Thirty-Five Thousand Residents Over Sixty, and a County That Went and Got Certified for It
Wilson County has about 35,000 residents aged 60 and older. By 2030 the county expects that number to pass 45,000. That is a ten-thousand-person shift inside five years, in a place better known for subdivisions going up than for the people quietly aging inside them.
It is also the reason the county went looking for a certification most people have never heard of.
Wilson County holds a Certificate of Commitment in the AARP Network of Age-Friendly States and Communities — one of only two counties in Tennessee to have earned it. Mayor Randall Hutto submitted the letter of support. The County Commission passed a resolution behind it. An advisory council was seated, chaired by Susan Shaw, drawing in the Greater Nashville Regional Council, the Mid-Cumberland Human Resource Agency, Home Instead, and Lebanon's Jimmy Floyd Family Center.
Here is what that actually means, because “age-friendly” sounds like a slogan and is in fact a checklist.
The AARP network is the American arm of a framework the World Health Organization built to help cities plan for aging populations. It measures a community across eight domains of livability: outdoor spaces and buildings, transportation, housing, social participation, respect and social inclusion, civic participation and employment, communication and information, and community and health services.
Read that list again with Wilson County in mind and it stops being abstract. Transportation, in a county where a great deal of life requires a car and where giving up the keys can mean giving up church, the grocery store and every friendship at once. Housing, in a market that has spent a decade building for young families with two incomes. Social participation, in a place where the old town centers now sit some distance from where most people actually live.
Joining the network is not an award for having solved any of that. It is a commitment to go measure it. The next steps are a community assessment survey and then an action plan built from what the survey turns up — the unglamorous part, where a county finds out which sidewalks have no curb cuts and which neighborhoods have no bus.
What makes this worth paying attention to in Mt. Juliet specifically is the arithmetic of growth. A city that doubles in twenty years does not simply gain young families. It gains the same young families twenty years later. The people who moved to Providence-era Mt. Juliet in their forties are in their sixties now, and the ones who came for the schools in the 2000s will be retiring here in the 2030s. Growth is not only a story about newcomers; eventually it is a story about everybody staying.
Counties usually plan for that late, if at all. This one has at least started the paperwork early, and put its mayor's signature and a commission vote behind it.
The county's offices are at 228 East Main Street in Lebanon, open 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., Monday through Friday, for anyone who wants to find out how to get involved.
