Wary of retirement housing
options, some baby boomers
make their own way
1/6
Five couples recently moved into Ankeny Row, a pocket village of townhouses that, thanks
to super-efficient construction and solar panels, will have a net-zero draw on the electric
grid.
In the late '90s, Dick Benner and Lavinia Gordon dreamed of buying a
building to open a bookstore and perhaps live in a condo above.
The bookstore idea fell to the wayside, but the conversation about
how the couple wanted to live in retirement endured.
Benner and Gordon and four other couples recently moved
into Ankeny Row, a pocket village of five townhouses in Southeast
Portland that, thanks to energy-efficient construction and solar panels,
will have a net-zero draw on the electric grid. But they're more than
residents: The couples came together to develop the property to suit
their needs.
All of the residents -- partners in a company formed to oversee the
development -- are retired or nearing retirement and wanted to
downsize, but hoped to do so in a way that aligned with their values
and their vision for their golden years.
"We had lived in these big houses and we wanted to downsize in an
environmentally sustainable way," said Francie Royce, who with her
husband, became Benner and Gordon's first partners. "And we
wanted to live with friends."
The Metro regional government and other forecasters expect the
retirement-age population of the Portland-Vancouver-Hillsboro area to
more than double by 2040, when nearly two in 10 Portlanders would
be over age 65.
The baby boomer-led retirement wave will be a major driver of
development in coming years, too, similar to the way recent apartment
construction has catered primarily to millennials.
In the meantime, some boomers are taking their retirement housing
into their own hands.
"We're starting to see boomers ... realize they need to be proactive
about how they're going to age and try to stay in their own
neighborhoods," said Margaret Neal, director of the Institute on Aging
at Portland State University.
Ankeny Row, designed and built for its residents by Portland-based
Green Hammer, comes with an array of efficient features with a target
of using no more electricity than is generated by rooftop solar panels.
If you go
Ankeny Row will be open for public tours April 25 in a fundraiser for Green Empowerment,
a Portland nonprofit that provides renewable energy to villages in the developing world.
Where: Southeast 25th Avenue and Ankeny Street
When: Saturday, April 25, 3 to 6 p.m.
Cost: $15 per person. Tickets available atgreenempower
ment.org.
But the townhouses also have aging-friendly features that much of the
housing stock available today lacks: ground-floor master bedrooms,
for example, and wheelchair accessible entryways.
It also embraces elements of co-housing, a development style that
emphasizes common areas and community. The townhouses have
balconies that look out on a common courtyard, and there's a common
room where residents can gather for meals or other events.
A much larger group of boomers are planning a larger co-housing
development nearby.
The future residents of PDX Commons, a 55-and-older co-housing
development, haven't even purchased land or fully designed their
development yet, but 15 of the proposed 27 units are spoken for.
Their development would include a mix of one-, two- and threebedroom condos, but about one-third of the building's square footage
would be used for common areas. That would include a community
dining room for up to 45 people as well as two shared guest rooms.
For Jim Swenson, one of the founding members of PDX Commons,
the impetus for his own retirement planning came from trying to find a
place for his own parents to live.
"Our generation, I think, is not going to be happy with the solutions are
available today, the kind of nursing facilities and retirement homes that
we saw our parents go through," Swenson said.
Many who signed on to the PDX Commons project had considered
other options: downsizing into a smaller house or a condo, for
example.
But while those options might address accessibility concerns,
Swenson said the sense of community built into a cohousing
development will become more important as residents age and
perhaps develop health problems.
"The experience has been that people really help each other out," he
said. "It's a much more old-fashioned system of caring for each other."
Developments like these will likely be an example of a small niche in
senior housing. Not everyone has the resources to build an ideal
home for retirement.
"We have a huge affordable housing problem in Portland," Neal said.
"Layer on top of that a little bit of need for health services, and then
you're looking at assisted living. Something like that really gets
expensive pretty quickly."
Preferences, too, will vary. Some retirees will prefer to stay in the
suburbs and in single-family houses.
Alan DeLaTorre, a researcher at the Institute on Aging, said in an
email that developers and others in the real estate industry have
already started to catch on to the need for aging-friendly housing.
But one of the biggest barriers might be boomers themselves, who
often aren't eager to start planning ahead for retirement and old age.
"Once older adults stop denying that they're aging and/or realize that
accessible housing is just good housing, it should become the norm,"
he said.