NORC’s = Naturally Occurring Retirement Communities

Not Exactly like the Village Model

Recently, I’ve been involved with the Village Movement and working on organizing a new Village in my home town. I’ve been a fan of the Villages idea for years since I learned about the Beacon Hill Village where the movement started in 2002.

The Village model involves a local grassroots, nonprofit Village forming where members join for annual fees ranging from $200-900 across the country and then have access to a range of services. Members join in activities together, recommend service providers to each other, are provided with a very well screened list of other service providers, provide volunteer services for each other, and can receive a host of volunteer services themselves.

The NORC’s, from what I understand, are a little different. They range in shape and size across the country so each of them are a little different, too, reflecting their communities and members. There is no membership fee so the NORC’s are usually affiliated with a not for profit organization, government grants, donors and other fund-raising sources that allow them to offer services for no charge to members.

NORC Movement Founder Fredda Vladeck

The founder of the first NORC is Fredda Vladeck whose wonderful interview I read yesterday: Naturally Occurring Retirement Communities: An Interview with Fredda Vladeck.  

Fredda was a geriatric social worker in NYC in the mid-1980’s and began to notice a lot of older people coming in to the ER with issues that could have easily been addressed – and prevented – at home if they had had the support and knowledge.

Many of these people lived at Penn South Mutual Redevelopment Houses in Chelsea, a cooperative housing development built in 1962 by the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. There were 6,200 residents with 5,000 them seniors.  

Many of them were old labor organizers who had devoted their lives to the unions and so did not have traditional family support systems. Fredda designed a unique program to empower these people to age in place – her program became known as a NORC.  Now there are dozens in NYC alone and hundreds across the US.

NORC WOW’s

The NORC’s are not just located in housing complexes, there are also NORC WOW’s – Naturally Occuring Retirement Communities Without Walls in communities such as the St Louis NORC which consists of a 3 square mile neighborhood.  NORC’s typically have over 50% of the population as older adults and can result from:

• In-migration: a location where retirees move because of things like access to services and quality of life,
• Evolution: where a community naturally ages together, and
• Out-migration: where younger working folks tend to move to other locations leaving older people behind.