Franklin's tireless volunteer and activist Casper Green was honored this week by Community Newspapers, Inc. as 2007 Franklin Person of the Year - a well-deserved title for a true community asset.
And now for the request: I hope that Mr. Green will use his platform - and further serve the local senior citizens for whom he has already done so much - by exerting his influence on local developers and city officials who continue to create and approve site plans that ignore the needs of less-mobile seniors.
Yes, I speak specifically of the Shoppes at Wyndham Village as one particularly sad example - a project for which Mr. Green expressed unqualified support, and for which he mobilized the senior constituency.
It was unfortunate to see the very people who will be most adversely affected by the "Shoppes" vehicle-centric site plan used as they were - - though, it should be stated, their support was not so much for the project itself, but for developer Mark Carstensen, who has contributed generously to senior causes. One can hardly blame them for "Supporting Mark," which was the phrase I heard over and over.
But there is a greater issue at stake, as we are reminded by authors Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Jeff Speck in their book Suburban Nation:
Most elderly are neither infirm nor senile; they are healthy and able citizens who simply can no longer operate two tons of heavy machinery. The phenomenon of suburban auto dependency is not just a theory for these people. It is the reason we see otherwise reasonable men and women falsifying eye exams and terrorizing their fellow motorists. They know that the minute they lose their license, they will revert from adulthood to infancy and be warehoused in an institution where their only source of freedom is the van that takes them to the mall on Monday and Thursday afternoons.
It should not be surprising that contemporary suburbia, with its strict separation of land uses, has inadvertently segregated the elderly from the rest of society.
See also: Complete the Streets and the AARP.
Andres Duany in TIME Magazine (including audio interview).
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