This article comes to us from Redfin Blog. To find the “best” cities for tech-supported living, the authors of this article looked at 5 app-based services that aging adults would find useful, monthly mortgage payments, and monthly assisted living facility costs in the cities. If it cost less to live at home and use the services than it would to live in assisted living, the cities made the list. So, while you are reading this list, please keep in mind that these are the criteria they used. Of course, there are many other options for using technology to support independent living, and if you want to read more about this, check out some of my other posts – you will see suggestions at the bottom of this post.

The 10 Best Cities for Technology-Assisted Living

by Christin Camacho | August 11, 2015

The National Conference of State Legislatures and AARP Public Policy Institute report that nearly 90 percent of people over the age of 65 want to stay in their home for as long as possible. Fortunately, in most cases, they won’t have to move as they age. According to Seniorly, a service that helps people find senior care, the majority of seniors do NOT need to move into a nursing home. They simply need some care equivalent to what they would find in an assisted living community, which includes assistance with daily activities like meals, medication, housekeeping, bathing and transportation.

And these days, there’s an app for that. An elderly woman can take an Uber to her friend’s home, find someone to walk her dog through Rover.com, schedule her lawn to be mowed or her house to be cleaned through Porch, get groceries delivered through Instacart, and schedule a professional caregiver to assist with bathing, meal preparation and other daily living activities through CareLinx. Or, for those seniors who aren’t tech-savvy, friends and family can use these technology-based services to arrange care for them.

To find the best cities for this type of technology-assisted living, we first identified which cities are served by Uber, Rover, Porch, Instacart and CareLinx. There are plenty of other companies that provide similar services, but we felt those five companies were good bellwethers for a city’s overall techiness; if a city has all five options, chances are it has a range of technology-based services.

Then we used Redfin housing data to calculate what the median monthly mortgage payment would be in those cities, and compared it to the average monthly fee for assisted living facilities in those cities (using data from Metlife). The cities that made our top 10 list are places where you’d have at least $1,500 each month to spend on the cost of services booked through Uber, Rover, Porch, Instacart and CareLinx, and, after paying your mortgage, it’d still be less expensive than an assisted living facility.

For seniors who need basic assistance and want to remain at home, these services are an attractive option. And, depending on the amount of care required, they can be a more affordable option as well. For example, in Washington D.C., a resident could spend $3,000 on care services and $2,787 on their mortgage, and still spend less than the $5,933 it would take to live in an assisted living facility.

“People often think of services like Uber and Instacart as being something that only millennials use, but those services can be a way for elderly people who need assistance to remain in their homes,” said Redfin chief economist Nela Richardson. “And when you compare the cost of a mortgage with the cost of assisted living facilities, in some cases it can make more financial sense to use those services and age in place, rather than move to a facility, depending on the level of care required of course.”

Read the rest of this article on Redfin.com.