Serenbe is advancing its plan to create a wellness-focused community that connects older adults and other people of all ages.

The company recently announced ambitions of a $1.7 billion expansion that aims to triple the planned community’s housing by 2035 and add a school, hotel, retail and commercial spaces and private homes.

In an interview with Senior Housing News on Monday, Serenbe Founder and CEO Steve Nygren confirmed the company is still planning to build its previously announced aging-in-place rental community for older adults in the future. Now, the company is just waiting on financing.

For the last 20 years, new urbanism-inspired Serenbe has aimed to build everything needed to sustain the wellness community as a fully functioning town. The company builds local connections between businesses and residents by supporting biophilic design and other features meant to strengthen intergenerational bonds. 

“We’re very close,” Nygren told SHN. “We’re not going to compromise on what we feel is important to create a new model for aging in place.”

The company’s project is coming together in a 66-square-mile area just south of Atlanta, with a model inspired by Blue Zone concepts. The community is designed to tie architecture with nature and create walkable clusters across the property in a way that emulates villages across rural Europe. 

Serenbe has tapped JLL Capital Markets to find financing partners. Its development company, Serenbe CH Properties LLC, submitted plans with the Georgia Department of Community Affairs to add 1,700 residential units, 235,000 square-feet of commercial business space, 75, 000 square-feet of civic space, 180 hotel rooms and a two-building school to serve nearly 500 students.

The groundwork for this sprawling growth started back in 2002 when Nygren and Serenbe leaders worked with local municipal leaders to change zoning.

“We’re excited and I think we’ll be making announcements within months,” Nygren said of securing financing. “We’ve had to educate investors and if you don’t fit into ‘X’ boxes, sometimes it just takes a lot longer to move. We’re not replicating yesterday’s model, we are tomorrow’s model.”

Today, residential development at Serenbe includes over 600 homes and 18 health and wellness providers have opened businesses in the master-planned area in the last two years, according to Nygren. That includes regional physicians who left previous hospital posts to establish a private practice network at Serenbe from pediatrics to geriatrics.

“It’s truly a community serving all of the people who are already living and renting here right now,” Nygren said. “Our campus will take it to the next level of really focusing on people who may need additional support.”

 As planned, the 2,000 acre development will include the 97-unit aging-in-place senior living community that includes a clubhouse and an expanded medical building. Serenbe aims to break ground on the effort in 2025, pending financing and community development approvals. Of the zoned 60 square-miles, 70% will remain for agricultural use. 

Nygren described the aging in-place community as a “garden campus” emphasizing natural light and many windows to be directly across from the planned school.

“We’re on a steady path of our development and people are aware of us,” Nygren said. “Wer’e on a steady path, and it’s not like all of a sudden the doors are opening, it’s all the curtains are pulling back and more people are understanding what we’re doing.”

Nygren cited various metrics in making the case for Serenbe’s intentional, wellness-focused development plans. He noted the country’s drop in the 2025 World Happiness Report to the lowest ranking ever of 24th out of 146 countries, a significant decrease since 2012 when the U.S. ranked 11th, along with rising health care costs as U.S. health care spending accounted for 17.3% of gross domestic product in 2022 and increased 7.5% to $14,570 per capita in 2023, according to the American Medical Association.

“It’s becoming more obvious that the way we have been building places for people has not been working,” Nygren said. “I think we all have to agree that maybe it isn’t working and there needs to be new models.”