Older adults' meanings of home, past and present: A qualitative and visual study of an age-segregated living facility in Detroit

This study investigated the past and present housing experiences and the meanings of home for a group of older, poor, African American adults over the age of 62, living in an age-segregated living facility in Detroit, Michigan. African American, poor, and older adults were the focus of this study because very little is understood in scholarly literature about their past housing experiences or present living conditions. The age-segregated living facility that acted as the setting for this project is a HUD 202 facility, located in Detroit and specifically built for older, low income residents of the city.;This study utilized a phenomenological research method to interview 30 older adults (19 women and 11 men) about their housing experiences. To support interviews, participants were asked to engage in photo-making of their homes to help fill out the "picture" of home garnered from the interviews. These photographs were used during interviews to prompt residents to discuss their meanings and experiences of home. Seven months of fieldwork also corroborated the stories and photographs.;Three major findings resulted from this research. First, older adults in this sample do not "attach" themselves to place in the same way literature currently suggests. Older, poor, African American men and women in this sample sometimes had a unique set of previous housing circumstances that suggest that they were attached to "everywhere" or "wherever" they lived. Alternatively, they spoke of being attached to their current living environment rather than of their previous ones. Even when older adults were attached to places, they often were attached in ways that spoke to inequalities situated in race, class, and gender.;Second, older people in this sample largely moved to age-segregated housing to escape previous housing environments or because they liked that the place was "nice", "new", and "safe". Many older adults discussed previous living environments as "bad" places where they did not necessarily "fit" in with the other people who shared the space. Therefore, age-segregated housing served as a way to escape deleterious urban neighborhoods in Detroit.;The third findings chapter reveals that older adults in this study created a "city-within-a-city" within the age-segregated facility, because the surrounding neighborhood did not support the needs of everyday life (e.g., social interaction, or grocery shopping). Participants used their private apartments to build and maintain private identities. As a set of findings, the results speak broadly to the gaps in theories about the residential environments of older people and the need for theory-building and more empirical research on the meanings and experiences of housing and home for older, urban, poor, African Americans living in Detroit.