Forget Sarasota — With Its Good Weather, Low Taxes And Leisurely Pace, New York City Is The Retirement Community Of The Future!

Lost in the discussion about the mysterious, still-unexplained one million new residents is that the number includes a previously overlooked army of 300,000 new seniors, making New York City the nation’s top retirement destination:

The city’s elderly population is projected to jump 44 percent by 2030, which means there will be roughly 1.35 million senior citizens comprising 20 percent of the city population. That includes roughly one-third of the projected additional 1 million New Yorkers the Bloomberg administration expects here then. That surge motivated the PlaNYC initiative to address issues such as the environment, energy and the city’s aging infrastructure — but not so much its aging population.

The City Council yesterday announced that the New York Academy of Medicine will receive $125,000 to develop a blueprint to prepare the city for its aging population. It’s expected by April.

“Our focus has been on the cost of care and biomedical research,” said academy president Jo Ivey Boufford. “This deals with prevention — how people can be as healthy as they can be, as long as they can. . . . We’re creating a blueprint for investment over a number of years and policy action over a number of years.”

The Advance makes the situation sound that much more dire:

With New York City’s population expected to boom, adding nearly 1 million more residents by 2030, demographers predict that the number of elderly dwellers will increase by 300,000.

. . .

“There’s been much discussion and planning, appropriately so, about what the future of New York City will look like in 2030,” Ms. Quinn said in respect of Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s environmental agenda to combat global warming. “But one of the things we’ve not yet looked at is the reality that by 2030, there will be 300,000 additional senior citizens in New York City.”