over 1 year ago

My parents were in their early 40s in 1969, the year we moved to the massive Co-op City housing development in the Bronx. My brother and I were preteens.

When it was completed a few years later, Co-op City had more than 15,000 apartments, most of them in high-rises scattered across 300 formerly swampy acres that had once been the Freedomland amusement park. Within a few years, the community's schools and shopping centers appeared. Most of Co-op City's occupants were working-class laborers and civil servants, drawn mostly from elsewhere in the borough. Direct and indirect subsidies made their new apartments affordable.

My brother and I both left for college within a decade. Our parents stayed until 1990, when they retired, departed for the suburbs of central New Jersey and rebuilt their lives around the activities of the local senior citizens' center. But many of their peers stayed in Co-op City, and quite a few of the kids my brother and I grew up with ended up staying with their parents, or inheriting apartments when their parents died.

For thousands of people like my parents, Co-op City became a "naturally occurring retirement community," also known as a NORC. The survivors of their generation who have stayed put, now advanced far into old age, have had the benefit of family, friends, familiar neighborhood institutions and a host of social services to sustain them. The phenomenon of this open-air retirement home that came into being quite by accident has been apparent for more than a decade. The New York Times wrote about it as far back as 2002. (1)

In New York, Medicaid pays for a lot of the services these behavioral health marketing plan need. To the extent that Medicaid is a low-income health care program, this is not necessarily surprising. Yet what makes New York's situation different is that Medicaid often covers even those services that don't have much to do with health care as most people understand it. In literature about the "Health Homes" initiative, introduced in 2012, the state's Medicaid administrators described the function of a "care manager," an individual who coordinates those seeing to an individual's medical, behavioral health and social service needs. The theory is that by making sure people can live independently in their own homes, Medicaid saves money on hospital costs, ambulance rides, repetitive doctor visits and, most of all, nursing home care.