levittown. Rybczynski built a Grow Home in Montreal and wrote an article about it for The Atlantic, in which he posited that the “abundant resources that accounted for the success of the large single-family suburban house — unlimited land, cheap transportation and plentiful energy — can no longer be taken for granted.” That was 20 years ago. While the Grow Home design proved to be a niche success, it didn’t change popular tastes, which kept inflating in defiance of all warnings about sustainability. By the market’s 2007 peak, the average American house had surpassed 2,500 square feet.
“This happened at the same time as household size declined, so it’s a little bizarre,” says John McIlwain, senior resident fellow at the Urban Land Institute. “But people seem to have liked the idea of having extra bedrooms and lots of room, big kitchens and big master bedrooms and big master baths. I think it’s just cultural, an expression of wealth.” But it’s not just that — studies have found that lower-class homes in the United States are also much larger than comparable residences in Europe.
“To me, the answer is that we subsidized it massively,” says Christopher B. Leinberger, a housing scholar at the Brookings Institution. “Over the last 30 years, we saw one of the largest social-engineering projects in the nation’s history.” The mortgage tax deduction encouraged a vast expansion of homeownership, while Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac created new pools of capital through securitization. The federal government kept building highways to serve ever-more distant suburbs, where local authorities often mandated large home and lot sizes in the belief that it would encourage the construction of affluent communities. Facing a widespread revolt against property taxes, many of the same municipalities began financing suburban infrastructure — roads, sewers and so on — through “impact fees” levied at the outset of the development process. This and other factors effectively inflated the cost of developable land. The homebuilding industry, which was in the process of consolidating into the hands of a dozen or so publicly traded corporations, passed on the added expense to consumers through higher home prices. But because they enjoyed such economies of scale when it came to construction, the major homebuilders could offer buyers an inducement in return: a lot more room.
Some in the industry argue that buyers never truly craved all that surplus space and took it only because that was the way the marketplace measured the worth of their investment. “We have to get out of the dollars-per-square-foot mind-set,” says Sarah Susanka, an architect and author of “The Not So Big House.” “I’ve been on a crusade to get people to think this way for years.” She says she was inspired to write her book — which recommends that home-buyers adjust their space expectations downward by a third and spend the money they save on creating a well-designed interior — after years of hearing the same sentiment from her clients: they were hoping to make a profit at resale, so they had to meet the market’s space expectations, not their own. Susanka says that the success of “The Not So Big House,” which has sold hundreds of thousands of copies since its publication 12 years ago, proves there is room for alternate conceptions of value.
In today’s marketplace, homebuilders are finding that smaller models are selling more reliably, and many are reassessing old marketing assumptions. “In many of our markets, there was an attitude that whatever you buy, you need to stretch, because in two years you’ll be able to sell it for double,” says Jeffrey Mezger, the chief executive of KB Home, one of the nation’s largest builders. With quick profit expectations dispelled, the average size of a KB house has fallen by almost 20 percent since the peak. The company recently introduced a line called the Open Series, homes that have flexible floor plans and low energy costs and run as small as 1,200 square feet.
The trend does not necessarily indicate, however, that Americans have suddenly decided they desire less. Homebuilders are shifting to compete with the cut-rate prices of foreclosures. Nowhere in KB’s marketing for the Open Series will you glimpse the word “small.” Even some enemies of the McMansion say it’s impossible to make a selling point of asceticism.
“Everybody hates the Calvinist sacrifice; they just don’t want to hear of it,” says the architect Andrés Duany, a founding father of the New Urbanist movement and a mentor of Marianne Cusato’s. Duany argues that the sprawling homes of the last decade actually met a need, albeit imperfectly, by reproducing internally what suburban communities lacked: an exercise room substitutes for a park, a home theater for the Main Street cinema. Buyers will only accept smaller homes, he says, if their surroundings compensate them. “The idea that you can promote things — that a developer is actually going to come out and say, ‘Marianne’s house is more virtuous,’ is ridiculous,” Duany says.
A real, live edition of the Home for the New Economy now stands near the end of a street in North Augusta, S.C., behind a white picket fence in a residential development called Hammond’s Ferry. The house owes its existence, in part, to the ideals of LeylandAlliance, which builds communities in the New Urbanist vein, but it’s also a practical concession to the distressed times. Hammond’s Ferry, which is situated along the Savannah River, hit the market in 2006, initially offering up a street of antebellum-style residences that ran as large as 4,000 square feet and cost an average of $500,000. The Home for the New Economy, priced at about half that much, represents a definite adjustment.
“If there was a tactical error we made, it was in the direction of going more toward the ‘wow,’ ” said Turner Simkins, the general manager of the project, as we stood atop a condominium building and surveyed a street of generously proportioned homes with columned two-story porches. On a color map of the Hammond’s Ferry master plan, the building was surrounded by some 450 beige rectangles, lots mainly set aside for single-family homes. So far, 88 houses have been built, 78 of them sold, and many of the lots on the map were still covered by uncleared bramble. Simkins said the homes that were finding buyers, unsurprisingly, were those priced below $250,000, but the developer had found it difficult to convince upscale Southern builders that there was money in modesty. Marianne Cusato’s house was there, as much as anything, to provide a different model.
Some skeptics have questioned whether the Home for the New Economy actually demonstrates much of a change. “I really think the whole thing is a marketing ploy,” Witold Rybczynski says. “Seventeen hundred square feet is not a small house.” Yet in North Augusta, the problem with the place appeared to be quite the opposite: people had trouble imagining how you could sell something so minuscule. One day I had lunch with Cusato and Thomas Blanchard Jr., whose firm was marketing Hammond’s Ferry. Blanchard explained that along the Georgia border, the crash had actually caused new houses to grow even larger. Crown Communities, an Atlanta-area builder, had snapped up suburban land at depressed prices and was erecting billboards that crowed, “Houses from $47 a square foot.” One of its largest models was called the Titan.
Cusato wondered aloud about the “sustainability” of such development and said that she would prefer for people to think of a house’s value not in terms of price per square foot but in its cost per month, taking into account the ongoing expenses of heating and cooling. “They’re meeting a segment of the market that needs to be served,” Blanchard responded, diplomatically. “You can’t create markets; you can only respond to them.”
One afternoon, Cusato and I made our way through Hammond’s Ferry to see the Home for the New Economy, walking down streets scaled to be bicycle friendly and passing Manuel’s Bread Café, where the French chef cooks with ingredients from an on-site organic farm. The houses, big and small, were bunched close together on lots that averaged a fifth of an acre. Building at relatively high density helps LeylandAlliance to offset the profit it forgoes by reserving a substantial portion of land for public amenities, like a waterfront park, running paths and several restored ponds. Still, the small-town feel doesn’t come cheap. For the price Cusato’s house was going for, $280,000, a North Augusta consumer could just as easily get something truly titanic, if less neighborly.
“There’s this machine we’ve created, this expectation that you have to have this huge home,” Cusato said. We were joined at the house by its builder, David Blair, who financed the construction himself because no bank would do so. We walked through the front door, into a sunlit 25-by-15-foot living and dining room, which was adjoined by an open kitchen.
Cusato had never been inside this particular version of her home — she had seen several others in upstate New York, where LeylandAlliance has another development — and so Blair took over the tour to show us a few alterations he made to the design. Cusato had intended it to be adaptable. Buyers, Blair said as we walked upstairs, are “used to the McMansions, and they say it’s too small.” At the top of the staircase was a loftlike open space, adjoined by two bedrooms and a windowless chamber that the builder said could be put to use as an office. Then, at the end of the hallway, there was a door. Blair opened it, and we entered an unfinished room, measuring 260 square feet. Blair said that it could be used for storage, but for a buyer willing to pay the asking price, he would finish it as a master bedroom. He explained that this allowed the house to be advertised as having four bedrooms and 2,000 square feet — in other words, not as a small house, but one close to medium-size. “People still have this . . . what I call a hang-up about price per square foot,” the builder said.
Blair’s stratagem had brought the Home for the New Economy’s price, according to the accepted metric, down from $160 to $140 a square foot. But that was still almost three times the rate the billboards were advertising elsewhere. Since the home’s debut in June, it had received a fair amount of public attention, but it still hadn’t sold, and Blair had already been forced to drop what he was asking. “To sell a house in this market is tough,” Blair said. “We’re going to market the lifestyle — the homes follow the lifestyle.” And indeed, at an open house later that evening, the Home for the New Economy filled up with neighbors from around Hammond’s Ferry: singles, retirees, families with kids. “I think it’s taken folks a while to get the concept of what we’re doing down here,” said Walker Posey, who lives in a three-bedroom house. “Your dollar can go a long way in South Carolina in terms of square footage. But quality of life is not about square footage.”
Of course, these were people who had already bought into that proposition — and it was unclear how many others would accept the trade-off of space for lifestyle. For more than 60 years, at least, American consumers have dreamed of one day having enough room to stretch out. It may take more than the shock of hard times to downsize that particular fantasy.
A Kind of Hunt That Even Deer Can Get Behind
LAND BETWEEN THE LAKES, Ky. — The deer hunters returned to the tournament checkpoint tired and hungry, their camouflage clothing soaked with sweat. All were empty-handed — no big bucks for bragging rights, no fat does for venison. But that was the plan all along.
Armed with bolt-action 20-gauge shotguns mounted with digital scopes developed for military training, each hunter was given five blank shells a day. Each night, he returned the empty shells and firearm to tournament officials, who removed a memory card from the $1,200 scope. The 10-second video clips on the card were used to determine the most skillful hunter.
The tournament, held here in September by the American Whitetail Authority, was the first in the Whitetail Pro Series, the only hunting competition in which deer are stalked but not killed. After four qualifying events, what is being billed as the A.W.A. World Championship will be held this month in Mississippi.
The main goal of the series, according to Greg Koch, the founder of the group, is to reward hunters who consistently take clean shots on mature deer.
“In most states, you can kill one deer per season, and that hampers your ability to prove your skills,” Koch, 53, said.
The series is the latest example of technology transforming a traditional sport. Just as some baseball and football players are turning to advanced imaging technology to improve efficiency and performance, deer hunters can now in theory practice in the field without risk of maiming an animal or running afoul of game laws.
Though an amateur competition with no prize money at stake, the Whitetail Pro Series is modeled on the professional Bassmaster series, a catch-and-release competition widely credited with popularizing bass fishing and helping it become a multibillion dollar industry. Digital rifle scopes, Koch said, can enable hunters to track their prey out of season and help children build a solid foundation in ethical hunting, a component of which is to kill an animal as quickly and painlessly as possible.
“You can put a 12-year-old in the field and he may have a big buck walk by him,” Koch said. “But I can give you five images of five different deer, and that takes a lot of the luck out of it.”
After each of the three days of competition at Land Between the Lakes National Recreation Area, the hunters’ memory cards were loaded onto a computer. Typically, the image of a mature whitetail doe, or a buck, appeared on a large flat-screen television, the shotgun scope’s crosshairs tracking its movements. There was the sudden sound of a shotgun blast. The screen turned gray. The deer bolted.
The judges reviewed the clip frame by frame until the second before the gunfire. They noted the position of the crosshairs. If they were slightly behind the deer’s front shoulder, a bullet would have passed through the lungs, ensuring a quick death. Bonus points were awarded for the cleanest shots.
In addition to shot placement, scores were calculated by age class, so shooting an older and warier doe earned more points than shooting a young, naïve buck. For bucks, antler size was also figured in.
The competitors were filmed for a show to be carried by the Outdoor Channel in early 2011.
“We knew it was a revolutionary concept,” said Jeff Murray, a managing producer at Winnercomm, the production unit of the Outdoor Channel. “It is designed to be very educational. The viewers are very thirsty for information.”
The competition, Murray said, is based on the wildlife management practice of taking out the oldest animal from the group to check population growth.
“It will teach hunters how to judge the age of a deer on the hoof,” he said.
TV hunting shows, in fact, were the inspiration for the series, said Koch, a lifelong hunter from Broken Arrow, Okla., who has trained bird dogs, worked as a guide and started and managed private hunt clubs.
“Something I’d seen made me think that the guy I was watching on TV didn’t know what the heck he was doing,” he said. “These personalities would come in, and one of the guys that I guided, if I left him in the woods, he’d never find his way out; and he was on television trying to teach people how to be more successful. I really thought the guides or somebody like the guides need to be the ones teaching the public.”
Early this year, Koch interviewed more than 2,000 potential competitors at Bass Pro Shops sporting goods stores across the country, seeking out those who had hunted in multiple states without a guide. He identified 400 before winnowing the field to 40 competitors — 10 for each of the qualifiers.
“I don’t care how many big deer you shot — that doesn’t give you any more credibility with us,” Koch said. “I want guys that have exceptional skills.”
Koch said he envisioned the Whitetail Pro Series as a vehicle to educate nonhunters and beginners. The competition, in his opinion, will never replace actual hunting, and he emphasized that he thought killing for competition was unethical.
“To kill an animal to score it is just not what the sport is all about,” he said. “It wasn’t until I ran across this piece of equipment in 2006 that I realized that’s the way to do it.”
That equipment is the DigitalHunter rifle scope, by Elcan Optical Technologies. It works like a normal hunting scope but captures the image of the shot in digital video or still photographs. When the hunter spots a deer and presses the record button, he has 10 seconds to aim and fire.
At Land Between the Lakes, the hunters pursued deer in 90-degree heat across 37,500 acres that the United States Forest Service opened to the group. With white oak acorn mast covering the forest floor and creating a widespread food source, the deer were unpredictable.
Hunters were required to wear an orange cap and vest. The use of calls and scents were allowed, but bait was banned.
Afterward, the hunters ate dinner and waited for the judges. Todd Hamilton, a cabinet designer from Oswego, Ill., said he was not used to the early-season climate in southern woodlands.
“We’re so ate up with stuff,” he said, rolling up his pants to expose a leg pockmarked with chigger bites.
Across the table, Chip Steely, from Dexter, Ky., said he was not bitten.
“What’s your secret?” one hunter asked.
“Pantyhose,” Steely replied, and after the laughing stopped, he said he used a permethrin-based repellent.
The judges finished their scoring. Scott Adams of Murray, Ky., was declared the winner, followed by Steely. They will move on to the championship.
Hamilton, who finished third, said he was drawn to the tournament because of the group’s emphasis on clean shot placement and on education.
“That’s been my big pet peeve lately: people are almost accepting wounding,” Hamilton said. “There’s been something lost in our heritage. There’s been a disconnect. I call it the dumbing down of our instincts.
“I was raised that when we butchered or slaughtered something, it goes fast and it’s quick, and that should be our goal, not to wound anything. And where I live, hardly anybody takes their kids hunting — virtually nobody. There are a lot of kids that would like to do it. And some kids are lucky enough to try it on their own, but they’re missing those little steps.”
KISUMU, Kenya — The young woman perched on the edge of the bed in her tiny hut. She was 29 years old, an AIDS widow who supported herself by frying and selling potato fries by the side of the nearby road.
Yes, she acknowledged to Peter Ouma Mchembere, a young counselor from a local H.I.V./AIDS project, she hadn’t returned to the clinic for her antiretroviral medications in more than a year; no, she didn’t plan to come back anytime soon.
She disliked the drugs, she explained: “The first time I started taking them, I was having the feeling that my heart was pounding and I had no strength.” These days, she said, she chose to rely on prayer instead of medicine to give her strength so she could care for her two young children.
“It’s not bad to pray, but getting care is also important, because this is biological,” advised Peter, who works in Kisumu for Family AIDS Care and Education Services, or Faces. The organization is a joint clinical and research program of the Kenya Medical Research Institute and the University of California, San Francisco.
“It’s very painful,” Peter said to me after we left her home. “She has two kids and they’re at a tender age, and if she dies, who’ll take care of them?”
I was in Kisumu, the largest city in western Kenya, as both a journalist and a public health researcher from U.C. Berkeley. This scruffy but lively port of more than 300,000 people on the eastern shore of Lake Victoria is a regional hub for commerce, transient relationships and H.I.V. infection. About 15 percent of the adults in the region are believed to be infected.
At Peter’s clinic, as elsewhere in Africa, patients who have not come for their medications in recent months are considered to have defaulted from treatment. As a “defaulter tracer,” Peter tries to track them down, find out what’s gone wrong and get them back into treatment, if possible.
Epidemiologists refer to such patients as “lost to follow-up,” and their increasing numbers in sub-Saharan Africa are causing concern among providers of H.I.V. and AIDS care. Interruptions in treatment lead to viral strains that are resistant to the cheapest medications, and to higher rates of illness and death.
Several years ago, during the rapid international expansion of H.I.V. drug distribution, researchers reported very high rates of adherence to treatment in sub-Saharan Africa — as high as or higher than in the United States. More recently, however, studies have found that 15 to 40 percent of those who start treatment are lost to follow-up within one to three years. This unsettling trend has emerged at a difficult time; financing for treatment from the United States and other donors is not keeping pace with the rate of new infections, which has generated waiting lists for the lifesaving medications in some parts of Africa.
At Faces, the loss-to-follow-up rate is around 30 percent, according to Dr. Dennis Osiemo, the organization’s technical adviser for care and treatment. In many instances, he said, problems over which patients have little or no control — like lack of child care, distance from a clinic or the high cost of transportation — force them to miss appointments or drop out of treatment. Others, of course, have died.
But recent research from Uganda found that a significant number of patients designated as lost to follow-up were actually receiving care elsewhere. A similar tracking effort is being started at Faces, but efforts to determine the status of lapsed patients are not always successful. “If a patient is outside the catchment area, it’s very hard to trace them,” Dr. Osiemo said.
H.I.V. programs in Africa are experimenting with various strategies to reduce loss to follow-up — offering a two- or three-month supply of medication per clinic visit, delivering drugs directly to patients’ homes and reimbursing them for transportation costs. Faces is exploring modest projects to raise patients’ income and stabilize their lives, like creating a microfinance system to provide water pumps and other agricultural support to help them grow more crops.
While accompanying Peter on his rounds of the district, I discovered that many cases elude easy solutions — the technological, financial or pharmacological fixes that Western-financed programs seek to carry out.
In search of the defaulted clients on Peter’s list, we rode in matatus — the wheezing, overcrowded minivans that provide cheap local transportation — to outlying neighborhoods, past hundreds of ramshackle storefronts bearing names like Blessed Mum Butchery, Canaan General Retail Shop and the Yes We Can Hair Salon. (President Obama’s ancestral village, Kogelo, is an easy drive from here.)
Peter, a tall, lanky man in his early 20s, lost both his parents to AIDS in 2006. He is supporting two younger brothers and a younger sister, all in their teens, and he struggles to pay their school fees so they can continue their education.
“I know what people are going through, so I have the heart to help them,” he said. He spoke slowly, as if contemplating the import of each word, and wore a black and white rubber bracelet inscribed with the word “friendship.”
Peter says he loves being able to reconnect patients with treatment, but his days can also prove fruitless and frustrating.
On this afternoon, one client was a woman who had stopped taking her young H.I.V.-positive grandson to the clinic every month. When we arrived in their neighborhood, Peter asked passers-by if they knew the family. Most said no.
Finally, a young boy stepped forward, led us across muddy paths and rows of shacks, and pointed out their home. No one was there, and it was clear no one had been for some time. A neighbor said they’d left for somewhere else a month before.
Next was a young disabled patient whose mother used to take her to the clinic. When we located the dwelling, we found the young woman, who was 20, sprawled in the dirt. She appeared to be suffering from serious neurological and cognitive problems.
The woman living next door told Peter that one recent morning she woke up to find that the mother — her sister — had disappeared, with no forwarding information. She knew nothing about her niece’s medical condition, she said, as Peter tried to discuss arrangements to get the girl back into treatment.
But that day it was the decision of the young widow to continue praying instead of returning to the clinic that haunted Peter. Her determination to ignore the medical realities underscored the limitations of his efforts.
When the woman insisted that faith would heal her, Peter challenged her gently. “Even at the clinic, people are praying and still getting medication, because H.I.V. is in the body and blood,” he said.
She acknowledged that she’d recently tested positive a second time, but that did not dissuade her. “I’m still hoping to be tested again and be negative,” she said softly.
Peter and I stood up. He knew there was nothing more to say. He wished her well, encouraged her one last time to return. She smiled and shook her head.
As Populations Age, a Chance for Younger Nations
YOU MAY KNOW that the world’s population is aging — that the number of older people is expanding faster than the number of young — but you probably don’t realize how fast this is happening. Right now, the world is evenly divided between those under 28 and those over 28. By midcentury, the median age will have risen to 40. Demographers also use another measure, in addition to median age, to determine whether populations are aging: “elder share.” If the share, or proportion, of people over 60 (or sometimes 65) is growing, the population is aging. By that yardstick too, the world is quickly becoming older. Pick any age cohort above the median age of 28 and you’ll find its share of the global population rising faster than that of any segment below the median. By 2018, 65-year-olds, for example, will outnumber those under 5 — a historic first. In 2050, developed countries are on track to have half as many people under 15 as they do over 60. In short, the age mix of the world is turning upside down and at unprecedented rates.
This means profound change in nearly every important relationship we have — as family members, neighbors, citizens of nations and the world. Aging populations also alter how business is done everywhere. The globalization of the economy is accelerating because the world is rapidly aging, and at the same time the pace of global aging is quickened by the speed and scope of globalization. These intertwined dynamics also bear on the international competition for wealth and power. The high costs of keeping our aging population healthy and out of poverty has caused the United States and other rich democracies to lose their economic and political footing. Countries on the rise amass wealth and geopolitical clout by refusing to bear those costs. Older countries lose work to younger countries.
To see this process at work, look at China. In its march to prosperity, the country has encouraged hundreds of millions of its young people to move into cities. Chinese metropolises — some, like Beijing, ancient but newly sprawling, others, like Shenzen, built from scratch — are where the factories are. Foxconn Technology Group, for example, the giant electronics manufacturer that builds components for Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Apple in gigantic plants in Shenzen and elsewhere in urban China, will soon employ enough people to fill 60 percent of the jobs in Manhattan. Foxconn has close to 920,000 workers, nearly all of whom are under 25; in August, the company announced plans to add 400,000 more workers in the next year. But China’s is a kind of Dorian Gray economy, its young and footloose global identity hiding a grayer reality. By and large, older workers have been excluded from its remade, globalized economy. They are left behind in their rural villages, or they are pushed from their urban homes into the ghettos of dour apartment blocks on the urban edge to make room for the new apartments and offices occupied by younger urbanites and the companies eager to hire them. Discrimination — “age apartheid” might be a better term — is one way to describe what’s going on here: no country sorts its population more ruthlessly by age.
The problem for China is that it is rapidly approaching the point after which it will no longer be the relatively young country we see today. In 2015, China’s working population below the age of 65 will begin to shrink. Meanwhile, the number of people over 65 will be rising to 300 million by 2050, a threefold increase. Richard Jackson, the director of the Global Aging Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, notes that China will be older than the United States within a generation, making it the first big national population to age before it joins the ranks of developed countries. One of China’s biggest fears, expressed repeatedly in public pronouncements, is that it will grow old before it grows rich.
To avoid this fate, China is doing all it can to lure the world’s production and capital while its work force is young. In large part, it does this by denying meaningful pensions and health care to its people today. Not only do the vast majority of elderly Chinese have little more than their meager savings, but today’s workers have pensions so measly as to be irrelevant. To keep the cost of manufacturing in China low for the rest of the world, the young Chinese work force is, for now, rarely provided more than token pensions, health care or disability insurance. In aging, developed countries, older workers with long tenure are usually at their peak in terms of pay and the cost of their benefits. Here in the United States, for example, health care costs for workers who are between 50 and 65 are, on average, almost two times what they are for their peers in their 30s and 40s. When the median age of workers climbs in the United States, so does the cost of insurance their employers must buy for them. China’s leadership clearly believes its young workers would lose their allure if the future costs of old age were added to their costs today. When state-owned companies trimmed their ranks of tens of millions of workers following the country’s transition to a market economy, older workers — many only in middle age — were often let go with small pensions and replaced by younger workers. So what China offers now is workers with short tenure and negligible benefits (as well as something of a free social safety net in the form of all the relatively young, physically fit grandparents who move in with their children to care for their grandchildren).
Companies that move production to China or buy goods from Chinese suppliers gain the leverage they need to rewrite the terms of employment with their older workers at home or the ability to push those workers off the payrolls altogether. In a 2006 analysis of how aging work forces influence global flows of capital, the economists Ronald Davies and Robert R. Reed noted that because “older” economies have smaller work forces and higher wages, they push investment to younger economies, which offer higher rates of return. And high costs in older economies reach beyond wages — into taxes, which are used to pay for age-related public spending like social security. China’s youthful labor force thus helps the country maintain its low-cost economic ecosystem and attract foreign investment that seeks the higher returns a “younger” economy offers, whether or not any particular pot of foreign money goes to employ young people.
China is not the only country in which a young labor force attracts global businesses and investors. Much of the developing world, particularly in Asia and Latin America, operates the same way. An outspoken champion of outsourcing, Nandan Nilekani, a former head of Infosys, the Indian technology giant, is well known for promoting India as a place to corral young workers in an otherwise aging world. Call it “global age-arbitrage.”
THE OTHER PART of the feedback loop, the role globalization plays in speeding up how fast a country ages, is tied to the two big reasons that populations grow older. First and most obviously, more and more individuals are living longer than ever before. Average life expectancy is increasing nearly everywhere. Longer life is itself a kind of byproduct of globalization, the result of the worldwide exchange of public-health technology, medical breakthroughs and, perhaps the most life-giving development of all, the spread of literacy. Every person who can read has access to the world of health information, including Internet sites and government pamphlets on diseases. Countries educate their people in order to make it possible for them to enter the mainstream of global commerce and that extends their life spans — making the countries older.
Above all, however, for communities or countries to age, people must have far fewer children. Today, almost no place in the developed world has a total fertility rate of 2.1 children, the replacement rate needed to keep a population from declining. The population of nearly every developed country is expected to shrink before midcentury. When emerging nations gear up for the global economy, they tend to take two steps that encourage smaller families: they extend educational and employment opportunities to young women, and they urbanize. Urban women postpone having children until they are prepared for and established in their jobs. Rearing children in the city is also more expensive. Cities serve the global economy, and the global economy drives people to cities. (According to the U.N. Population Fund, about half the world’s population was urban in 2007, but by 2030 nearly 80 percent of it will live in the cities of the developing world.) The world gets older.
Such urbanization and globalization can take hold with remarkable swiftness. Japan was one of the youngest countries in the world until around 1950, and now its population is arguably the world’s oldest. (Its median age will exceed 56 by midcentury, up from 43 today.) The median age in Western Europe today is just over 40; it will rise to near 50 by 2050. Population aging did not always happen so quickly. France was the first country in the world to see its share of 65-year-olds double, from 7 percent to 14 percent; this took about 115 years, starting in 1865. But China will experience the same doubling in 25 years.
One exception is the United States. The country is subject to the same two big trends — longer lives, smaller families — that are aging much of the world’s populations, but we are not growing old as fast as countries in East Asia and Western Europe. Our median age will climb only 3 years, to 40, by 2050, a rate slowed by the arrival of young immigrants, including millions from Latin America.
Of course, immigration for one country means emigration from another — and an older population left behind. Spain, which rivals Japan as the world’s oldest country, was for much of the 20th century one of the youngest nations in the West. Before 2000, it had virtually no foreign-born residents. Today, nearly 12 percent of Spain’s population is foreign born. Among the arrivals are hundreds of thousands of Ecuadoreans (many of them female caregivers for elderly Spanish) whose absence at home increases the median age of Ecuador’s population. More than one in 10 Ecuadoreans has left in search of work, and the loss of so many of the country’s youngest and most enterprising workers means Ecuador has little chance of developing. Recently, its president initiated the Welcome Home Program to lure emigrants back with tax breaks and money to start businesses.
How do globalization and an aging population affect the American workplace? According to the Economic Policy Institute, 2.3 million American jobs were lost to China alone between 2001 and 2007. Susan Houseman, an economist at the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research in Kalamazoo, Mich., notes that older employees in manufacturing jobs who are low-skilled have been among the most vulnerable workers of all. And when older workers lose their jobs, they search longer for new ones than people do in other age groups. They find it hard to remake themselves with new skills and grow less employable over time and more desperate to accept low pay. This, along with the prospect of additional outsourcing abroad, drives down the earnings of those older workers who manage to stay employed. Looking at data ending in 2002, a team of researchers including economists from the World Bank and the National Bureau of Economic Research found that older workers suffered greater income losses because of foreign outsourcing than women and union workers.
Keep in mind that these results predate the recent recession and the even more difficult times that have resulted for older workers. The ranks of the unemployed who are 55 and older grew 331 percent over the decade that ended last December. U.S. unemployment levels for workers over 50 are now at their all-time highs, nearly double what they were three years ago. AARP’s Public Policy Institute reports that from December 2007 to February 2010 the number of workers 55 and older who gave up looking for work rose more than fivefold, to 287,000 from 53,000. Far more people have retired early than anyone predicted. In 2009, there were 465,000 more applications for Social Security and disability benefits than there were the year before, as employers made it clear to older workers that they were not wanted. This increase was nearly 50 percent greater than what the Social Security Administration expected.
One conundrum for aging societies is how to keep older people employed at a time when economic conditions favor the young, whether nearby or far away. The workplace left to itself comes up with some solutions, but they require older workers to accept more “flexible” conditions, which often means joining the so-called contingent work force of part-timers, self-employed contract workers and temps hired through agencies. According to the AARP Public Policy Institute, 21 percent of workers over 65 are part time, compared with 16 percent for the overall work force. Self-employment is also climbing among older workers, and Americans over 50 are the most active group of entrepreneurs, often out of necessity. This partly explains an apparent contradiction: at the same time that unemployment among older workers is at a peak, the percentage of older people with jobs is also near a high, because more people must work to make ends meet.
In the United States, the transformation of older workers into a giant contingent work force is just getting started. This year, as baby boomers begin to hit 65, the “elder share” of the U.S. population begins a sharp climb. From 2010 to 2030, the number of Americans between 25 and 64 will climb by 16 million, but two-thirds of the increase will consist of people 55 and 64. Countries that are older than the U.S., that are further along in reshaping their workplaces, give a glimpse of the future. In Japan, retirees from the biggest companies are well provided for, but for many of the rest — workers at smaller companies, the self-employed — the fear of outliving their money is real. One in five elderly Japanese lives in poverty. So the Japanese stay on the job when they can. Since 2006, the number of Japanese still working after the customary retirement age of 60 has risen by more than 11 million. Most are officially retired but are back at their companies, under contract. They typically earn about half their former wages.
WILL THE WORLD ever grow young again? Perhaps, but not anytime soon. Today, many of the places that are growing old the fastest are in the developing world, largely because that’s where urbanization is most rapid. It is hard to conjure a situation in which people move back to the countryside and again have larger families. Instead, if past is prelude, today’s young countries like China will be the countries that in the not-distant future go shopping for younger workers in younger places. Those places will be transformed by satisfying an older China’s needs, and the cycle will repeat itself: when the world finds its next young place, that country may well age even more quickly than the formerly young countries that preceded it.
The rough adjustments that global aging imposes on populations can sound bleak. Nonetheless, the challenges do not trump what we gain by living longer. Remember, too, that smaller families enable parents to make greater investments in themselves and the children they do have. Still, as the world gets older, we need to anticipate how this extraordinary change might undermine our communities, weaken nations and push able older people to the side. There are also sobering geopolitical consequences to consider. It now looks as if global power rests on how willing a country is to neglect its older citizens. Faults in the welfare states of the West are highlighted by the world debt crisis. Fiscal woes driven by age-related expenses plague every level of government in the United States. Europeans take to the streets, strike and close down governments struggling to cover unsupportable pensions. The most advanced countries owe trillions in age-related public expenses. The most straightforward solutions, like higher payroll taxes to pay for benefits, raise the cost of doing business and chase off investors and producers to lower-cost economies. Mark Haas of Duquesne University has argued that aging forces all high-income democracies into triage mode. They can pay for income support and services for their elderly and drastically reduce financing for schools, defense, infrastructure and everything else, or they can decide older people will have to make do with far less.
China has gained new financial clout in relation to advanced industrial nations because it has grown rich enough as the youthful factory of the world to act as the developed countries’ banker. Yet the Chinese government says the country is still too poor to put a more comprehensive social safety net in place. Perhaps, but it is the financial sacrifices of its people that give China the means to lend trillions of dollars to the United States and other industrialized nations. That’s a bargain China may be happy to accept, but it, too, is caught in the irreversible dynamic of aging, and its demographic denouement is coming. By then, the United States will be older than it is now, but younger than most of the rest of the developed world, younger than much of the developing world and far younger than China. If we understand how aging populations and economic forces interact, perhaps we can make the most of our age and our youth.
The Elusive Small-House Utopia
Every year, in conjunction with a big trade show, the magazine Builder creates something it calls its “concept home.” The house is an exhibition on a theme — the 2004 edition, for example, was called the Ultimate Family Home — but also a commercial venture. Attendees of the International Builders’ Show can walk through a model, and when the show is over, the concept is quite literally put to a test when the finished house is offered up for sale on the open market. During the last decade’s real estate boom, the annual demonstration kept up with the times: designs abounded with baronial features like colonnades, cathedral ceilings and observation towers, and they sometimes topped 6,000 square feet. But then the crash came, wiping out credit lines and shaking the industry’s confidence. For this year’s show, Boyce Thompson, the editorial director of Builder, wanted a look more attuned to curtailed appetites, so he came up with a concept that he called a Home for the New Economy.
The most salient specification of the house was its modest proportions. At around 1,700 square feet, it was the size of the average American home built in 1980. Since then, new houses have on average grown by more than 40 percent, as dens have expanded into great rooms, and tubs and sinks have multiplied. “Houses got too big, because people were chasing investment gains and there was cheap money, and the industry responded by building houses that were too large,” Thompson says. “So we really wanted to focus people’s attention on doing smaller, better homes.” He points to Census statistics that show a slight decline in the size of homes built over the past two years and to a much larger drop in the square footage of those that have just started construction, and suggests that the market may be headed toward a more austere norm.
That’s certainly debatable. If dissecting the causes of the housing market’s crash is a task for economists, predicting its future is a fuzzier matter of sociology. Will Americans re-evaluate cultural assumptions that equate ever-larger houses with success and stability? Or will they invest more in their lived environments, figuring that with the demise of the quick flip, they are now in for the long term? In the absence of much real market activity, imaginations are free to run wild. The Home for the New Economy is one such exercise in speculation, a proposal that the future lies in denser, more walkable, modestly scaled communities. Marianne Cusato, who designed the Home for the New Economy, sees it as a rebuke to the ethic of the McMansion. “We’re not going to go back to 2005,” she says. “What was built then is not going to come back, and this is not a bad thing. What we were building was so unsustainable, and it didn’t really meet our needs.”
Cusato, who is 36, started her career drawing up million-dollar mansions, but she has made a name for herself by going smaller, designing a 300-square-foot Katrina Cottage meant to be a replacement for the trailers the government set up after the 2005 hurricane. When Cusato sat down to devise the Home for the New Economy, she tried to consider how families actually use their living areas. She started with a simple, symmetrical three-bedroom plan, excising extraneous spaces — the seldom-used formal dining room, for instance — while enlarging windows wherever she could and adding a wraparound porch. A result was a house that was compact, comfortable, bright and energy-efficient.
There was just one problem. Usually the concept homes are put up in partnership with a local builder, but this year’s conference was held in Las Vegas, perhaps the nation’s most disastrous real estate market, and it was presumed no investor there would be willing to take a risk, even a small one, on the Home for the New Economy. So Builder put together an interactive Web site and displayed Cusato’s design at a booth inside the conference hall. The concept was a hit with at least one developer, LeylandAlliance, which was working on master-planned communities in New York, Connecticut, Virginia and South Carolina. Cusato began working with the company to bring her idea to life. The Home for the New Economy would be given the opportunity, after all, to meet the actual new economy.
The spirit of constraint that Cusato means to tap isn’t purely a product of the recession. It’s a cultural thread that runs from Henry David Thoreau’s 10-by-15-foot cabin next to Walden Pond all the way to the New Urbanist communities that began appearing in the 1980s, reacting to the spread of soulless suburbanization by trying to recapture a traditional small-town aesthetic. But the wider buying public has never found much appeal in the idea that it ought to make do with less. “Builders have tried quality rather than size, but they always fail,” says Witold Rybczynski, an architecture professor at the University of Pennsylvania. “The market always says: We don’t care. If you’re giving us a smaller house, we don’t want it.”
Rybczynski speaks from experience. In 1990, he and a partner came up with a design they called the Grow Home, a 14-foot-wide row house that could be constructed for as little as $35,000. His intent was to produce something along the lines of Frank Lloyd Wright’s famed Usonians, dwellings devised during the Great Depression as housing for the working man, which later became a model for the tiny tract homes of Levittown. Rybczynski built a Grow Home in Montreal and wrote an article about it for The Atlantic, in which he posited that the “abundant resources that accounted for the success of the large single-family suburban house — unlimited land, cheap transportation and plentiful energy — can no longer be taken for granted.” That was 20 years ago. While the Grow Home design proved to be a niche success, it didn’t change popular tastes, which kept inflating in defiance of all warnings about sustainability. By the market’s 2007 peak, the average American house had surpassed 2,500 square feet.
“This happened at the same time as household size declined, so it’s a little bizarre,” says John McIlwain, senior resident fellow at the Urban Land Institute. “But people seem to have liked the idea of having extra bedrooms and lots of room, big kitchens and big master bedrooms and big master baths. I think it’s just cultural, an expression of wealth.” But it’s not just that — studies have found that lower-class homes in the United States are also much larger than comparable residences in Europe.
“To me, the answer is that we subsidized it massively,” says Christopher B. Leinberger, a housing scholar at the Brookings Institution. “Over the last 30 years, we saw one of the largest social-engineering projects in the nation’s history.” The mortgage tax deduction encouraged a vast expansion of homeownership, while Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac created new pools of capital through securitization. The federal government kept building highways to serve ever-more distant suburbs, where local authorities often mandated large home and lot sizes in the belief that it would encourage the construction of affluent communities. Facing a widespread revolt against property taxes, many of the same municipalities began financing suburban infrastructure — roads, sewers and so on — through “impact fees” levied at the outset of the development process. This and other factors effectively inflated the cost of developable land. The homebuilding industry, which was in the process of consolidating into the hands of a dozen or so publicly traded corporations, passed on the added expense to consumers through higher home prices. But because they enjoyed such economies of scale when it came to construction, the major homebuilders could offer buyers an inducement in return: a lot more room.
Some in the industry argue that buyers never truly craved all that surplus space and took it only because that was the way the marketplace measured the worth of their investment. “We have to get out of the dollars-per-square-foot mind-set,” says Sarah Susanka, an architect and author of “The Not So Big House.” “I’ve been on a crusade to get people to think this way for years.” She says she was inspired to write her book — which recommends that home-buyers adjust their space expectations downward by a third and spend the money they save on creating a well-designed interior — after years of hearing the same sentiment from her clients: they were hoping to make a profit at resale, so they had to meet the market’s space expectations, not their own. Susanka says that the success of “The Not So Big House,” which has sold hundreds of thousands of copies since its publication 12 years ago, proves there is room for alternate conceptions of value.
In today’s marketplace, homebuilders are finding that smaller models are selling more reliably, and many are reassessing old marketing assumptions. “In many of our markets, there was an attitude that whatever you buy, you need to stretch, because in two years you’ll be able to sell it for double,” says Jeffrey Mezger, the chief executive of KB Home, one of the nation’s largest builders. With quick profit expectations dispelled, the average size of a KB house has fallen by almost 20 percent since the peak. The company recently introduced a line called the Open Series, homes that have flexible floor plans and low energy costs and run as small as 1,200 square feet.
The trend does not necessarily indicate, however, that Americans have suddenly decided they desire less. Homebuilders are shifting to compete with the cut-rate prices of foreclosures. Nowhere in KB’s marketing for the Open Series will you glimpse the word “small.” Even some enemies of the McMansion say it’s impossible to make a selling point of asceticism.
“Everybody hates the Calvinist sacrifice; they just don’t want to hear of it,” says the architect Andrés Duany, a founding father of the New Urbanist movement and a mentor of Marianne Cusato’s. Duany argues that the sprawling homes of the last decade actually met a need, albeit imperfectly, by reproducing internally what suburban communities lacked: an exercise room substitutes for a park, a home theater for the Main Street cinema. Buyers will only accept smaller homes, he says, if their surroundings compensate them. “The idea that you can promote things — that a developer is actually going to come out and say, ‘Marianne’s house is more virtuous,’ is ridiculous,” Duany says.
A real, live edition of the Home for the New Economy now stands near the end of a street in North Augusta, S.C., behind a white picket fence in a residential development called Hammond’s Ferry. The house owes its existence, in part, to the ideals of LeylandAlliance, which builds communities in the New Urbanist vein, but it’s also a practical concession to the distressed times. Hammond’s Ferry, which is situated along the Savannah River, hit the market in 2006, initially offering up a street of antebellum-style residences that ran as large as 4,000 square feet and cost an average of $500,000. The Home for the New Economy, priced at about half that much, represents a definite adjustment.
“If there was a tactical error we made, it was in the direction of going more toward the ‘wow,’ ” said Turner Simkins, the general manager of the project, as we stood atop a condominium building and surveyed a street of generously proportioned homes with columned two-story porches. On a color map of the Hammond’s Ferry master plan, the building was surrounded by some 450 beige rectangles, lots mainly set aside for single-family homes. So far, 88 houses have been built, 78 of them sold, and many of the lots on the map were still covered by uncleared bramble. Simkins said the homes that were finding buyers, unsurprisingly, were those priced below $250,000, but the developer had found it difficult to convince upscale Southern builders that there was money in modesty. Marianne Cusato’s house was there, as much as anything, to provide a different model.
Some skeptics have questioned whether the Home for the New Economy actually demonstrates much of a change. “I really think the whole thing is a marketing ploy,” Witold Rybczynski says. “Seventeen hundred square feet is not a small house.” Yet in North Augusta, the problem with the place appeared to be quite the opposite: people had trouble imagining how you could sell something so minuscule. One day I had lunch with Cusato and Thomas Blanchard Jr., whose firm was marketing Hammond’s Ferry. Blanchard explained that along the Georgia border, the crash had actually caused new houses to grow even larger. Crown Communities, an Atlanta-area builder, had snapped up suburban land at depressed prices and was erecting billboards that crowed, “Houses from $47 a square foot.” One of its largest models was called the Titan.
Cusato wondered aloud about the “sustainability” of such development and said that she would prefer for people to think of a house’s value not in terms of price per square foot but in its cost per month, taking into account the ongoing expenses of heating and cooling. “They’re meeting a segment of the market that needs to be served,” Blanchard responded, diplomatically. “You can’t create markets; you can only respond to them.”
One afternoon, Cusato and I made our way through Hammond’s Ferry to see the Home for the New Economy, walking down streets scaled to be bicycle friendly and passing Manuel’s Bread Café, where the French chef cooks with ingredients from an on-site organic farm. The houses, big and small, were bunched close together on lots that averaged a fifth of an acre. Building at relatively high density helps LeylandAlliance to offset the profit it forgoes by reserving a substantial portion of land for public amenities, like a waterfront park, running paths and several restored ponds. Still, the small-town feel doesn’t come cheap. For the price Cusato’s house was going for, $280,000, a North Augusta consumer could just as easily get something truly titanic, if less neighborly.
“There’s this machine we’ve created, this expectation that you have to have this huge home,” Cusato said. We were joined at the house by its builder, David Blair, who financed the construction himself because no bank would do so. We walked through the front door, into a sunlit 25-by-15-foot living and dining room, which was adjoined by an open kitchen.
Cusato had never been inside this particular version of her home — she had seen several others in upstate New York, where LeylandAlliance has another development — and so Blair took over the tour to show us a few alterations he made to the design. Cusato had intended it to be adaptable. Buyers, Blair said as we walked upstairs, are “used to the McMansions, and they say it’s too small.” At the top of the staircase was a loftlike open space, adjoined by two bedrooms and a windowless chamber that the builder said could be put to use as an office. Then, at the end of the hallway, there was a door. Blair opened it, and we entered an unfinished room, measuring 260 square feet. Blair said that it could be used for storage, but for a buyer willing to pay the asking price, he would finish it as a master bedroom. He explained that this allowed the house to be advertised as having four bedrooms and 2,000 square feet — in other words, not as a small house, but one close to medium-size. “People still have this . . . what I call a hang-up about price per square foot,” the builder said.
Blair’s stratagem had brought the Home for the New Economy’s price, according to the accepted metric, down from $160 to $140 a square foot. But that was still almost three times the rate the billboards were advertising elsewhere. Since the home’s debut in June, it had received a fair amount of public attention, but it still hadn’t sold, and Blair had already been forced to drop what he was asking. “To sell a house in this market is tough,” Blair said. “We’re going to market the lifestyle — the homes follow the lifestyle.” And indeed, at an open house later that evening, the Home for the New Economy filled up with neighbors from around Hammond’s Ferry: singles, retirees, families with kids. “I think it’s taken folks a while to get the concept of what we’re doing down here,” said Walker Posey, who lives in a three-bedroom house. “Your dollar can go a long way in South Carolina in terms of square footage. But quality of life is not about square footage.”
Of course, these were people who had already bought into that proposition — and it was unclear how many others would accept the trade-off of space for lifestyle. For more than 60 years, at least, American consumers have dreamed of one day having enough room to stretch out. It may take more than the shock of hard times to downsize that particular fantasy.
A Kind of Hunt That Even Deer Can Get Behind
LAND BETWEEN THE LAKES, Ky. — The deer hunters returned to the tournament checkpoint tired and hungry, their camouflage clothing soaked with sweat. All were empty-handed — no big bucks for bragging rights, no fat does for venison. But that was the plan all along.
Armed with bolt-action 20-gauge shotguns mounted with digital scopes developed for military training, each hunter was given five blank shells a day. Each night, he returned the empty shells and firearm to tournament officials, who removed a memory card from the $1,200 scope. The 10-second video clips on the card were used to determine the most skillful hunter.
The tournament, held here in September by the American Whitetail Authority, was the first in the Whitetail Pro Series, the only hunting competition in which deer are stalked but not killed. After four qualifying events, what is being billed as the A.W.A. World Championship will be held this month in Mississippi.
The main goal of the series, according to Greg Koch, the founder of the group, is to reward hunters who consistently take clean shots on mature deer.
“In most states, you can kill one deer per season, and that hampers your ability to prove your skills,” Koch, 53, said.
The series is the latest example of technology transforming a traditional sport. Just as some baseball and football players are turning to advanced imaging technology to improve efficiency and performance, deer hunters can now in theory practice in the field without risk of maiming an animal or running afoul of game laws.
Though an amateur competition with no prize money at stake, the Whitetail Pro Series is modeled on the professional Bassmaster series, a catch-and-release competition widely credited with popularizing bass fishing and helping it become a multibillion dollar industry. Digital rifle scopes, Koch said, can enable hunters to track their prey out of season and help children build a solid foundation in ethical hunting, a component of which is to kill an animal as quickly and painlessly as possible.
“You can put a 12-year-old in the field and he may have a big buck walk by him,” Koch said. “But I can give you five images of five different deer, and that takes a lot of the luck out of it.”
After each of the three days of competition at Land Between the Lakes National Recreation Area, the hunters’ memory cards were loaded onto a computer. Typically, the image of a mature whitetail doe, or a buck, appeared on a large flat-screen television, the shotgun scope’s crosshairs tracking its movements. There was the sudden sound of a shotgun blast. The screen turned gray. The deer bolted.
The judges reviewed the clip frame by frame until the second before the gunfire. They noted the position of the crosshairs. If they were slightly behind the deer’s front shoulder, a bullet would have passed through the lungs, ensuring a quick death. Bonus points were awarded for the cleanest shots.
In addition to shot placement, scores were calculated by age class, so shooting an older and warier doe earned more points than shooting a young, naïve buck. For bucks, antler size was also figured in.
The competitors were filmed for a show to be carried by the Outdoor Channel in early 2011.
“We knew it was a revolutionary concept,” said Jeff Murray, a managing producer at Winnercomm, the production unit of the Outdoor Channel. “It is designed to be very educational. The viewers are very thirsty for information.”
The competition, Murray said, is based on the wildlife management practice of taking out the oldest animal from the group to check population growth.
“It will teach hunters how to judge the age of a deer on the hoof,” he said.
TV hunting shows, in fact, were the inspiration for the series, said Koch, a lifelong hunter from Broken Arrow, Okla., who has trained bird dogs, worked as a guide and started and managed private hunt clubs.
“Something I’d seen made me think that the guy I was watching on TV didn’t know what the heck he was doing,” he said. “These personalities would come in, and one of the guys that I guided, if I left him in the woods, he’d never find his way out; and he was on television trying to teach people how to be more successful. I really thought the guides or somebody like the guides need to be the ones teaching the public.”
Early this year, Koch interviewed more than 2,000 potential competitors at Bass Pro Shops sporting goods stores across the country, seeking out those who had hunted in multiple states without a guide. He identified 400 before winnowing the field to 40 competitors — 10 for each of the qualifiers.
“I don’t care how many big deer you shot — that doesn’t give you any more credibility with us,” Koch said. “I want guys that have exceptional skills.”
Koch said he envisioned the Whitetail Pro Series as a vehicle to educate nonhunters and beginners. The competition, in his opinion, will never replace actual hunting, and he emphasized that he thought killing for competition was unethical.
“To kill an animal to score it is just not what the sport is all about,” he said. “It wasn’t until I ran across this piece of equipment in 2006 that I realized that’s the way to do it.”
That equipment is the DigitalHunter rifle scope, by Elcan Optical Technologies. It works like a normal hunting scope but captures the image of the shot in digital video or still photographs. When the hunter spots a deer and presses the record button, he has 10 seconds to aim and fire.
At Land Between the Lakes, the hunters pursued deer in 90-degree heat across 37,500 acres that the United States Forest Service opened to the group. With white oak acorn mast covering the forest floor and creating a widespread food source, the deer were unpredictable.
Hunters were required to wear an orange cap and vest. The use of calls and scents were allowed, but bait was banned.
Afterward, the hunters ate dinner and waited for the judges. Todd Hamilton, a cabinet designer from Oswego, Ill., said he was not used to the early-season climate in southern woodlands.
“We’re so ate up with stuff,” he said, rolling up his pants to expose a leg pockmarked with chigger bites.
Across the table, Chip Steely, from Dexter, Ky., said he was not bitten.
“What’s your secret?” one hunter asked.
“Pantyhose,” Steely replied, and after the laughing stopped, he said he used a permethrin-based repellent.
The judges finished their scoring. Scott Adams of Murray, Ky., was declared the winner, followed by Steely. They will move on to the championship.
Hamilton, who finished third, said he was drawn to the tournament because of the group’s emphasis on clean shot placement and on education.
“That’s been my big pet peeve lately: people are almost accepting wounding,” Hamilton said. “There’s been something lost in our heritage. There’s been a disconnect. I call it the dumbing down of our instincts.
“I was raised that when we butchered or slaughtered something, it goes fast and it’s quick, and that should be our goal, not to wound anything. And where I live, hardly anybody takes their kids hunting — virtually nobody. There are a lot of kids that would like to do it. And some kids are lucky enough to try it on their own, but they’re missing those little steps.”
