Deinstitutionalization and age friendly urban transformations

The deinstitutionalization of the long-term care is the main direction outlined in the recent European documents. In recent years, how best to finance livelihood, housing and long-term care for elderly had become highly topical issues. The key issue in the financing debate is how far people should fund their own living and lodging expenses and how far they should be publicly funded. To respond to this challenge, the Commission and Member States set out a number of recommendations and acts but not much has been done on the question of how to support the changes of urban structures, which are influenced by population aging. How Slovenia can follow this direction is discussed in this paper. This article provides an answer to the question: (a) what kind of housing do the seniors in Slovenia prefer after a substantial decrease of their functional capacities, i.e. when they already need long-term care services, (b) what are the possible solutions and (c) how to finance them. We found that the construction of housing for seniors can be developed in different types of structures and that there is a substantial gap between the needs and the availabilities of housing arrangements in Slovenia, which also increases the rigidity of the Slovenian housing market and reduces land rent in comparison with USA and Western Europe. Seniors using long-term care services provided by municipalities in their own homes, living outside the main Slovenian central places, were included in the survey. To identify the preferred structure of the built environment for seniors we organized 3 groups of interviews with assisted living inhabitants from three Slovenian municipalities and evaluated the percentages of each desired type of housing and care. The available financial sources have been analyzed and the way how to realize the wishes of seniors have been evaluated and structure of possible sources presented. The study could give different results in the case of metropolitan areas, e.g. for the case of Ljubljana or even for Maribor, but the general directions stay the same.