And Back Again

After Hurricane Wilma rumbled across Florida in 2006 — hammering the coast with 140 mph winds and torrential rains, ripping roofs off buildings and generally leaving everything in southern a mess — Ruth and Jerry Selman had had enough.

“When Wilma struck, my son and niece helped us get on the last plane out of West Palm Beach,” Ruth said, “and we never returned back.”

The Selmans, at the time, had been New Yorkers who’d relocated to Florida. They made the move for the same reasons countless others before them made it — the promise of never-ending summers, palm trees, lower cost of living. But after several years of being thousands of miles from family (not to mention a handful of hurricanes), they made a move that more and more seniors are making ever year: They returned to New York.

A recent New York Times analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data found that, for the first time since the Depression, more Americans are heading out of Florida than heading in. To a large degree, the analysis found, people who left cooler climes such as New York’s are heading back, many returning to the families they left when they moved away from what had been their homes for most of their lives. Many find that quality of life concerns also enter the picture. And some say the things that made New York dear to them have proven to be, as time passed, increasingly harder to live without.

Jim Tift, director of the Gerontology Department and the Center on Aging at Minnesota State University, said the phenomenon’s history is difficult to trace.

“I don’t know if you can put a finger on when it started,” Tift said. “I think it’s more noticeable now because of the numbers.”

The most likely reason people are coming back north is health. As people get further into their golden years, they crave more support — both physical and emotional — from their children. Tift has firsthand experience in that area.

His parents moved to Arizona in their fifties. But after his father died, his mother decided she wanted to move back north to be closer to family. When she did, he and his brothers were happy to have her closer, but Tift said he also had some apprehension. Having mom back was nice, but there were issues with dealing with her needs. His mother moved nearest to him, which left him to carry most of the burden of driving mom to doctor appointments and to the grocery store, which he didn’t mind. It’s an issue that families face, however, and Tift said that the workload of helping aging parents needs to be spread around among family members and not become a burden on a single person.

In a mildly ironic twist, Tift said that right about the time his mother moved back north, one of his brothers relocated to Arizona.

Ruth Silverman and her husband are another example of people who’d left for warmer climes as they headed into retirement, but traded it in years later.

They began making the annual trek south with three-month stints in Florida. Gradually, their time south lengthened. Eventually, they were spending up to eight months in Florida, until they finally broke down and purchased a home. They did so because Ruth’s husband had suffered a heart attack, and was having a difficult time enduring the often harsh New York winters.

They lived in that home for three years until her husband died. Soon friends moved away. Others passed away. And Silverman’s isolation grew, and so did the burden of maintaining a home by herself. She also had two cats, which made it difficult to find a condo in Florida as, she says, most condos she checked on did not allow pets of any kind.

While visiting upstate in the summer of 2002, she saw an advertisement for The Village at 46th & Ten. She jotted down the contact information and sent an e-mail off as soon as she could. Her main question: “Can I bring my pets?” Getting the answer she wanted, she and her daughter visited the Village Care operated senior residence. She liked what she saw, and made the decision to sell the house in Florida.

“For me, this location was perfect,” Silverman said. “My daughter lives upstate and the Port Authority is just four blocks away and the Theater District is right here, and the proximity to everything and the transportation is fantastic. People asked me if I looked anywhere else, and I said, ‘No, I wasn’t interested in anywhere else.’”

Silverman, who spends summers upstate with her daughter, says the cost of living is one of New York’s disadvantages. For example, she says she pays double for groceries.

“I took the cost difference into account when considering moving back, but my house in Florida was free and clear, didn’t have a mortgage,” Silverman said. “And I, being very good at budgeting, figured out that I made enough on the sale of the house to cover the higher costs here in New York.”

“I don’t miss the warmer weather at all, as a matter of fact, when I was contemplating coming here, my daughter asked me ‘what would you do if the weather’s so cold, you can’t go out?’ and I replied ‘what I did in Florida when it was too hot to go out, I stay indoors. It’s a lot easier to stay indoors here than because you’re not alone, there are so many activities here that I participate in with many of the other residents.

“The main factor that led me into looking at a senior residence rather than a private residence is that I was 83 years old, and I knew eventually I would have to go into a facility, and I would rather be able to choose a facility while I still had my wits.”

Like the Silvermans, the Selmans started out going to Florida for a few months out of the year and maintaining a permanent residence in New York. Gradually, their time in Florida got longer every year, and they eventually went all the way with a move to Florida.

“It was a painful decision because it meant saying goodbye to New York which we were avid lovers of,” Ruth Selman, whose husband recently passed away, said. “I have other roots here in New York as well. I am a member of the American Montessori Society, which requires that I attend conferences and lectures at the United Nations, so I found myself trekking back and forth from Florida to attend these events.”

Florida was nice. But the good life of tropical weather comes with an occasional dose of Mother Nature’s wrath. The roof of their building was ripped off during one hurricane. Another caused extensive damage to their car. Hurricanes scared her so much, in fact, that she’d find herself hiding under the covers, she says, “like a baby.” Hurricane Wilma was the last straw.

“When Wilma struck, my son and niece helped us get on the last plane out of West Palm Beach, and we never returned back,” Selman said. “When we were ready to go back, my son recalled seeing an ad for 46th and Ten and felt it would be better for us, especially because it was so close. I loved the idea because I would be back in New York, the place that I love more than anywhere else in the world.”

Minnesota State’s Tift says adult children generally welcome their parents who come back to live closer to them, but he said that children have to be careful about not committing their lives to caring for aging parents.

“You hear about Boomers quitting their jobs (to care for a parent),” he said. “Don’t quit your job. still need something else to focus on.”

Oftentimes, Tift said, those seniors returning home come back because they are older, maybe already in their eighties, and already with medical needs that can be acute.

Adult children need to look at alternative living arrangements that include home care and assisted living rather than having a parent move in with them. This reverse population shift is a unique one. The Census Bureau said that not since the Depression have more people moved out of the South than moved in.

The fastest-growing segment of the population, Tift says, is made up of those 80 and older. Census estimates show there are about 10.7 million Americans 80 and older. By the year 2025, they expect that number to jump to 15.6 million.

The number of older adults in general is also swelling. By 2040, the Census Bureau estimates there’ll be 80 million seniors. What remains to be seen is whether retirement communities, home care, senior living arrangements and others will be able to keep up with demand, and whether new businesses offering services to seniors will be created as seniors and their families demand resources to help them, Tift said.