November 2018
Key Takeaways
- The six trends reshaping intergenerational senior living
- How the movement of New Urbanism facilitates intergenerational lifestyles
- The connection between the principles of mixed-use and intergenerational
- Bold product executions not just in the U.S. but in Canada, London and Singapore
- The affinity groups that embrace intergenerational households
- How to execute urban senior living in reverse
The demand by seniors to not be called “seniors” is not one of vanity. It is one of realism. With life expectancy rising and health levels improving, the traditional notion of a “senior” is no longer relevant. Seniors know that, and their lifestyle demands reflect that understanding.
What that looks like from a practical standpoint are new choices and forms of senior living, from the active adult space to the highest stages of acuity. Today’s senior — and, crucially, tomorrow’s senior — wants an active lifestyle, a connection to the outside community and avenues to share their lifetime of experiences, skills, knowledge and wisdom. Their desires and demands are increasingly coalescing into an ever-expansive senior housing model:
Intergenerational living.
Also known as multigenerational living, this concept of merging generations to solve disparate housing problems is growing more common with an expansive range of methods, from master-planned communities with age-based neighborhoods to mixed-use apartment complexes that house a preschool or daycare.
No matter the style, intergenerational senior living brings new product types and lifestyle offerings to seniors and listens to their demand for a daily connection to the rest of the world.
The 3 top drivers of today’s intergenerational senior living
- Consumer Demand
- Economics and Demographics
- Land Use
Just as the notion of how much technology seniors want in their lives changes as a tech-savvy population ages into the senior bracket, so too are today’s seniors bringing with them a demand for intergenerational living due to their own experiences. Though there is no data around the total number of intergenerational senior communities or programming initiatives, a quick look at the numbers that do exist makes clear the trend’s explosive potential.
Among the most telling come from Pew Research Center, which compiles data on the number of Americans living in a household with at least two adult generations. In 1970, 26 million Americans fit that bill. In 2012, 57 million did. Four years later, in 2016, the figure hit a new record: 64 million. That is 20% of the U.S. population.
Though these statistics measure individual households and not senior living, they are indicative of a trend toward these arrangements, and speak to the rising comfort level around them. It’s no surprise that housing developers across the age spectrum are increasing their intergenerational housing output, especially for seniors.
The examples persist across the U.S., even when the drivers differ. In the Bay Area, many seniors and young families are being priced out of affordable housing, leading them to seek joint solutions to their housing problems. Empty-nest widowers in Boston are joining a pilot program to house graduate students in exchange for companionship.
Members of the Northwest’s Chinese population are coming together in an intergenerational assisted living and memory care home designed around their culture and community. And residents of a CCRC in Lebanon, Ohio, will soon be neighbors with the occupants of nearly 90 single-family homes.
Americans living in a household with at least two adult generations
These are just four of the ways that senior living operators, all-ages developers and municipalities are coming together in the U.S. to create new senior housing solutions to address a startling numbers crunch around population, land use and budget.
Yet this is not merely a United States trend. In Australia, intergenerational housing is on the rise as the country faces a housing crisis brought on by population growth far exceeding estimates. Australia’s Housing Industry Association projected in 2002 that Australia’s population would reach 25 million people in 2042. The country passed that figure in August of this year.
Data from the 2016 census out of Canada shows a 21.7% growth rate since 2001 in overall households, yet a 31.7% growth rate in that time of multigenerational households. In London, the mayor’s office in May released a 264-page housing strategy to address a crisis borne of only 20,000 new homes built annually to serve 96,000 new annual residents, with multigenerational housing cited as one possible solution. From Canada to Japan to Singapore, intergenerational communities in senior living are popping up around the globe.
Many of these communities are coming from senior living providers, in a variety of product types. Some are master-planned communities with age-specific neighborhoods, including senior neighborhoods, where common spaces are built to encourage intergenerational integration. Some are senior living apartment buildings with space for a daycare or a preschool and programming created for the seniors and students to interact.
Some are merely senior living communities built purposefully near schools or city centers, again with programming proactively created to give seniors an opportunity to connect with people of other age groups.
The programming component is booming, too. At McLean, Virginia-based Sunrise Senior Living, the Live With Legacy program brings together residents and children to play, read, eat, sing and learn. Programming that creates intergenerational interactions for senior residents is a key solution to isolation, and gives senior living providers another option for delivering intergenerational lifestyles beyond residential arrangements.
From a residential standpoint, senior living providers would seem to have the inside track on the intergenerational trend, yet they actually face competition from outside their industry. That’s because intergenerational senior living is not merely about seniors — the other generations have to be there as well. Developers who traditionally work only in all-ages housing are reading the tea leaves, and sliding into this space from the other direction.
Senior living providers need no glimpse of competition from beyond their industry to spur their action on intergenerational living. They are seeing the opportunity grow right in front of them, due to three powerful causes.
Intergenerational driver #1: Consumer demand
While the improved health quality and increased life span of seniors is well documented, less certain is what senior living providers must do to continue to serve this clientele as a result of those changes.
What is evident based on both polling and anecdotal data is that the incoming flood of baby boomers aging into the senior population differ in several key ways from their greatest generation predecessors, and that those differences will manifest themselves in the future of senior living design.
One key difference though, beyond taste, is simply the health and longevity in and of itself. Because seniors are living longer and remaining healthier, they no longer see senior living as a place to live quietly for 10 years from a late-life move-in to death. Prior to independent living, the number of seniors moving into active adult communities is growing, meaning seniors might be in some level of senior living for three decades.
“Consistently, when I visit with my residents over the years, they love the services, they love the amenities, but their biggest complaint is all the old people that are there,” says Chip Gabriel, president of Portland, Oregon-based operator Generations LLC. “We all see ourselves as younger than we are, and we want to be involved in vibrancy and life, not people who are having health and age issues.”
San Francisco-based BRIDGE Housing operates 30 senior living properties, with seven in an intergenerational model. The nonprofit, which opened in 1983, focuses on a mission of providing affordable homes for working families and seniors.
The intergenerational move is driven by the city’s wave of young, high-income residents, largely from the tech industry, whose presence often ends up pricing out seniors and families. Making communities intergenerational benefits residents and the overall community, says CEO Cynthia Parker, while calling communities “intergenerational” is a winning marketing strategy.
“It’s a big advantage — we are always oversubscribed for residents moving in,” Parker says. “If we have 100 apartments, we might have 10,000 residents taking out an application form. It’s incredible. That’s the demand. And people want to live in these types of communities.”
Part of the desire of seniors to engage with other age groups is the joy of diversification of experiences. But part of it is simply a solution to isolation. A study published in 2015 in Perspectives on Psychological Science concluded prolonged isolation is as bad for a person’s health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.
And a report in 2013 from four professors in the University College London’s Department of Epidemiology and Public Health found that feelings of loneliness can increase the risk of death by up to 45%.
It’s a big advantage — people want to live in these types of communities.
– Cynthia Parker, CEO, BRIDGE Housing
“We’ve got an aging population, certainly in Britain,” says Neil Rodgers, associate architect of UK-based architecture firm Henley Halebrown, which has worked on co-housing models with aging-in-place design principles. “People are living longer, but not necessarily living together longer, so isolation is a big issue.”
Of course, to be successful in intergenerational living, it’s not enough for seniors to be interested. The other generations must be too. Fortunately, they are, typically falling into two main categories:
Parents of young children. Three of the most popular intergenerational arrangements geared toward seniors cater to parents of young children who for reasons both logistical and emotional want seniors — specifically their parents — living near or with their children.
One of these three arrangements is mixed-use senior living with daycares or preschools in the same building. Another is an individual multigenerational household, often with the senior parents moving in with their adult children and their grandchildren.
The third is an all-age community with residents who are willing participants in an integrated lifestyle with seniors, either through a master-planned community divided by neighborhoods or an urban-center senior living community with planned, integrated programming that caters to both seniors and their younger neighbors.
University and graduate students. A growing number of students in their 20s are embracing opportunities to live with seniors, both from an economic, need-based standpoint and a cultural one. In Boston, homesharing company Nesterly is partnering graduate students with widowed, empty-nest seniors in an intergenerational homeshare pilot.
Nesterly launched its pilot partially in response to a report by Trulia that showed that young adults who rented a room instead of a one-bedroom apartment could save $24,000 annually. The trickle down effect is that those one-bedroom apartments can then be rented by seniors looking for affordable options.
A similar pilot is underway in British Columbia, where students can live rent-free in assisted living community Gateway Lodge in exchange for spending 10-15 hours per week with senior residents for meals and activities.
Intergenerational driver #2: Economics and demographics
In 2013, land investment firm Foremost Companies out of Newport Beach, California, entered the senior living space with Terramor, a 1,443-home master-planned community in southern California that mixes 55+ neighborhoods with all-age, market-rate ones.
The company made this move out of a business imperative. Based on their own market research, company leaders began to recognize the reality of the powerful senior demographic, which to that point was untapped by them.
Vice president of community development Satish Lion says that the company saw two significant economic figures driving their need to enter this space. The first is the concentrated wealth in the senior community compared to Millennials.
“From our standpoint, it makes more sense to sell to net worth than to sell to income,” Lion says.
Secondly, Lion and his colleagues saw the cost-of-living challenges that SoCal seniors face when they want to buy a new house, with slim availability in coastal areas at expensive price points, starting at $800,000 and up. In the desert, buyers can find senior housing at $400,000 and below, but the isolation is greater.
“That’s really where Terramor slots in, with prices from the $400,000s to $800,000s,” Lion says. “You can get an amazing house with a great view that meets all your needs and be in a much more central location without going out to the desert.”
From our standpoint, it makes more sense to sell to net worth than to sell to income.
– Satish Lion
vice president of community development, Foremost Companies
Intergenerational driver #3: Land use
When Scott Eckstein looks at the intergenerational trend in senior living, he sees one driver that binds the previous two: land.
Eckstein is a clinical assistant professor of senior living management at Washington State University, and is a leader in the university’s Institute for Senior Living, which trains students for careers in the sector. When he looks at senior living through the eyes of a prospective developer, he sees a land-based need for intergenerational development.
“Land is at a premium,” Eckstein says. “If you can hedge your bets as far as the kind of people who are going to move into your community, you can bring in seniors, and you can bring in Millennials, and you can bring in middle-aged folks, and you spread the wealth. It’s easier to capture smaller bits of larger markets.”
Creative land use through intergenerational senior living development is a boon to outside communities too. Whether building a new property in a city center or a university campus, or retrofitting existing housing to better serve an aging population, a developer who creates a space for seniors that benefits neighbors of all ages removes some of the barriers to construction.
“Cities have many constituents,” Eckstein says. “If you have a product that addresses multiple constituents, it’s an easier sell.”
The 6 trends changing intergenerational senior living
Intergenerational living, even with seniors, is not new. What is new is both the greater pressures driving intergenerational arrangements in senior living and the increased enthusiasm for the product from seniors, younger adults and city governments.
The oldest boomers turn 75 in 2021. Some of the intergenerational housing options that greet them will be similar to what exists now. But interviews with more than 20 leaders in intergenerational senior living — including operators, developers, architects and housing support program directors — reveal six trends that will influence the communities that welcome this wave.
The 6 trends changing intergenerational senior living:
- Embracing the tenets of New Urbanism
- Intergenerational is the new mixed-use
- Lifelong aging-in-place
- Building partnerships, even with competitors
- Understanding the power of affinity groups
- Urban senior living… in reverse
Trend #1
Embracing the tenets of New Urbanism
When Otterbein SeniorLife hired a team of developers in 2014 to plan nearly 1,200 acres of land surrounding its 200-acre senior living community in Lebanon, Ohio, the senior living provider wanted to give its nearly 900 residents access to a richer life with more connections to other ages, activities, amenities and resources.
The resulting master-plan will take 30 to 50 years to complete, changing the lives of its senior population. It will do so by embracing a growing philosophy of living: New Urbanism.
“All New Urbanists believe that the built environment matters — that where and how you build and develop has a dramatic implication for the economy, public health, quality of life and the environment,” says Lynn Richards, president and CEO of the Congress for the New Urbanism. The CNU operates based on a charter that identifies 27 principles of living at the regional, neighborhood, block and building levels.
“New Urbanism is about providing people with choices on where and how to live, work, play, shop and get around,” she says. “To create walkable, liveable places.”
While New Urbanism is not explicitly about seniors, it is about intergenerational senior living. That’s because it functions based on the “8-to-80 principle”: a community must be built specifically to serve eight-year-olds, 80-year-olds and everyone in between.
From a practical standpoint, this mindset produces similar product types and results as mixed-use senior living and urban senior living. The difference is that rather than approaching these communities through the prioritization of either amenities or location, New Urbanism looks first at the impact a built environment will have on its residents.
New Urbanism is about providing people with choices on where and how to live, work, play, shop and get around. To create walkable, liveable places.
– Lynn Richards
president & CEO of the Congress for the New Urbanism
“When you are beginning to build choices on the type of housing in which you live, as well as provide a range of choices of how to get around, all of a sudden you open up better and more choices for living, particularly as you get older,” Richards says.
She shares an anecdote about speaking to kindergarten classes about living environments, opening by asking how many of them drive. The kids, naturally, guffaw and respond that none of them drive.
“Exactly,” Richards likes to tell them. She notes that about 40% of the U.S. population does not drive, “and yet so much of how we build communities now is grounded in the car — and that’s particularly true for senior living,” she says. “What happens if we flip it around and we start building places where people aren’t required to drive? That is where New Urbanism comes in.”
For the new development, Otterbein president and CEO Jill Wilson spearheaded an effort to connect with a team led by development consultant Robert Turner because of the solution they pitched for Otterbein’s mass amount of unused land that wraps around the senior living community.
“As we began to work with them and learn more about the concepts of New Urban planning — the walkability, the green spaces, having amenities there — we could do it in a way that was age-friendly so that seniors could buy property and live in this community and have easy access to all of the amenities,” Wilson says.
“The lines between the retirement community and the village will begin to blur, and will begin to provide services out in the village to folks who are aging. There won’t be a need as much for them to move into the retirement community. It just seems like a huge solution to what we envision our future to be.”
Trend #2
Intergenerational is the new mixed-use
With the forthcoming 62+ senior living community in Brookline, Massachusetts, leaders at 2Life Communities — formerly Jewish Community Housing for the Elderly, or JCHE — are letting a single vision guide their development.
“We’re making all of our walls permeable,” says Amy Schectman, president and CEO of 2Life Communities.
Along with the 62 affordable, age-restricted apartments, the new community at 370 Harvard Street — its unofficial name — includes a number of intergenerational touches, both physical and programmatic. 2Life Communities is leasing the property from Congregation Kehillath Israel (KI), which will be physically and programmatically connected to the new building. Its ground floor has community-oriented retail and a community gathering space.
Together, 2Life and KI are building partnerships and co-sponsored events with the nearby Brookline Senior Center, and its ground floor Village Center will host activities and programming for neighbors as well as residents. All of this is done with the hopes of introducing outsiders into the prospect of participation in the community, Schectman says.
From an emotional standpoint, the work that 2Life is doing with 370 Harvard Street is designed to combat isolation and increase social integration for senior residents.
But from a pragmatic, development standpoint, operators who take this approach to senior living are using the same winning strategy that providers use with mixed-use senior living. In mixed-use senior living, developers use retail and restaurants to entice a given municipality into approving a community, because those mixed-use elements give the community value for neighboring non-residents.
At 370 Harvard Street and other like-minded communities, the senior residents are a portion of the enticement, offering non-residents the benefits of living near seniors, be that in the form of a rich social life or the assistance seniors offer for young parents and their children.
Essentially, senior living operators can think of intergenerational senior living as mixed-use senior living where the intermingling age groups is the mixed-use.
“We’re on a quest, and we’re very open about this quest, to debunk the myth that aging-in-place is anything other than aging in loneliness and isolation,” Schectman says. “By inviting people in to see what it’s like to live here… I think we start spreading the word about the value of aging in community.”
This is a winning play in the Boston area. It’s also a winning play in Singapore. In May of 2017, WOHA Architects completed the construction of Kampung Admiralty, a mixed-use, intergenerational age-restricted public housing high-rise for people 55 years and older, serving as Singapore’s first integrated public development.
Like 370 Harvard Street, Kampung (the Malaysian word for “village”) Admiralty was designed to serve not just its seniors but neighboring non-seniors too. The project — with a site area of approximately 96,800 square feet — was the result of a design competition headed by multiple government agencies that wanted to locate a variety of public need facilities under one roof, including public housing for seniors, retail, medical care and childcare.
“The elderly have their children living nearby, and their children have young children, and the grandchildren attend the childcare in the same development,” says Pearl Chee, director of WOHA. “It’s really a lot of convenience that these grandparents can look out for their grandkids.”
Kampung is designed in layers, to create different atmospheres literally from top to bottom. The roof offers more green space than the surrounding areas, along with a community farm. The higher floors are quiet, with the childcare, senior care and senior housing. The ground floor includes the retail and other public community spaces. The community includes 104 apartments for seniors, divided across two, 11-story blocks.
At Kampung, intergenerational interaction is not just encouraged — it is one of the community’s key performance indicators. Because the building is public housing, the only areas that are off-limits to the public are the apartments. The building was designed to draw the public in, thus enabling seniors to interact and bond with their outside neighbors.
All in all, WOHA came to a similar conclusion as 2Life: that the intergenerational model has social benefits for seniors, social benefits for neighbors and meets objectives of both the architects and the government bodies. And though Kampung was the result of a government competition, WOHA sees the community as something it can scale.
“The layering I think works very well, which is a very good prototype for us to develop future projects,” Chee says. “Hopefully if it can be multiplied, it will generate substantial green spaces in a very urbanized environment.”
Trend #3
Lifelong aging-in-place
Candy Ho, co-founder and director of Vancouver, Canada-based Element Lifestyle Retirement, has senior housing in her blood. Her father, Don Ho, is a pioneer of Canada’s aging-in-place senior living and assisted living offerings, and she has worked in the industry for more than 16 years.
Yet it was a personal story, not a professional one, that took her into intergenerational living.
When her father retired and turned his focus to helping his wife through her battle with Parkinson’s, Ho saw a desire to create a new senior living community in their hometown of Vancouver, one that would accommodate both her healthy father and ailing mother, and that would allow her parents to remain naturally close to their extended family.
“I wanted my mom and dad to enjoy the fruits of their legacy and age in place together,” Ho says.
The result is OPAL, an intergenerational community opening in 2019 in which residents are nearly fully integrated among age groups — some within the same building, some even within the same suite.
OPAL is the first of three intergenerational communities coming soon from Element. Its three interconnected buildings offer a mix of rentals and for-sale units, with about one-third of residents aged 50-59, one-third 60-69, and one-third 70 or older. It is designed for residents like Ho’s parents, people with a range of care needs and who have indicated a desire to host and entertain grandchildren and family.
Ho notes that while the community’s physical design has intergenerational principles in place, it is the spirit underneath the physical, along with the programming, that truly makes a community intergenerational.
“Intergenerational is embodied in every aspect of our operation,” Ho says. That includes a space designed to run a Montessori preschool and kindergarten that connects to an outdoor playground, an art room that will host intergenerational arts and crafts courses, a “movement studio” for dance, ping pong, yoga and tai chi, a movie theater and a rooftop area designed for both parties and gardening.
Each of the three forthcoming intergenerational communities from Element — including AQUARA in Victoria West, Greater Victoria, and master-planned community OASIS in the Vancouver township of Langley — has some level of age-restriction for senior residents, with OPAL and OASIS at 55+. But some developers are creating living environments where residents can age in place beginning in their 30s.
Copper Lane co-housing is London’s first co-housing project, and although it was not built for any seniors to start, it follows the UK’s Lifetime Homes design guide, and is designed for its residents to to age in place for the rest of their lives.
This could be a long time: among the residents in the six houses of Copper Lane are two families with young children, the youngest of which was seven years old when the community planning started in 2009 and 12 when it opened in 2014.
To achieve this lifelong aging-in-place model, Rodgers and his team at Henley Halebrown essentially meet the 8-to-80 principle employed in New Urbanism. Each house has multi-functional entrances whose purpose can adapt to the age of the resident.
In the house with the young family, the kids’ entrance into the house moves directly into their bedroom. This gives them a hallway-like living space independent from their parents. When the children moved in, it was a playroom, and as they grew they used it as a space for television and as a hangout room. And because it’s all on the ground floor, the parents can use it as they age, transforming its function again.
The houses are all built to be easily retrofitted to accommodate aging residents and changing needs. One resident has physical disabilities, so this multi-functionality was a part of the initial design. That flexibility allowed one house to be transformed on the fly into a “granny annex” with the ground floor, independent entrance when a resident’s elderly mother had to move in, an aspect that put two of the other residents more at ease, as they are both single and in their 50s.
“For them, seeing their future being less mobile even in the next 10, 15 or 20 years, and being a part of a community that evolves and has younger people is a real boon,” Rodgers says. “You get these interactions and the shared relationships … even in terms of childcare. The kids even grew up through this (planning) process, so the one thing the residents were quite keen on was for this to feel like a multigenerational thing and have that energy.”
Trend #4
Building partnerships, even with competitors
Generations LLC has five communities in California, Oregon, Utah and Washington, and has focused on intergenerational, public-facing senior housing for most of its 75 years. Yet as Gabriel noted, its residents still want more integration.
To deliver it, Generations does what many are doing today, which is forming strategic partnerships with organizations that can deliver an intergenerational element. The operator has four communities in the works, most of which are partnering with either K-12 schools or preschools to provide opportunities for residents and young children to interact.
The newest, Peninsula Wellness Center, is specifically designed with educational benefits in mind for seniors and the surrounding community of Burlingame, California. Peninsula has 295 IL units and 80 AL. It offers 250,000 square feet of medical office building space and 35,000 square feet of nonprofits, dining venues and community-based health and wellness programming, mostly through its Center for Health Innovation and Discovery.
Peninsula will also likely house a large preschool for local students, and Gabriel hopes the community will eventually feature apartments for low-income residents. Meanwhile, Generations’ existing IL/AL community Paradise Village in San Diego is partnering with University of California at San Diego to bring graduate students in for research opportunities with residents. The students learn, while the residents get to visit.
Whether through shared space or planned programming, educational partnerships are growing more common as intergenerational elements in senior living. Even bolder partnerships are those between potential competitors.
All-ages developer Robert Turner came into senior living similarly to how seniors do: his project aged into it. He developed the master-plan for Habersham, South Carolina, and after a certain point the residents began asking Turner and his team how they could remain in the community as they aged. Habersham was already amenity-rich, and Turner began to view it as a natural location for IL and AL.
“If you can provide all of those services, it just seems like an ideal situation to give seniors the freedom once they can’t drive their car anymore, to walk to these places and still feel like they are part of a community,” Turner says.
It was after Habersham that Turner and his group connected with Otterbein to serve as consultants on the Otterbein expansion. The two factions formed Union Village Development Company, a wholly owned, for-profit subsidiary of Otterbein. Union Village Development Company is leading the development of the 1,200 acres that wraps around Otterbein’s existing senior living property, to create a master-planned, multigenerational, mixed-use community.
New Urbanist developers such as Turner are now looking for new opportunities to work in senior living. That makes him and others like him a potential threat to senior living operators — or a partner.
“If you’re truly just a senior provider, you can see that we’re taking this space and doing these New Urbanist projects,” Turner says. “But the better way to look at it is, ‘How can we incorporate the two?’”
Turner knew very little about senior living when he started the Otterbein project. What he knew was master-planned work in the all-ages, mixed-use space.
“I had none of the knowledge that Jill has,” he says about Otterbein’s Jill Wilson. “But if I can say, ‘Hey Jill, let’s incorporate these things together — you bring your knowledge, we’ll bring ours,’ and create places that are better places for people to stay and live for a long life, I think it’s a win-win.”
If you’re truly just a senior provider, you can see that (all-age developers are) taking this space and doing these New Urbanist projects. But the better way to look at it is, ‘How can we incorporate the two?’
– Robert Turner, Union Village Development Company
Trend #5
In February 2018, Aegis Living opened a 131-unit assisted living and memory care community that found another way to deliver intergenerational living: serve an affinity group.
Aegis Gardens at Newcastle, in Newcastle, Washington — about 12 miles southeast of Seattle — is an Asian-inspired community that caters to the Northwest’s Chinese population. The numbers support the move: anchored by Portland in Oregon, Vancouver in British Columbia and Seattle, the Northwest, including Canada, has nearly 600,000 people of Chinese descent.
“We didn’t want to build an old folks’ home, or a typical assisted living or typical retirement home,” Dwyane Clark, chairman and CEO of Bellevue, Washington-based Aegis Living, told Senior Housing News in March 2018. “We wanted to be the epicenter of Chinese life in the Northwest.”
The plan is working. Built for $52 million, the five-story community is filling up, while the intergenerational mixed-use elements — including public lectures, a cultural center and a bilingual preschool — keep the residents in touch with the broader community. The preschool opened in September and currently has 12 students, with regular interactions with senior residents, while the lectures focus primarily on topics related to Chinese culture.
“We have 48-year-olds coming to our lectures,” Clark said then. “Because of that, our 83-year-old residents feel like they are mainstreamed into life. It doesn’t feel like an old folks’ home. It’s much more lively.”
While creating senior communities based on race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, orientation or any other affinity group may seem controversial, antithetical to 21st century norms or simply bad for business, it is an option that some operators are exploring, and should be another tool in the operator’s tool box when pursuing intergenerational senior living.
“In my career, and in observatory research, not written research, Italians, Jews, Greeks — a lot of the European side — they tend to be a lot more comfortable with this kind of living situation,” Eckstein says. “I think like-groups like to stay together. We like to be multicultural, but the reality is that people like to hang with their own. And they’re more comfortable with their own. And they’re more comfortable with their own as they age, at least historically.”
A 2018 study from Pew Research Center studying multigenerational households gives a glimpse into which groups of people might be most accustomed to these living arrangements.
While not specific to seniors, Pew defines “multigenerational” as a household that includes at least two adult generations, or grandparents and grandchildren under the age of 25. The study found that all racial and ethnic groups had more people in these households in 2016 than 2009, with Asian-Americans leading the way: 29% of that population lived in multigenerational households in 2016. Whites had the least at 16%.
Based both on Pew data and other research and anecdotal evidence, there is a case to be made for senior living providers pursuing an intergenerational community to consider the power of affinity groups.
“Aegis Living has had tremendous success building these beautiful communities that are Asian-focused, mainly Chinese,” Eckstein says. “But you’ll see Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese as well. … So I think there is validity in that.”
Eckstein also notes his experience working in Europe, where he saw Brits, Germans and Belgians develop communities geared toward serving seniors of their respective nationalities.
“It’s a worldwide thing,” he says.
The trend is seen based on sexual orientation, too. The Los Angeles LGBT Center has been a beacon for that city’s gay community since 1969, and in 2019, 50 years after its launch, it will add the next chapter in its story by unveiling the intergenerational Anita May Rosenstein Campus.
The campus will include 99 units of affordable senior housing and 100 beds for homeless youth, working toward a goal of providing care, support, safety and healing for LGBT youth and LGBT seniors.
Like any trend in senior living, there is no one-size-fits-all with regards to the marketability of affinity-based intergenerational senior living. One huge draw to intergenerational living is the community and cross-generational integration, yet for some seniors that is actually a drawback, hence the growing popularity of active adult.
Indeed, with the expanding racial and ethnic diversity in the U.S., where white people are projected to fall under 50% of the U.S. population by 2065, the coming generation of seniors will be more accustomed to multicultural lifestyles than any before it.
Still, affinity-based intergenerational senior living can be a successful element of the space, and should be taken into account by operators as they plan projects.
Trend #6
Urban senior living… in reverse
Of all the communities studied for this report, the one with the most unique arrangement is one that might be the most difficult to replicate. But operators who can do so might be looking into the future.
In 1912, Otterbein SeniorLife purchased 4,500 acres of land for $350,000 to continue the Christian mission-based living of the United Brethren Church. For close to 100 years, Otterbein sold parcels of that property as a revenue stream, reaching a point today where Otterbein SeniorLife owns 1,440 acres. The senior community sits on 140-200 of those acres, while they lease most of the rest to farmers.
But in 2006, the company began discussing the possibility of developing the surrounding acreage which wraps around the senior living community, turning that land into a community that would create intergenerational benefits for the senior residents.
The planning was temporarily derailed by the Great Recession, and returned in earnest in 2014. That is when Otterbein connected with Turner’s team. The result is urban senior living, albeit in reverse.
“The trend has been for senior living to go into cities or towns,” Turner says. “But this was interesting in that they already had that, and now they’re building the town around the (seniors).”
Union Village is currently working on the first phase of the buildout, which is 89 market-rate, single family homes, plus townhouses and apartments. Also included in this phase are the first pieces of the town center, such as restaurants, coffee shops, physician offices and an arts and culture center — amenities that can be used by both the senior residents and the neighboring residents of the first phase.
The end result will be 3,400 multi-generational residences, along with retail, grocery, restaurants, hotels, schools, churches and theater — everything the people in the community need on a daily basis.
Wilson believes that the wraparound community will also create staffing benefits for Otterbein, because the housing around the senior living will be a new living option for staff. She envisions many of the single-family houses to be purchased by families with children, which will then drive intergenerational programming between the children and the seniors.
But she also sees an entry point in the townhouses and apartments for empty-nesters and millennials. This was revealed in their market research, as they realized that empty-nesters and millennials want many of the same housing elements, including walkability and a bonding within a neighborhood. “Front porches and community,” as Wilson puts it.
“What we are selling is a lifestyle,” she says. “Having empty nesters, millennials and our retirement (residents) all mixed into one, to me, makes for a great option for good lifestyles.”
Putting it all together: the future of intergenerational senior living
Whether in traditional care continuum living or active adult, whether via residents or programming, there are countless opportunities to execute intergenerational models in senior living — and countless reasons to do so. What operators are finding is that intergenerational living lends itself to a fusing of many of the best trends in senior living innovation.
And that might be where the future lies.
“I really see more collaboration with the multi-family business and the residential people, where we are partnering with them in bigger developments with multitudes of spaces and resources, Gabriel says.
Gabriel sees a growing prevalence of planned, self-contained communities. Housing would include everything from single-family all-age homes to apartments and townhouses to affordable housing, right into age-restricted neighborhoods and full care-continuum offerings. Residents would go to school there, shop there, eat there, grow food there, have their entertainment there, see physicians there and live their entire lives there, if they wanted. Everything would be mixed-use, multi-functional and intergenerational.
I really see more collaboration with the multi-family business and the residential people, where we are partnering with them in bigger developments with multitudes of spaces and resources.
– Chip Gabriel, president, Generations LLC
At their simplest form, the creation of each of these master-plans and others is the result of operators and developers joining multiple strands of living principles and models to solve interconnected problems in senior living. That means addressing isolation through intergenerational programming, zoning quandaries through mixed-use offerings, land availability through vertical construction or declining healthy lifestyles through wellness practices.
Bringing it all together is the next step.
“I see that’s where it’s going — our industry partnering with the residential large developer or the multi-family space,” Gabriel says. “That’s where I envision it going.”
