Credit Alan Dep
Credit Alan Dep
05/12/2011 – Marin Independent Journal
By Nels Johnson
The first wave of Marin County’s baby boomer “silver tsunami” is beginning to cash Social Security checks, and a bigger surge of senior citizens is just a few years behind, new census data indicate.
Statistics released Thursday summarizing data collected during the 2010 census put the median age in Marin County at 44.5 years, highest in the Bay Area and nine years older than the state average of 35.2. The oldest population in California is in rural Trinity County, where the median age is 49.3 years.
Ten years ago, Marin’s median age was 41.3 years, while the state’s was 33.3, so Marin’s population is aging more than one-and-a-half times as fast as that of the rest of the state.
“Marin County is really on the cutting edge of the aging population we’ll see in the state,” said Hans Johnson, a demographer and senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California. “And over the next 10 years in Marin, especially, is when you’re going to see big increases in the senior citizen population.”
Some 53,579 Marin residents, or 21.2 percent of the county’s 252,409 population, were age 62 or older, and 42,192 residents, or 16.7 percent of the population, were 65 or more years old.
The census reported that some 21,084 residents, or 8.4 percent, were 50 to 54 years old; 40,088 Marin residents, or 15.9 percent, were ages 55 to 64, and 14,037, or 5.6 percent, were 64 to 69. A total 18,981 residents, or 7.5 percent, were 75 years old or older.
The census also reported 13,932 children under age 5; 15,481 from 5 to 9 years old; 14,241 age 10 to 14, and 12,798 from 15 to 19 years old.
Belvedere, with a median age of 54, checked in as Marin’s grayest city, with Sausalito not far behind at 51.1 years, and Tiburon at 48. San Rafael, which posted a median age of 40.2 years, ranked as Marin’s youngest.
Marin population statistics provide policy makers with a planning road map, as public and private agencies increasingly cater to the needs of seniors for health care, housing, transit, social and related services as the population “ages in place.”
“Lots of seniors can’t drive at night,” Johnson said. “They need transit” and living quarters close to shopping and related services, he noted.