What Makes a Community Age Friendly? Policymakers Emphasize Physical Over Social Factors

Abstract

Public policy serves older Americans well but also skirts major challenges—one being many communities’ “age (un)friendliness.” This paper investigates whether local government policymakers in the United States emphasize some “domains” of age friendliness over others, of those defined by the World Health Organization, when describing local-level services for older adults. It finds they do but that they give all eight domains some attention and give infrastructure domains more attention than social and informational domains. These results suggest that policymakers are supportive of age friendliness overall.