As the wave of aging arrives, how can older residents receive care, companionship, and joy in their later years? A special column launched by Shangcheng Publishing explores how, in this community, home is a harbor and neighbors feel like family, revealing a warm and tangible picture of aging in place through ordinary moments in kitchens, mutual-aid rooms, and even a simple curtain.
Yang, an elderly woman living in Dongpingxiang Residential Quarter, often needs follow-up hospital visits. With her children away year-round and mobility difficulties, she dreaded registration, navigating departments, and collecting reports. A few days ago, she booked an accompanying medical visit service in Hubin Subdistrict through the smart property platform of the district municipal group. From booking to consultation, someone helped throughout, and she described the experience as worry-free. Her relief does not come from a single organization, but from the three-party coordination mechanism among the community committee, homeowners committee, and property management firm, deepened under Party-building leadership, with residential specialists as the core link connecting a network of elderly care partners.
Hubin Subdistrict sits in the city's core area, where the aging population exceeds 40%, making emergency rescue, daily care, and medical travel essential needs. Equipment has been installed and platforms built, but response teams still needed to be organized. Teams existed and services were delivered, yet industry standards remained incomplete and service professionalism uneven. Facing these common dilemmas in elderly care, the Hubin Hundred Neighbors model offers a different solution.
The first thing that stands out is the quiet understanding of neighbors watching out for one another. Youth Road Community is the birthplace of Hangzhou Neighbor Day, a tradition of mutual watchfulness that has lasted more than two decades. The community has turned that tradition into a mechanism: led by residential specialists, grid workers and building captains visit door to door, creating a one-person, one-file needs ledger for 106 elderly residents living alone or in empty-nest households, while recruiting 56 mutual-aid volunteers from younger seniors and pairing them with older residents based on the principle of same corridor, same unit, and familiar pairing. The help is practical and known as the four handy tasks: checking in with a knock, bringing cleaning supplies, shopping and handling errands, and collecting or delivering items, weaving closeness into daily life.
Yu Huier, a veteran Party member, once knocked repeatedly on the door of her paired neighbor Grandma Shou with no response, contacted her daughter, and found the elderly woman bedridden, sending her to the hospital immediately. Chen Yinhua, a group leader, insists on visiting 82-year-old Grandma Zhu across the hall every day, chatting with her, taking out trash, and buying groceries and daily necessities. Chen also encourages people around her to join the mutual-aid group, and through her own social circle, helped neighbor Master Zhou pair with the elderly Mr. Zhou living alone in just two days. Volunteer service earns points that can be exchanged for daily goods, coffee, or movie tickets, and the community selects outstanding neighbor role models each year. Helping neighbors is both heartwarming and rewarding, Chen said, adding that as long as her health allows, she will keep doing it.
A call is answered. That answer is the most reassuring anchor in an elderly person's heart. Behind this neighborly understanding lies the routine outreach, screening, and cultivation of key volunteers by residential specialists, turning scattered warm-hearted people in the corridors into a dense mutual-aid network.
What is relied on most often is the timeliness of property management response. Within the Hubin Hundred Neighbors service network, property management is the closest pillar to older residents. Under the Party-building-led three-party coordination mechanism, residential specialists lead monthly joint meetings among the community, homeowners committee, and property management to study the urgent difficulties of elderly residents and dynamically expand the property service list. Relying on the system in which property project managers report to the community, response standards for elderly care services are clarified, and the three-party first-question responsibility system is implemented to ensure that older residents' demands are received, handled, and closed in a loop at the earliest possible moment.
Hubin Subdistrict has joined with the district municipal group's smart property team to expand home-based elderly care services, building a one-center, multiple-site service matrix centered on the Zhongshan Middle Road Silver Age Life Experience Hall, with several secondary showrooms within a 2-3 kilometer radius, fully leveraging property management's advantage of being rooted in communities and able to reach households. If a pipe leaks, a light fails, or a toilet clogs, residents can call for help with one click and property management responds. When grid workers visit homes, they also bring property maintenance staff. Beyond fixing things, they look for problems. Are bathroom tiles slippery? Are there grab bars beside the toilet? Is electrical equipment aging? After a housing inspection report, issues that can be solved on the spot are handled immediately, and those requiring renovation are arranged quickly.
Ding, an elderly man living alone in Building 31 on Changsheng Road, faced serious fall risks because his old bathroom lacked dry-wet separation and the floor pattern was nearly worn smooth. When property staff conducted a housing inspection, they found the problem and installed temporary anti-slip mats for free the same day. After consulting the elderly man and his children, they customized a bathroom aging-adaptation renovation plan based on his needs. In just one week, the renovation was completed with dry-wet separation, supportive anti-slip grab bars, new anti-slip floor tiles, and a toilet lift assist bar. He was so satisfied with the refreshed bathroom that he immediately ordered a whole-home renovation package. So far, the subdistrict and smart property team have completed personalized housing safety inspections and partial aging-adaptation micro-renovations for more than 115 elderly residents living alone, advanced in age, or with disabilities, with more than 1,400 home repair orders, effectively addressing safety pain points in home-based elderly care in old residential communities.
In addition, smart property has integrated service resources to promote the transformation of traditional elderly care services toward market-oriented quality consumption. Silver-age public welfare classes, intangible cultural heritage snack tastings, and convenience-themed markets are held regularly, averaging more than 50 events per year, and more than 200 convenience services such as medical accompaniment, errand running, and home companionship have been provided. In Hubin, it functions more like a hub: when older residents have needs, property management catches them first, handling what can be solved immediately and, for more difficult matters, having residential specialists bring the three parties together. There is no need to search everywhere or ask around, and one can live comfortably at home. That is the most solid explanation of the word smart enjoyment.
What is hardest to replace is the meticulousness of professional strength. After solving speed, professionalism must also be addressed. Take medical accompaniment, for example. Many elderly residents need it, but what are the service standards, how is safety ensured, and what pricing is reasonable? Satisfying residents still requires extensive market research and practice. Under the three-party coordination approach of joint consultation on problems and linked resources, residential specialists take the lead in identifying gaps in professional services, while the district municipal group leverages its state-owned platform advantages, strictly selects service providers, and brings in professional market players such as Didi Medical Accompaniment, incorporating standardized accompaniment into the Hubin Hundred Neighbors service list and gradually exploring a working model of property platform booking, community site handover, professional team delivery, and regular follow-up closure.
Didi Medical Accompaniment enforces strict background screening and pre-job training, unifies service standards, and ensures standardized, traceable processes. Elderly residents have senior-friendly pickup and drop-off points when leaving home, are accompanied throughout the hospital visit, and can access service records after returning home. Those unable to use smartphones can have bookings made by property staff and resident volunteers, and public welfare charity projects provide subsidies for disadvantaged elderly residents. In the early stage of the project, residential specialists tracked the service experience throughout and offered suggestions based on feedback to continuously improve service standards. Property management is the service tentacle closest to older residents, while volunteers and professional institutions enrich the supply of mutual-aid elderly care, and residential specialists are the connecting thread among all three, said a staff member from Hubin Subdistrict.
In this elderly care service chain, the saying that a distant relative is not as good as a close neighbor has become a lived experience. For older residents in the area, lightweight assistance and incentive guarantees make participation sustainable. For the community, pressure from insufficient professional elderly care capacity has been eased, and a atmosphere of everyone participating and everyone helping one another is growing stronger. Next, Hubin Subdistrict will continue to deepen the Party-building-led three-party coordination mechanism, strengthen the residential specialist team, expand the Hubin Partner elderly care force, and promote deeper integration of neighborhood warmth, professional services, and smart technology, so that the Hubin Hundred Neighbors model for quality elderly care in old urban areas can go further and more steadily.