Aging in Place: How to Make a Home in the City (Watch Video)
This webinar took place on May 1, 2025. View the event's recording.
Please join UCSF Family Services for a virtual talk on aging in urban America.
To understand elders' experiences of aging in place, sociologist and UCSF Assistant Professor Stacy Torres, PhD, spent five years conducting ethnographic fieldwork with longtime New York City residents as they coped with health setbacks; depression; gentrification; financial struggles; the accumulated losses of neighbors, friends, and family; and other everyday challenges. Dr. Torres' book, At Home in the City: Growing Old in Urban America, which recounts her study, moves beyond stereotypes of older people as either rich and pampered or downtrodden and frail to capture the multilayered complexity of late life.
Stacy Torres' webinar will chronicle how a nondescript bakery in Manhattan served as a public living room, providing company to ease loneliness and a sympathetic ear to witness the monumental and mundane struggles of late life. Based on years of careful observation, Dr. Torres peels away the layers of this oft-neglected social world and explores the constellation of relationships and experiences that Western culture often renders invisible or frames as a problem. At Home in the City highlights how people find support, flex their resilience, and assert their importance in their communities in old age. Dr. Torres will also outline opportunities for us all to strengthen our social infrastructure, support our neighborhood third places, and make a home in the city, whatever our age.
Stacy Torres is an Assistant Professor in the UCSF Department of Social Behavioral Sciences, School of Nursing. She is a proud first-generation college graduate, born and raised in New York City.