More people 55+ are moving to Cary to live out their golden years. Is the town ready?

Darryl Mills, 80, says retiring to Cary is one of the best decisions he’s ever made.

Mills is originally from South Africa but has been a U.S. citizen since the late ‘70s and a North Carolina resident for 11 years, ever since work took him Goldsboro.

“When I retired, I decided that was not the place for me to retire,” he said.

So Mills followed a few friends to Cary.

At first, he says he was a bit lonely on his own. But through Cary’s Senior Center, he found the SearStone retirement community and fell in love with the community and connection he found there, where he still lives with his partner. Other retirement communities he called had wait lists of years.

Between SearStone’s amenities, the restaurants and community of Cary and trips into Raleigh for the opera and symphony, Mills is content with his retirement.

And he is one of many North Carolinians who have moved to Cary to live out their golden years.

While the town itself has grown by 29% in the last decade, according to Mayor Harold Weinbrecht’s blog on the Cary Citizen, Cary’s population of 55 and over increased from 12% of the town to 18% from 2010 to 2020.

The recently approved Affordable Housing Plan states that residents over 55 “have made up nearly half of total population growth since 2010.”

The mayor’s blog post included several snippets of interesting data. Nearly a quarter of Cary’s population is foreign-born, Cary’s millennial population is catching up with the national average, and Cary is the oldest of North Carolina’s 14 top municipalities.

For Morgan Mansa, Intergovernmental affairs liaison for the town of Cary, this comes as no surprise.

“We’ve been in the top five places that seniors gravitate toward in North Carolina for quite some time,” Mansa said.

One of the town’s top priorities in building the new affordable housing plan was making room for seniors. Mansa, who manages all of the housing programs in Cary, said the town spoke with senior advisory boards and did community outreach to understand how best to serve seniors, keeping them connected to the community and in their homes as long as they wanted to be there.

The first program geared at helping seniors ‘age in place’ was called Healthy Homes Cary, where the town provided loans to help seniors keep their houses habitable.

But, Mansa says, people weren’t taking out loans to keep up their homes. It turns out, some senior citizens would rather put up with potentially dangerous issues — doorways too small for wheelchairs or showers without seats and grab bars — than take out a loan that might burden their children in a few years.

Today’s version of the program is a grant for anyone making 65% or less of Cary’s median income, and it sees many more applicants. Mansa says the town went from working with around five households a year to an average of 20.

The success of this program created a framework for seniors to be included in the development of the affordable housing plan, and Mansa has heard concerns about both affordability and accessibility through those conversations.

“The seniors were like, well, all this new construction that’s happening, what can you do to make sure we’re a part of that conversation?” Mansa said. “So that’s kind of been phase two, talking with developers about not only affordability but can we make sure that affordability includes seniors.”

Aligning interests

Mansa admits that other communities might set their sights on attracting young new residents, but Cary isn’t only interested in attracting millennials.

“We really like that, for whatever reason, people feel like Cary could be a place to retire to,” Mansa said. “That means a lot because seniors tend to look for places that are safe, that have high amenities because they’re retired. We think that shows that we’re doing something right.”

But Mansa doesn’t think that attracting millennials and seniors are necessarily opposing goals.

Cary seniors want walkability and smaller housing options. So do the millennials.

Mansa admitted the focus on walkability that she heard from seniors surprised her.

“I assume that that’s something that younger people want, Millennials and Gen Z,” Mansa said. ”But seniors are like ‘No, please build these developments close to other things, because we care about that, too.’”

Serving low-income seniors

The recently approved Affordable Housing Plan shows that the senior population with a household income of $100,000 or more has grown the most since 2010 and now represents the largest contingent of Cary’s 65+ population.

But retention is just as important as expansion, and the next largest group of seniors by household income make less than $35,000 per year. That population increased by 50% between 2010 and 2018.

“We have folks who have lived in Cary for generations,” Mansa says. “And so, as the growth continues in Cary, we were like, we’ve got to make sure that people are able to stay here. So. So that’s why that preservation program is so important.”

The Housing Plan notes three affordable housing units that exclusively serve low-income seniors, Highland Terrace, Willow Creek, and Ryan Spring. Mansa said the discussions with seniors were vital to securing funding for Ryan Spring when it faced a deficit of $250,000 during construction.

Together, those units only serve around 6% of Cary’s low-income seniors.

Howard Manning, executive director of Dorcas Ministries and himself a senior in Cary, sees some of the ill effects of rising property values.

“The biggest impact that the housing market, the lack of affordable housing, is having on seniors is that the rising rent and housing costs, because of our fixed income, actually force some of them, not only out of their home, but out of this community.”

Through Dorcas, Manning helps provide rent assistance for a few months and food to older people struggling to stay in their homes on a fixed income amidst development. The ministry sees many people who have a home, but who spend half of their income on rent or a mortgage. So when a transmission fails or an accident brings on an unexpected medical bill, the crisis can affect their ability to stay in their homes.

“We can help some, but sometimes it’s like putting a BandAid on a gaping wound,” Manning said.

For other populations of struggling Caryites, Manning says they can offer career support and job training. But many older people don’t see the point of retraining for a few years of work.

“If you take a person that’s in their 40s or maybe somebody in their 50s, you can retrain them for other careers, and they don’t mind,” Manning says. “But most of our aging population are kind of fixed in our ways. By the time we learn a new trade or career, one doesn’t live long enough to benefit from it.”

After a few months of assistance, some seniors still find themselves forced to move out of their homes and what’s worse, says Manning, away from support systems. Often, the team at Dorcas has to refer seniors to services outside of Cary for longer term support.

“They’re moving out of the physical facility or surroundings. But they probably developed a network of support or care within their community of families and loved ones,” Manning says. “And if you have to pick up boots and move somewhere else, that means you’ve got to build a whole new support system in this new place. Sometimes that can be even more traumatic than just having to leave one facility and go to another one.”

The number of senior citizens Dorcas assists has stayed pretty consistent over the last decade, even as Cary’s older population surges.

“Our senior population is growing, but a lot of that growth is people that are financially independent,” Manning says.

When pressed for issues around retiring in Cary, Mills could only think of the isolation caused by the pandemic. His community was careful to retreat from the cultural amenities that made Cary such a great place to live, and Mills said residents couldn’t even go to the library. But the community made it through the pandemic with only a few minor cases of COVID-19. Now that 247 of the 250 residents are vaccinated and boosted, life is a little bit more normal.

This story was originally published March 9, 2022 at 1:24 PM.