Over the next five years, a Baltimore developer plans to build, at a cost of about $2 billion, 10 continuing-care centers for the elderly.
Each of the centers would house more than 2,000 residents with moderate incomes.
Since 1983 the developer, Senior Campus Living, has built two campus-style complexes and a third, Oak Crest Village, is under construction in this community 22 miles northeast of Baltimore.
The state has 27 such communities where active and frail people alike can live out their lives. They have a total of 8,900 residents.
Senior Campus Living’s projects house more people and cost less than most other continuing-care communities, which typically are single, mid-rise structures with a few hundred upper-income residents each who have ample savings.
In contrast, Senior Campus Living’s Charlestown Retirement Community, population 2,478, consists of 15 brick buildings averaging four stories on 110 acres in Catonsville, 11 miles southwest of Baltimore.
All the buildings are linked by glass-enclosed bridges so residents never need to step outside. Six restaurants, two banks, beauty salons and dozens of activities a day make Charlestown a virtually self-contained community.
Such a formula has attracted the attention-and investment-of Equitable Real Estate Management.
“We looked at smaller-scale projects, but with a larger development come economies of scale,” said Harry D. Pierandri, senior executive vice president of Equitable Real Estate Management and portfolio manager of its Prime Property Fund.
“You can supply more services in a cost-effective way. You don’t have to target high income. You can do it for middle-income people.”
Over the next five years, Equitable expects to invest up to $300 million of its $3 billion fund in Senior Campus Living projects.
Its first joint venture is Oak Crest Village, an 85-acre development that opened its first phase in March. The $200 million project, which will house at least 2,000 elderly residents when it is completed in 1998, is modeled after the sold-out Charlestown.
Another campus for the elderly is Henry Ford Village on 35 acres in Dearborn, Mich., which opened 18 months ago. It now has 308 residents and expects to have 1,200 when completed next year.
Two-thirds of the project, which is expected to cost $125 million, is being financed by Ford Motor Land Development Co., the rest by Senior Campus Living.
The average resident of the campus projects is 75 and previously lived within a 50-mile radius of a retirement community. Most use the equity from the sale of a home to pay the entrance deposit.
The fee, which is fully refundable to the resident if he or she moves or to the family at death, ranges from $56,000 for an efficiency to $225,000 for a two-bedroom unit with a den.
Monthly fees between $750 and $1,200 cover utilities, maintenance, property taxes, one meal a day, transportation, cable television and activities. Additional services, such as medical care, are priced separately.
Entrance fees are used to pay development costs so the company has no long-term debt, according to John C. Erickson, chairman and chief executive of Senior Campus Living. Equitable’s share in the venture adds further financial stability.
Pierandri said that residents’ “outstanding creditworthiness,” evidenced by the equity they are able to apply toward the entrance fee, played a part in Equitable’s decision to invest the fund’s money.
There are more than 275 retirement communities of a varied nature in the Washington region. Among them are the independent living or leisure retirement community-often luxury developments geared toward active, upper-middle-income seniors such as Leisure World, a community of 7,500 featuring golf in the Washington suburb of Silver Spring, Md. Extended health care for chronic illness generally is not available on site, so residents must make their own medical arrangements or move.
On the other end of the spectrum are assisted-living communities (where an independent-living resident pays separately for many services), nursing homes and congregate-care operations (where most services are packaged in the fees).
The fastest growing segment is assisted living, according to Leon Harper, a senior housing specialist for the American Association of Retired Persons in Washington.
Many pure “leisure communities” are adding assisted-living components as aging residents require more help, Harper said.
Continuing-care communities are a mix of independent-living apartments and units offering varying medical and other services. There are about 1,000 continuing-care operations throughout the country, according to figures from the American Senior Housing Association.
The $220 million Charlestown has 132 assisted-living units where residents get three meals a day and 24-hour help with bathing, dressing and taking medications.
Its 270-bed nursing home has 74 beds reserved just for Alzheimer’s patients. Its medical center has six full-time physicians and 16 specialists on call.
They bill residents in the independent-living apartments separately from maintenance charges.
At least one member of a couple applying for a Charlestown unit must be 62 years or older. Applicants for the 1,614 independent-living units are required to pass cognitive, memory and physical tests.
Although medical care is available, Erickson says fewer residents need it at Charlestown than in the elderly population at large.
An AARP study found that one in four people 65 or older will need nursing care. Yet at Charlestown, only one in 14 residents 75 years or older ever needs high level care, Erickson said.
“Social isolation and depression from living alone are a greater cause of death in the 65-year-old age group than cancer or heart disease,” said Erickson, a former seminary student. If anything, a resident at Charlestown might suffer from the opposite.
Activities such as an Internet Club, billiards, line dancing, masquerade balls, a closed-circuit cable TV station, aquatic center, woodshop and happy hour every Friday keep Charlestown residents upbeat and active.
