The Retirement Housing Setting

The paper describes and analyzes selected environmental aspects of six widely varying retirement housing facilities, in particular, the ecological variable of site boundaries. The analysis tests a model predicting thar perceived community support in crises will be a joint function of site permeability and service availability. Data collected from interviews with 600 residents fit the model and showed that in settings with good service availability (five sires), the lower the site permeability, the greater the perceived community support; the one site with poor service availability, as well as lowest permeability, evidenced the lowest perceived community support in crises.