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Changing
demographics in Gwinnett begs
'Will Gwinnett age gracefully?'
By Marina Peed
Executive Director
Gwinnett Housing Resource Partnership
Special to GwinnettForum.com
MARCH 1, 2002 -- Long regarded as a suburban bedroom
community of white, two-parent families with SUVs, Gwinnett County
has grown with a resident diversity to match it's economic strength
with diverse commercial enterprises.
When we talk about "d" word (diversity), the first issue
that comes to mind typically is race and ethnicity. While Gwinnett
is much less homogenous than before (67 percent of the residents
are white, not of Latino/Hispanic origin), we as a community are
also more diverse in terms of age and the types of households in
which we live. This is often counter-intuitive to what we observe
in our daily travels.
For example, Gwinnett County has the largest, and arguably the
best, public school system in the entire state. (I'm guilty of contributing
to that student head count and could not be prouder of our schools.)
With the Buford City Schools included, we have more than 120,000
youth in our public schools.
So you might be surprised to know that the majority of households
in Gwinnett (55 percent) do not have children under the age of 18.
The 2000 Census figures show that three-fourths of the 202,317 households
in Gwinnett County consider themselves "family households."
Of those family households, less than half (42.3 percent) have children
under the age of 18.
We are getting older in Gwinnett County, too. Gwinnett's Senior
population (persons 65 years and older) totaled 31,600 persons in
the 2000 Census. Many seniors are married or living with relatives,
but a growing number, typically women, are seniors living alone
(6,171).
I've been talking to more "Boomerang parents" lately
- parents who send their kids off to college only to see their college
grads return to the nest. Why are they moving back home? The most
common reasons cited are to pay down the debt they've accumulated
while at school (student loans, credit cards and car payments are
just the beginning these days), and to find a job that pays a living
wage in a community where they would like to live. Parents are surprised
at how much the cost of rental housing has increased since they
rented a couple of decades ago.
I've also been hearing from the "Sandwich Generation"
- singles and couples who work to care for their dependent children
and also their aging parents. They are caught in an exhausting vortex
of meeting job demands, child rearing challenges, and health and
housing issues of aging parents. We are hearing many more requests
for an apartment that is affordable to a senior on a fixed income
that is also convenient to the family home.
Unfortunately, we do not have many neighborhoods in Gwinnett County
that are friendly to mixed generations. There are limited housing
styles for our aging and often single population to "downsize"
into for ease of maintenance, convenience to services, and designed
with accessibility considerations in mind.
As the new century progresses, I hope we give some thought to how
we as a community can create a healthy, safe living environment
for all our residents - those in their early years, those balancing
work and family, and those who retired from the workforce and helped
shape the people we are today and the community in which we live.
We each have a self-interest in this issue, as we deal with aging
relatives, employees who are caring for young and old, and the likely
event that we will each retire ourselves someday.
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Number
1.86, March 1, 2002
