Frequently framed as a crisis, the aging of the U.S. population also provides an opportunity to build more livable communities.
Analyzing nearly 650 counties, cities and towns that have participated in the AARP Livability Index over the past decade, new Cornell research shows most have made progress developing communities conducive to aging in place across a range of metrics, from transportation to civic engagement. Some 31,000 other places that are not part of AARP's age-friendly network also made improvements, but to a lesser extent.
Challenges remain, such as housing affordability and health care access, and the need to attract rural communities with larger percentages of older and lower-income residents, the researchers concluded.
"So many view aging as a crisis - but this is not, 'Woe is me, we're aging and society is going to fall apart,'" said Mildred Warner, M.S. '85, Ph.D. '97, professor of global development in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and of city and regional planning in the College of Architecture, Art and Planning. "This is an opportunity to do what we all want to do, which is create more livable communities. Looking over time, we see that there has been progress."
Warner is the co-author of "Progress in Building Livable Communities: What do the AARP Livability Data Show?" with Xue Zhang, M.S. '16, Ph.D. '19, assistant professor of biobehavioral health at Pennsylvania State University. Submitted for journal publication, the study has been presented at two conferences and been reviewed by a network of age-friendly scholars and by AARP for technical accuracy.
Warner, director of the Local Government Restructuring Lab, will discuss the findings during an AARP webinar, "Toward More Livable Communities: The 2025 AARP Livability Index Reveal," Dec. 9 at 3 p.m. In prior work, Warner and Zhang reported on aging as an opportunity to address needed structural changes in the economy, social policy and regional planning.
Launched in 2015, AARP's Livability Index seeks to encourage communities to pay greater attention to policies supporting older Americans. The index incorporates public and private data to monitor more than 61 indicators across seven domains: health, neighborhood, housing, transportation, opportunity, civic engagement and environment. Data points range from monthly housing costs to opportunities for social connection and inclusion of age-friendly considerations in community plans.
Warner and Zhang found that among the 646 places spanning 10 states that were participants in the Livability Index in both 2015 and 2024, 70% improved their overall livability scores. The others started with higher scores in 2015.
"Communities that joined the network became more livable, more engaged, offered more opportunities, and became wealthier over time," the researchers wrote.
Urban communities lead in advancing age-friendly communities, but housing affordability remains a weakness - partly because housing becomes more desirable and expensive in more livable places, the researchers said. Rural communities, which are generally smaller and have greater concentrations of older adults, are lagging, possibly reflecting urban bias in the tracked indicators, the researchers said.
"We need to identify age-friendly practices that work for rural and small communities if we are to assist all communities to become more age-friendly," the scholars wrote. "With an aging society, this is imperative."
Warner said many age-friendly improvements are possible at the individual and local levels, from zero-step entries into homes to transit systems and planning, zoning and housing development. Broader economic and societal forces - such as housing affordability, income inequality and obesity - are more difficult to overcome.
"We see the greatest improvements in areas that local communities can control - neighborhood, transportation and engagement," the authors wrote.
While physical design can be expensive and take more time, Warner said, civic engagement - the area where age-friendly communities improved most in a decade - can be low-cost and rapid. Proactively listening to and planning for the services and amenities that residents would like to see in their communities both encourages innovation and reduces division, and promotes higher voting rates, the data shows.
"We have the power to create communities that are livable for all, and it's time to move beyond a singular focus on economic productivity and focus more on community well-being," Warner said. "An age-friendly community can be a community that is more livable for all, and that's what we're starting to see in planning and community-level response."
The research was supported by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
