Abstract
Purpose: At the moment, a lot of poor older people live in permanent rental housing in Korea. But many rental apartments are not suitable for elderly living because most of them have many problems related to the lack of accessibility and adaptability for older people with physical and mental disabilities. So it is necessary to upgrade the old permanent rental housing for convenience of elderly living. The purpose of this paper is to construct basic data for remodeling of worn out and small rental housing block in order to realize the concept of "Aging in Place". Methods: Questionnaires and interviews about elderly living have been conducted on 104 elderly who live in Suwon Wooman permanent rental apartment block which was constructed 21 years ago. From the collected data, dining pattern, inconvenient area, small area, satisfaction level on unit area and demand for unit expansion type have been analysed in order to find out the direction for remodeling of permanent rental apartment unit. Results: The problems of existing permanent rental apartment can be summarized into improper laundry space, small dining area, inconvenient bath and so on. According to the family size, the elderly resident has the different preference about the expansion type of his resident unit. Big families usually want to enlarge their living unit though they pay for additional monthly rental fee. Implications: Lifetime home concept adopting Universal Design has to be applied to the whole residential block especially to the social rental housing. And this concept had better be expanded to Lifetime neighbor design.