Cohousing-L Mailing List: NYTimes: The Next Retirement Communities Won’t Be Just for Seniors

[Ann Lehman (ann]

FYI.....The Next Retirement Communities Won’t Be Just for Seniors
FYI
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/01/business/dealbook/senior-retirement-communities.html

New developments that integrate senior housing into age-diverse apartment
buildings offer a more affordable alternative to isolated suburban
retirement communities.

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Credit...Yifan Wu

By Patrick Sisso

Getting older comes with challenges. For the architect and designer
Matthias Hollwich, one of the more taxing ones is something often taken for
granted: moving.

His point — that leaving behind friends, social connections and the purpose
of a particular job can be physically and psychologically debilitating for
older adults — underscores how developers, architects and city leaders are
reimagining the retirement home.

“I want to give people the power to change their living conditions without
moving away,” he said.

Mr. Hollwich, a co-author of “New Aging,” is developing a new senior living
concept. Aiming to retrofit an office building
<https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/27/business/what-would-it-take-to-turn-more-offices-into-housing.html>
in Manhattan left bare by remote work, the concept, called FLX Live, will
feature communal dining, spa and co-working spaces and shared suites in
which older adults, sleeping in private bedrooms with kitchenettes, will
share living rooms with younger renters, resulting in lower rent for both
parties. Operators will deliberately recruit an age-diverse community.

Driven by an aging population, a more active vision of retirement, and a
shortage of senior housing options and support services, developers are
increasingly embracing this urban village model of housing, which offers a
sharp contrast to the typical isolated suburban retirement communities.

These projects are becoming more viable as city and business leaders
realize that seniors can help support local shops like cafes, bookstores
and salons.

“The stigma around older adults is going away,” said Tama Duffy Day, an
architect and principal at the architecture firm Gensler. “Hospitality and
residential developments understand that older adults are a huge market.”

Affordable senior rentals in urban areas would have been a dicier real
estate proposition decades ago, when homeownership rates were higher
<https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/home-ownership-rate> and more
mortgage-free older Americans hoped to age in place, decreasing the pool of
potential renters. Seniors still predominantly own their homes, but
demographics are shifting. An increasing number of adults in their 30s and
40s never plan to own a home, per recent research from Apartment List
<https://www.apartmentlist.com/research/millennial-homeownership-2022> and the
Federal Reserve Bank of New York
<https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/interactives/sce/sce/downloads/data/frbny_sce_housing_chartpacket2022.pdf?la=en>
.

A more diverse older population, increasingly without close family
connections
<https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/03/health/elderly-living-alone.html> and
often hard hit during market downturns like the 2008 recession, means the
number of affordable units needed for future seniors is “daunting,” said
Jennifer Molinsky of Harvard’s Joint Center on Housing Studies. The United
States will have 16 million middle-income seniors by 2033
<https://www.norc.org/Research/Projects/Pages/forgotten-middle-housing-and-care-options-for-middle-income-seniors-in-2033.aspx>,
according to research by N.O.R.C. at the University of Chicago, a social
research organization.

This new approach to senior housing, especially for those without serious
medical issues, focuses on local resources, a model that not only serves
both younger and older renters, but also can offer cheaper rent, because
the connection to community organizations and the shared amenities of
nearby parks and public programming can reduce the cost of providing such
services in-house.

Kallimos Communities, a development concept created by Bill Thomas, a
leader in progressive senior housing, features multigenerational
neighborhoods of 50 to 60 smaller homes, with common spaces and programming
staff who will plan group meals and social events. Developments are in the
works in Victoria, Texas, and Loveland, Colo., where Kallimos is teaming up
with a local housing authority and plans to break ground in 2024.

The initial response has included significant interest from older couples
“seeking to be part of a community,” said Megan Marama, the chief operating
officer of Kallimos.

In Britain, a model called RightSizer is being used to renovate and
refurbish empty Main Street businesses decimated by online shopping and
transform them into a mix of senior housing sites and community-focused
health and education centers. The plan will reinvigorate local culture and
business, said Rory O’Hagan, a director at Assael Architecture, which
devised the idea. He added that he was working with developers to get
approval this fall for the first site in South London.

Many developers of urban senior living rentals have tapped into the value
of intergenerational living
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/02/style/housing-elderly-intergenerational-living.html>,
integrating senior apartments with younger renters to stave off loneliness
and share costs.

Bridge Meadows has successfully developed four such facilities in Oregon
where seniors, foster children and their foster parents live in the same
building. Part of impetus for the project was seeing elders who felt that
“they were being put out to pasture” and wanted to feel vital to a
community, said Derenda Schubert, the executive director of Bridge Meadows.
Her design team is looking at ways to build on a larger scale.

Some developers, like McNair Living and Tabitha, have focused on building
senior living facilities near college campuses. Next fall, Tabitha will
open a 128-apartment intergenerational facility in Nebraska with the Bryan
College of Health Sciences, offering 25 college students a chance to live
closer to campus and supplement their classroom learning with real-life
experience interacting with and living alongside elders.

“The moderate income price point for senior living is poorly served,” said
Joyce Ebmeier, Tabitha’s chief of staff. “When you’re competing with
high-end product, with lots of grand entrances and grand pianos and plush
amenities, you need to think about creating a product that will serve
people.”

The “awakening” around housing that has a more communal orientation
parallels the way cities, in the pandemic era, are rethinking how to
reinvigorate downtowns with more residential conversions; strict categories
and rules are being revisited, said Ms. Day of Gensler.

“Cities are becoming more aware of the fact that we need to keep people in
these cities and in an urban setting for it to remain active,” she said.
A version of this article appears in print on Feb. 1, 2023, Section B, Page
8 of the New York edition with the headline: Taking On a Senior Living Reset.
Order Reprints <https://www.parsintl.com/publication/the-new-york-times/>
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