ELDERLY CHOOSE RETIREMENT COMMUNITY LIVING
NO longer are retirement communities looked upon by the elderly as ''old-age homes.'' More and more Americans of advanced age are moving into them, social researchers say, not to withdraw from active life in their later years, but for the positive support of others like themselves. An awakening of ''aging group consciousness,'' of group pride and feelings of self-worth among the elderly, is perhaps the most important of the findings of social scientists and researchers investigating the still-new field of retirement living, a field that until recently was without basic statistics. Until a private research study by University of Michigan investigators was published 21 months ago, it was not even known how many retirement communities there were in the United States, much less precisely who was living in them. Today's best estimates are that about 924,000 people now live in 2,363 nongovernmental retirement communities throughout the country and 600,000 others are in retirement housing provided under United States Department of Housing and Urban Development programs, a small but significant portion of the estimated 27 million Americans 65 years old and older. And sociologists who study housing patterns of the elderly expect that even more people will move into such communities as life expectancies increase and the older population expands.
