Apartment Dwellers Research Articles

Risk factors for West Nile virus infection and meningoencephalitis, Romania, 1996.

In 1996, an epidemic of 393 cases of laboratory-confirmed West Nile meningoencephalitis occurred in southeast Romania, with widespread subclinical human infection. Two case-control studies were performed to identify risk factors for acquiring infection and for developing clinical meningoencephalitis after infection. Mosquitoes in the home were associated with infection (reported by 37 [97%] of 38 asymptomatically seropositive persons compared with 36 [72%] of 50 seronegative controls, P<.01) and, among apartment dwellers, flooded basements were a risk factor (reported by 15 [63%] of 24 seropositive persons vs. 11 [30%] of 37 seronegative controls, P=.01). Meningoencephalitis was not associated with hypertension or other underlying medical conditions but was associated with spending more time outdoors (meningoencephalitis patients and asymptomatically seropositive persons spent 8.0 and 3.5 h [medians] outdoors daily, respectively, P<.01). Disease prevention efforts should focus on eliminating peridomestic mosquito breeding sites and reducing peridomestic mosquito exposure.

Kabylia, the House, and the Road: Games of Reversal and Displacement

This article traces the difficult relationship between tradition and modernity in several dwelling environments in Kabylia, Algeria. The traditional architecture of the Berber village of Bou Mansour structures a game of reversal that regulates the delicate relationship between two contradictory spheres of life: the outside world of masculine confrontation and the inside world dominated by feminine presence. However, dwelling and building practices in the village increasingly show disrupting signs of displacement that have to do with the exodus of residents. In the provincial capital of Tizi Ouzou, modern apartment dwellers seem restlessly caught in a continuous move between the town and their villages of origin, searching for an impossible synthesis of tradition and modernity. Returning end-of-career migrants in Beni Yenni, on the other hand, realize their own desire of ambivalence by introducing in the home village-system building and dwelling practices displaced from their successful urban and modern experiences.

Mama Might be Better Off Dead: The Failure of Health Care in Urban America (review)

196 Review MAMA MIGHT BE BETTER OFFDEAD: THE FAILURE OF HEALTH CARE IN URBAN AMERICA By Laurie Kaye Abraham, pp. 289. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993, $22.50. Mama Might Be Better Off Dead is a powerful and revealing ethnography of one African American family and its struggle with the prevailing health care system in the United States. Author Laurie Kaye Abraham, in the role of an objective observer, provides a gripping account of four generations of the Baneses, an impoverished urban Chicago family, as they survive multiple medical catastrophies. Somehow, though, they always seem to make it to the next day. Mama Might Be Better Off Dead also reveals how government health care polides fundion when they "hit the streets." The book follows the Banes family for one year, chronicling the family's experiences through home and community life, dialysis counseling and treatment , hospital visits, and dodors' appointments. The author guides the reader through a myriad of complex medical issues that confront some of America's poor on a daily basis. Each chapter describes in detail yet another medical-sodal scenario in which the Baneses are forced to adjust to their dismal plight. Abraham also vigorously reports on the radal inequalities and politics of substandard living conditions, dialysis treatment, government insurance, patient and caregiver issues, mental health issues, inner-dty emergency room care, personal responsibility, preventive care, organ donation and transplantation , interaction with medical professionals, right to life, quality-of-life issues, and how treating the poor is "bad" for business. Embedded within each of these issues, however, is a complex array of other aspeds facing the Baneses, including the administration of social services, employment, intergenerational issues, transportation, long-term care, and, to a lesser extent, family and personal relationships. The Baneses live in North Lawndale, one of Chicago's poorest inner-dty (a term that is often a euphemism for areas inhabited primarily by poor blacks) neighborhoods. Only 8 percent of the neighborhood's 8,937 buildings are habitable. The rest are abandoned, on the verge of collapse, or in need of repair. North Lawndale is a community surrounded by numerous medical facilities, including urban and university hospitals, private medical complexes, the Veterans Aclministration Medical Center, clinics, dialysis centers, mental health facilities, and sodal service offices. The VA center has the highest Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved · Vol. 9,No. 2 · 1998 ________________________________________________________(Quails 197 concentration of hospital beds in the United States, some 3,000 among its four institutions. But while this location may at first appear to be ideal as far as access to medical services is concerned, it is ironic that the poor, espedally African Americans, in this Chicago-area neighborhood are more likely to be underserved than any other group seeking the same medical services within this community. Such is the case with the Baneses, as Mama Might Be Better Off Dead vividly tells the story of "their access (or lack of access) to medical care." Unfortunately, there are many "Baneses" throughout urban America. The family is headed by Jackie Banes, who cares for her diabetic grandmother ; her husband, Robert, who suffers from kidney failure; a sick and dependent father; and three children. The family lives in the crowded condition of a small apartment dwelling. Throughout most of the year chronided in the book, Jackie does not work outside the home, although later she gets a job at a local school. Most of her time is spent caring for the physical, finandal, and emotional needs of her grandmother and providing support for her husband and father. Consequently, her children are forced to grow up quickly and become caregivers themselves, often assisting with their grandmother's care. Although Jackie does not appear to be bothered by the fad that her husband is unable to give her much physical or financial support, she does susped (and rightly so) that he is using drugs. She acts on her suspicions by not giving him a key to their apartment. One senses that Jadde probably hopes that Robert will just take care of himself and stay out of trouble. Robert could not get reliable, ongoing medical coverage until his kidneys failed when he was...

Herb's Pajamas (review)

both of which overshadow the function of paradox, the real source of poetry's transcendent beauty. For Simic, poetry boils down to two themes: "How strange I should be alive in this very moment. How strange the knowledge that I shall die one day." Such wonderment in the face of the sublime has long been a staple of his poetry yet, as he reveals in these essays, his mysticism is unalloyed by metaphysical speculation, which he deems to be an obstacle to the experience of mystery and awe. (KH) Life Among the Trolls by Maura Stanton Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1998, 86 pp., $11.95 Maura Stanton's fourth book of poems is a beautiful and uneasy examination of what it means tobe a human and a writer. The poems persistently return to realizations of the grotesque underpinnings of art and life. The title poem chronicles the speaker's mutation into one of the trolls that "try to look like humans/ In their wigs and smiling masks/ Hiding their bristly humps,/Their bulbous eyes and horns." The speaker remembers, "Once sponge/ Slipped off a hand I was shaking/ And I felt the hooked claw/Quivering , exposed." The best poems in this collection enact similar transformations , the hand turned to claw, the familiar changed into the foreign. The images that evoke revelations of how monstrous it is to be alive and writing are often grim or violent: a fall in a parking lot that reveals a blood clot, a poetess who is imprisoned and forced to burn her work, the student with a tumor in her chest. These poems juxtapose tales of how the body can fail with stories of how art might also falter. In "Ornaments," a gradeschool child is horrified by the amateurish Christmas ornament she creates: "I held it up, shocked that my eager hands/ Had turned desire for beauty into nothing." And in "Drugstore Trolls," the uncannily "half-human," garishly outfitted troll dolls, which include an artist troll, are "given lives/So like our lives they seem like mockery." Stanton's poems are plain-spoken narratives, but just when they begin to seem too prosy they take startling leaps, as in "Letters from Paradise," in which, describing an exotic landscape , the poet suddenly divulges that "the insects/That seem like butterflies , drifting, gorgeous,/Are really pieces of thehuman mind." This alternation between ambitious imagery and everyday detail mirrors the tension in the collection between the permanence of art and the unreliability of the body. At times, the poems that are overtly about writing become too heavyhanded , as in "Ballad of the Magic Glasses," where the speaker is doomed to wear glasses that allow her to see the ugly truths of the world around her. But for the most part the verse is sure-footed, successfully risktaking . In this beguiling collection, Stanton maps what appears to be familiar territory while gradually revealing its true strangeness. (TH) Herb's Pajamas by Abigail Thomas Algonquin, 1998, 210 pp., $17.95 The Missouri Review · 217 Longtime New Yorker Thomas describes the lives of four of the city's apartment dwellers in this collection of long short stories. Bunny, Edith, Walter, and Belle inhabit the same city block on the Upper West Side and live overlapping lives— walking by the same stores, talking to some of the same people—but never develop relationships with each other despite each person's need for companionship. Thomas' writing relies on small but telling details about each character : Bunny, a fifteen-year-old runaway , carries a small silver button in her pocket that she found on the ground and believes her missing sister left as a clue. Edith buys herself a piece of sexy lingerie, though she is fifty-three and has never seen a man naked. Walter takes comfort in the fact that he can walk through his apartment in the dark and never trip over a piece of furniture. And Belle makes her married lover put on her dead husband's pajamas before going out to smoke a cigarette in the middle of the night. All have lost someone close to them and are trying to fill the void in their own ways: Edith...

The Tent of Orange Mist (review)

Longtime New Yorker Thomas describes the lives of four of the city's apartment dwellers in this collection of long short stories. Bunny, Edith, Walter, and Belle inhabit the same city block on the Upper West Side and live overlapping lives— walking by the same stores, talking to some of the same people—but never develop relationships with each other despite each person's need for companionship. Thomas' writing relies on small but telling details about each character : Bunny, a fifteen-year-old runaway , carries a small silver button in her pocket that she found on the ground and believes her missing sister left as a clue. Edith buys herself a piece of sexy lingerie, though she is fifty-three and has never seen a man naked. Walter takes comfort in the fact that he can walk through his apartment in the dark and never trip over a piece of furniture. And Belle makes her married lover put on her dead husband's pajamas before going out to smoke a cigarette in the middle of the night. All have lost someone close to them and are trying to fill the void in their own ways: Edith fantasizes about marriage, while Bunny denies her sister's death and mounts a search for her. Walter foolishly believes his wife will return home, and Belle settles for sleeping with a married man. Thomas makes it clear that despite the vast differences in age and background , her characters' experiences are remarkably similar. Despite loneliness , all four maintain upbeat and creative attitudes about their situations , and a wealth of humorous details keeps the stories light. While each story is engaging on its own, all are enhanced by being juxtaposed with the other three. Thomas is also the author of a novel, An Actual Life, and a collection of short stories, Getting Over Tom. Herb's Pajamas, not quite story collection , not quite novel, shares with those books a sense of empathy for the characters' predicaments, leavened with skillfully chosen comic detail. (MT) The Tent of Orange Mist by Paul West Scribner, 1995, 263 pp., $22 The art of decadence consists of the transformation of repellent matter into the very stuff of sophisticated pleasure. The pleasures of decadence, though artificial, may be exquisite, and in The Tent ofOrange Mist, his fifteenth novel, Paul West shows himself to be their ardent devotee. An ostensibly historical treatment of the horrors unleashed during the sack of Nanking by the Japanese army in the winter of 1937, the novel centers on its adolescent heroine, Scald Ibis, and the story of her transformation under the tutelage of Colonel Hayashi, her brothel master, from stunned sex slave into elegant geisha. West complicates this sadomasochistic pas de deux with the somewhat improbable introduction of Hong, Scald Ibis' father, who undergoes his own painful transformation : former enfant terrible of high society, he turns into his daughter's impotent familiar spirit, haunting their former home-turned-bordello. Against a grotesque background of luridly depicted atrocities, these three characters play out their game of 218 · The Missouri Review domination, subversion and mutation to its inevitably tragic end. Given that hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians met all manner of grisly deaths at the hands of the Japanese, the voice of realism combined with an epic narrative technique might seem the medium best suited to convey the enormity of the rape of Nanking and to evoke the reader's sense of outrage. But West rejects such an approach, instead imposing on his central characters a frame as tight in its way as any drawing room in Jane Austen. The result of this close-in view is a sense of intimacy with these extraordinarily artificial creatures. Outrage would be beside the point here, as Wesfs book is about the temptations of art and the seductive powers of artifice. After being gang-raped by Hayashi and his troops, Scald Ibis' first gesture is to compose a poem in elegant calligraphy to her new master . "Feeling she was dipping her brush into darkest midnight, she painted in that magical modicum of animal glue and pine soot a message as ancient as her writing tools: ? give myself to you.'" Hayashi, more...

Russian Talk: Culture and Conversation during Perestroika

Soulful, theatrical, intense: Russian talk is notably full of existential musing and dark passion. However, despite the widespread appreciation of Russian talk, no one has analyzed it as a form of cultural performance. As one of the first Western ethnographers to undertake fieldwork in Moscow, Nancy Ries did just that. In this pioneering study, she shows how everyday conversation shapes Russian identity and culture. Dire stories about poverty, hardship, and social decay recited constantly during perestroika served to fabricate a common worldview-conveying a sense of shared experience and destiny, and casting Russian society as an inescapable realm of absurdity and suffering. Ries agues that while these narratives aptly depicted the chaotic events of the time, they also comprised a kind of contemporary folklore, generic in their lamenting, portentous tones and their culturally poignant details. The story of a grandmother who stands in line all day in order to bring home a precious kilo of sugar becomes a parable of feminine self-sacrifice and endurance. Sardonic narratives about frustrated communal apartment dwellers pouring hot pepper in their neighbor's soup pot challenge the myth of camaraderie and express the proverbial notion that revenge is sweeter for Russians than reconciliation. This insightful ethnography suggests the enormous power that ordinary talk has, in any society, to shape social and political attitudes, and to produce distinctive cultural patterns.

Alternative visions of home

Alternative Visions of Home Howard Gillette Jr. (bio) Living Downtown: The History of Residential Hotels in the United States. By Paul Groth. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. 401 pages. $35.00. In tracing the evolution of hotel living in America, Paul Groth pursues two, not always consistent, objectives. Speaking to the contemporary housing crisis by critiquing the long held bias favoring the single family dwelling, he seeks support for the construction and rehabilitation of more multi-unit buildings. To support his case, he documents how important such housing options have been over time, pointing out in particular the positive function of hotels, a factor often eclipsed by the discussion of apartment dwellings. Quoting a contemporary housing activist, he asserts that many of today’s homeless require rooms, not apartments, a need that could be satisfied if the relentless demolition of hotels, particularly at the lower end of the income scale, could be reversed. This subject is not entirely new. A main focus of his inquiry, single room occupancy (SRO), has been examined in two books by Robert Slayton. Chester Hartman has detailed the devastating effects of redevelopment on such housing in his study of San Francisco, a prime location for much of Groth’s evidence and a city especially noted for the high percentage of its residents living in hotels. Discussion of the antagonism towards multiple dwelling units has appeared in a number of studies of apartment houses as well as suburban development. Groth’s special contribution lies in the thorough documentation he provides of hotel living across a broad spectrum of time, space, and class. [End Page 410] Groth builds a hotel typology on a 1903 quote from New York hotel keeper Simeon Ford’s simple, but compelling characterization: We have fine hotels for fine people, good hotels for good people, plain hotels for plain people, and some bum hotels for bums. In devoting chapters to each of four housing types—palace hotels, mid-priced hotels, and rooming and boarding houses—Groth enlivens this picture of social stratification and class rank through a rich array of visual as well as written documents. Among his many striking findings are the ratio of five workers to every guest that could be found in the palace hotels in their heyday during the first part of the twentieth century and the fact that in Chicago in 1844 one in six residents lived in hotels. To deepen Ford’s characterization, Groth examines the material culture of each hotel type, utilizing not just surviving photographic evidence, but such illuminating documents as old menus, whose contrasting bill of fare, from rich to poor, underscore the truism, you are what you eat. Groth’s photographic evidence is particularly compelling, revealing strategic decisions of city location as well as a wide array of hotel uses. These photographs range from a group portrait of the Vanderbilt family and friends prepared to board a private train for an excursion from the Royal Poinciana Hotel in Palm Beach to a 1929 image of a light housekeeping room in Chicago where three women tenants have connected a hot plate to the gas wall fixture by way of rubber tubing, pinning newspaper to the wall to prevent grease from splattering. While not as fully informative, a series of measured drawings of different building types and their floor plans provide additional depth to the documentation. Comparisons are not merely anecdotal, but quantified to a considerable degree, both in the text and in several extensive tables constituting the appendix. The effect of Groth’s survey is to assure readers how widely used hotel space has been over time and how many positive functions it has provided. Even the cheapest flophouses, offering the barest material amenities, he argues, offered not just shelter but a true haven for those who most needed it. Against this record, he juxtaposes the campaign for a new city, one aminated by the opposition, as he puts it, to “building a civilization without homes.” Starting in the nineteenth century but gaining momentum in the early twentieth-century Progressive reform movement, criticism mounted against hotel living. Housing reformers imbued with a belief in environmental [End Page 411] determinism found many reasons to...

Higher Rates for Apartment Approved

Thomas J. Flatley owned an apartment complex in Malden, Massachusetts. In all, the complex had 13 buildings containing 919 apartment units. The city has a three‐tiered water rate system that includes, in addition to a flat rate for up to 1,000 cu ft (28 m3) of water, three incrementally higher rates per 100 cu ft (2.8 m3) as usage increases. Each building has a single water meter, meaning that Flatley pays much of the water bill at the high‐usage rates. The court assumed these higher charges were ultimately paid by the residents of the complex. Flatley challenged the rate system as creating an impermissible discrimination between consumers who receive the same service under similar conditions, i.e, between apartment dwellers and residents of single family homes. The trial court ruled against Flatley. The decision was upheld by an appellate court.

Isolation and identification of Neosartorya species from house dust as hazardous indoor pollutants

Isolation of ascomycetous microfungi from 58 house dust samples from detached and apartment dwellings around Kobe City revealed that species ofTalaromyces, Eurotium andNeosartorya were common ascomycetous propagules in the house dust.Neosartorya species accounted for 8.3% of the total identified isolates, of whichN. pseudofischeri was the main constituent, indicating that it may be a common potential fungal pathogen in the dwelling environment. Based on the specimens collected,N. pseudofischeri is described and illustrated as new to Japan.

Resuspension of Asbestos in Settled Dust in an Apartment Cleaning Situation

Abstract To gain information about the airborne asbestos levels to which an apartment dweller could be exposed as a C1 occupant, a simulation exercise was designed to study the upper limit of normal cleaning activity. Prior to the cleaning exercise, settled dust samples were collected to establish an index of asbestos fibers with potential for release from the surfaces in the apartment; microvac dust samples were collected from six locations where dust was to be disturbed. The cleaning exercise consisted of vacuuming the complete floor surface of the apartment continuously for 30 minutes using a commercial vacuum cleaner, followed by dry wiping of all appropriate surfaces for 30 minutes. During the cleaning, exercise area and personal air samples were collected. Before cleaning, asbestos in air measured less than 3 asbestos structures/L. During cleaning, air samples in the vicinity of the breathing zone of the person cleaning were below detection of phase contrast microscopy (PCM) (<0.04 f/ml) and 40–140 s/L by transmission electron microscopy. Dust samples showed levels of asbestos in the range of 2000–7000 str/cm2 except for one sample from the top of a gas heater. The index of asbestos in the settled dust, as determined by microvac test (weighted for surface area) was approximately 4000 str/cm2. Results showed a trace of asbestos was suspended into air at below the detection level of the PCM analysis. The resuspension factor “K” value was calculated to be in the range of 10−5 cm−1 using the average (personal) air sampling data and the average (area weighted) dust sampling data.

Indoor radon concentrations in Greek apartment dwellings.

Radon concentrations indoors were determined in 24 typical occupied apartments in the city of Thessaloniki, North Greece (40 degrees 38'N, 22 degrees 58'E), by means of 12 surveys, each 2 mo long, over a 2-y period starting October 1989. The ratio of the winter and summer averages for the first year of measurements was 1.8 +/- 0.78, and for the second year of measurements was 1.6 +/- 0.61. The indoor radon concentration in the summer (1990) period ranged between 8 and 81 Bq m-3, while in the winter (1989-1990) it ranged between 20 and 143 Bq m-3 for the first year of measurements or between 8 and 92 Bq m-3 in the summer (1991) period and between 12 and 119 Bq m-3 in the winter (1990-1991) for the second year of measurements. These results were obtained by type CN-85 alpha track detectors. Some parameters that influenced the concentrations, such as precipitation rates and use of fly ash in building materials, are discussed.

Conservative versus progressive strategies of Federal German Park Administrations in the 1950s and 1960s

The planning and designing of parks and other public open spaces has always been a political issue, in the sense that the location as well as the furnishing of these spaces for various human uses has reflected contemporary structures of power within a given society. Since the beginning of industrialization in Germany, which brought about the growth of the cities and the housing of the majority of its inhabitants in apartment dwellings without any private open space, the question of open space has become a prime matter of political discussion.

A flaw in gerontological assessment: the weak relationship of elderly superficial life satisfaction to deep psychological well-being.

This study assessed the degree of relationship between superficial and deep psychological adjustment among elderly individuals. Eighty-six middle-class, Anglo persons averaging seventy-six years of age participated. Roughly one-half of the sample were "independent living," with the other half "congregate apartment dwelling." A similarly equal representation of both sexes was achieved. Superficial psychological well-being was measured using Cantril's Self-Anchoring Scale for life satisfaction, while deep psychological well-being was measured using portions of the Eriksonian-based Measures of Psychosocial Development. It was hypothesized that no more than a moderate correlation (.50) would be found to exist between shallow and deep psychological adjustment. This hypothesis was confirmed, suggesting that gerontologists need to cease relying on superficial psychological measures for elderly assessment, and implement more depth-oriented tests. It is argued that failure to do this promulgates an unfortunate tradition of shallow, inaccurate psychological measurement within gerontology.

Psychometric characteristics of the Adult Functional Adaptive Behavior Scale (AFABS).

The Adult Functional Adaptive Behavior Scale (AFABS) was administered to 432 individuals who received geriatric support services as inpatients or senior city apartment dwellers. Factor analysis confirmed that the AFABS assesses a unified underlying dimension. Item analysis yielded strong indices of internal consistency. Supplementary analyses using the AFABS data and patients' placement level suggested that the AFABS provides precise measurement of adaptive behavior of elders who exhibit adaptive behavior deficits.

Survey of household hazardous waste generation and collection preferences in the City of Vancouver

A survey of over 200 households in Vancouver was conducted to determine stored quantities and generation characteristics of household hazardous wastes (HHW). Respondents were also asked to identify their preferences and concerns regarding the design of a collection program for these wastes. The results were used to estimate the quantities of HHW disposed of annually, and the quantities and profiles of wastes that could be received at a typical depot collection program in the City. Different operating parameters for both depot collection programs and household collection programs were compared and evaluated for effectiveness. Public willingness to participate in different collection programs was evaluated, and the collection needs of different residential areas were assessed. Several differences in waste generation and public willingness to participate were noted between areas of apartment dwellers and detached residence dwellers, and of high and low income levels. Recommendations were made to assist in the design of an effective HHW collection program for the City of Vancouver. Alternatives for the design of a collection program were developed. Key words: household hazardous waste, solid waste, household waste, hazardous waste, waste collection, small quantity generator, waste generation, special waste.

Relationship of MMPI Dependency and Dominance Scale Scores to Staff's Ratings, Diagnoses, and Demographic Data for Day-Treatment Clients

Scores on the MMPI Dominance (Do) and Dependency (Dy) scales of day-treatment clients were correlated with staff's ratings, age, sex, diagnosis, length of time in day treatment, and level of independent living. A total of 72 subjects, 36 men and 36 women between the ages of 20 and 65 years, completed the MMPI. Day-treatment staff were asked to rate the dependent and dominant characteristics of each subject on a unipolar adjective checklist of 20 10-point scales. Pearson product-moment correlations indicated significant associations between the two scales, between subjects' scores and staff's ratings, and between scores and age. Analysis of variance showed that (a) Dy scale T-scores were significantly higher than Do scale T-scores, (b) women scored higher on Dy and men scored higher on Do, (c) depressed subjects scored higher on Dy than did other diagnostic groups, (d) apartment dwellers scored lower on Dy than did subjects living in either group homes or with their families, and (e) Dy and Do scores did not vary with length of time in day treatment.

Electronic watchdogs

Enhanced by advances in microelectronics, the use of burglar-alarm systems for the home is on the rise in the United States. Home owners in suburbia and apartment dwellers in big cities are among the big users of burglar-alarm systems, and with electronic intelligence and control now offered at reasonable cost, other protective measures - like fire detection and “panic buttons” to summon medical help - have been added.

Shopping perceptions of the inner city elderly

This paper offers an exploratory investigation of two behavioural constructs of elderly shoppers: (i) spatial information fields and (ii) retail evaluation criteria. The constructs of the elderly are examined with reference to comparable responses of a baseline group of non-elderly consumers. The data are elicited from samples of elderly and non-elderly apartment dwellers in Winnipeg's central area. The results disclose that the spatial information fields of the elderly are relatively restricted, largely as a result of their lower levels of mobility. The problem of limited transport availability for the elderly is also expressed in terms of the higher levels of importance which they assign to accessibility factors in the decision on where to shop for groceries. In terms of other retail evaluation criteria, the elderly and non-elderly express different degrees of concern about various grocery outlet characteristics and commodity traits. It is concluded that the elderly represent a distinctive group of shoppers whose special characteristics may be relevant to the formulation of consumer spatial choice models.

Spatial Aspects of the Shopping Patterns of the Urban Elderly: The Case of Central Area Apartment Dwellers

ABSTRACTThis paper offers an exploratory investigation of spatial aspects of the shopping patterns of elderly downtown residents. Attention is explicitly focused on their usage fields, transport modes, and shopping context. The shopping behaviour of the elderly is evaluated with reference to that of a baseline group of non-elderly consumers. The data are obtained from a questionnaire/interview survey of random samples of elderly and non-elderly apartment dwellers in the central area of Winnipeg. The findings indicate that the elderly's shopping trips are largely restricted to the central business district. In contrast, the non-elderly exhibit more extensive movement patterns, particularly when purchasing relatively expensive items. These differences appear to be related to the higher level of transport deprivation among elderly persons, although some are able to compensate for their limited mobility by travelling as bus or automobile passengers.

Families in Apartment Buildings

In this article, it is suggested that apartment dwellings may become a realistic housing choice for a growing number of American families. Some consequences of this possibility are explored. Specifically, results from previous research on the effects of apartment living on children are reviewed. Some problems limiting the reliability and validity of findings to date are identified, and a number of suggestions are made to overcome these difficulties.