Ageing in Unsuitable Places

Much of the focus of ageing in place policy is concerned with the provision of support to enable older people to age in the community in residences adapted to their needs. There has been little examination of why older people make choices to age in particular places in later life. In this paper, we drew on 143 interviews with older people in New Zealand to examine the narratives older people use to describe their housing preferences in later life. Older people drew upon personal and public narratives to story housing in later life, and construct four identifiable identities: ‘practical planner’, ‘rugged pioneer’, ‘where I belong’ and ‘rooted in place’. This analysis demonstrates that some older people do narrate decisions to age in ‘sensible’ places with good access to services and have clear plans for change as their physical health declines. Other older people live proudly in unsuitable places and do not wish for support to move or accommodations made to their housing. These older people draw upon narratives of place as foundational to their identity, of relationships with people both living and dead as social relationships that bolster their identity and of housing as part of situated lifelong narratives. Both the situation of their home and the condition of the home provide the backdrop to alternative narrative identities that require them to remain in housing because of, or irrespective of, its unsuitability. To understand the limitations and the possibilities of ageing in place, we need to identify the multiple narratives that structure the lives of older people. By doing so, we can support ageing in place processes that do not disrupt the strong identities that have been developed in and through housing.