What Makes a Community Age Friendly? Perspectives of Local Government Policymakers

• In Event: The Politics of Aging

Abstract

Public policy serves older Americans well in several ways but skirts challenges in major areas—one being the “age (un)friendliness” of many communities. Scholars anecdotally attribute these shortfalls partly to policymaker ambivalence about devoting new resources to older adults. Using an original survey of local government policymakers in the United States, this paper examines whether and how policymakers show ambivalence around actions to foster age friendly communities by investigating whether a partial form of agenda denial—which scholars term “issue containment”—characterizes policymakers’ remarks about local conditions relevant to older adults. It finds qualified evidence that it does.

Author

• Jacqueline M. Chattopadhyay, University of North Carolina at Charlotte