Your home is not an island and, especially as you age, if the surrounding community isn't livable you may be adrift in a sea that's not so tranquil.

Livable communities offer affordable, appropriate housing, supportive community features, a variety of services and sufficient options for getting around, all to facilitate personal independence and civic and social interaction.

It's all about quality of life.

However, it's tough to know if a town can help you sustain your version of quality life if you don't know how to evaluate it for livability.

To that end, the AARP (formerly known as the American Association of Retired People), a national nonprofit membership organization providing information, advocacy and benefits for people 50 and older, has developed "Livable Communities An Evaluation Guide" a treatise that doesn't rate, grade or rank cities, but leaves that task up to you.

The guide's centerpiece is a "Livable Communities Quiz" of ten questions you can answer to be the judge about what communities best serve your needs in the second half of your life.

Written by a team from the Herberger Center for Design Excellence at Arizona State University, the guide is based on input from focus groups regarding perceptions and availability of features that make a community livable. The report is written from the perspective of an older person, but the livability issues explored easily apply to anyone.

What's more, the study doesn't just point to the highs and lows of livability, but offers lots of direction for you to take to create more livability highs in any community.

The underlying message is that it often takes active residents to raise a village and a good plan of action is to begin with the quiz. It helps you understand the components of livability while revealing how your current community stacks up.

After each answer, you'll get an explanation of why the question is important and, if necessary, what you can do, if anything, to improve that component of livability.

As a result, you'll learn if you should perhaps move to a more livable community or get moving to make your community more livable.

For example, Question 9 asks, "If you wanted or needed to leave your current home, how would you grade your community for having affordable housing options elsewhere in your community?"

The result explains that affordable housing likely isn't just a problem in your community but in many areas. Renters are particularly hard hit. Some 27 percent of households headed by someone 50 or older experienced a "housing cost burden" defined by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) as housing payments totaling more than 30 percent of the gross household income. For renters in the same age group, more than half pay more than 30 percent of their income for rent.

Question 10 asks, "If you had difficulty walking around or performing a physical activity, how would you grade your home for being designed in a way that would allow you to complete your daily tasks?"

The reply says a home's interior design (not decor) enhances or detracts from the quality of life by enabling you to enjoy the full use of your home or not. A well designed home means more independence, including access to activities outside the home and hosting guests inside. Well-designed homes also enable residents to remain in their communities and out of more expensive and sometimes less appealing nursing homes and the like.

Design options available can be achieved through buying a new home or by modifying an existing home.

After the test is complete, a somewhat redundant summary adds, to the mix of information, resources you can tap to help make any community a better place to live.

If you want a town already considered livable, Cal State Northridge geography professor Warren Bland offers "Retire in Style: 60 Outstanding Places Across the USA and Canada," (Next Decade, Inc., $22.95).

Bland's criteria to rate the towns include the landscape, climate, quality of life, cost of living, transportation, retail services, health care, community services, cultural and educational activities, recreational activities, work and volunteer activities and crime rates and public safety. Based on his numeric rating system, the highest possible score was 60.

"The total points scored are not intended as a means of ranking the retirement towns from best to worst; they are meant to help people assess a community's overall resources for retirement," Bland said.

"Because individual wants and needs vary, the ratings for particular criteria may be more important to a person in their evaluation of a place than its cumulative score."

Among the 60 towns, which rated highest?

Published: July 7, 2005

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Broderick Perkins parlayed a career in old-school journalism into a contemporary digital news service that really hits home. The award-winning consumer journalist, originally from Wilmington, DE, is founder, publisher and executive editor of the bootstrap DeadlineNews Group, a Silicon Valley-based editorial content and consulting service specializing in residential real estate, consumer news and related editorial consulting services. The DeadlineNews Group includes the website, DeadlineNews.com, offering real estate editorial content and consulting services, and its back shop, the Deadline Newsroom, an open house on news that really hits home. Perkins obtained his formal journalism education from University of Delaware and a journalism boot camp, the Institute of Journalism Education at the University of California-Berkeley. He went on to 20 years of service as a daily newspaper journalist at the Wilmington, DE News Journal and San Jose, CA Mercury News. Perkins covered housing on the San Jose Mercury News reporting team which earned a General News Reporting Pulitzer Prize in 1989 for coverage of the Loma Prieta earthquake. He has also produced real estate, consumer and small business content for the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, RealtyTimes.com, Nolo.com, Better Homes and Gardens, the National Association of Realtors, Homestore/Move and Intuit/Quicken among more than three dozen publications. In addition to managing the DeadlineNews Group, Perkins most recently served as chief editorial consultant for Nolo's Essential Guide To Buying Your First Home, Nolo, and writes real estate television scripts for RealtyTimes.com.