No time to slow down
Communities adapt to a more active generation of retirees

by Lisa Antonelli Bacon
for Virginia Business
August 2006

When her husband passed away in June last year, Mary Easterly was in a bind. Her husband, Harry, had made her promise to keep their sprawling home on the James River in Richmond. But it was large and lonely, and a lot to manage for a single person who has seen age 80 come and go. “He thought I loved it as much as he did, but I didn’t,” she says. “I had my fingers crossed when I promised.”

By November, Easterly was happily settled in a cottage at Richmond’s Westminster-Canterbury retirement community. The cottage is smaller than the riverfront home Harry loved, but it’s big enough for the Easterly grandchildren and great-grandchildren to stay for as long as she’ll have them. Problem is, like many of her neighbors at Westminster-Canterbury, she doesn’t stay still very long.

In February, Easterly and her two daughters took an 18-day sojourn to Africa. But for the petite octogenarian brimming with energy, the trip didn’t end there. Once at home, she orchestrated a full-blown fete for 100 friends, featuring a seated dinner with a guest speaker and a PowerPoint show of her trip. Her guests described the event as the best party of the season. Leaving the heavy lifting, so to speak, to Westminster-Canterbury’s staff, no one enjoyed the affair more than Easterly. “Moving here was the best thing I ever did.”

Easterly embodies the new reality facing 21st-century retirement communities: If 50 is the new 30, then 80 is the new 50. Don’t believe it? Retirement communities of old, replete with photogenic landscaping, clubhouses and the odd swimming pool, are just that. Old. Today’s retirement communities are more resort than restful, more luxe than laid back, with youthful-thinking residents planning forums, sharpening their pool games and calming their inner selves through yoga or music therapy.

If none of those sound appealing, fear not. Retirement communities today have lists of activities that rival any cruise ship’s.

As the oldest baby boomers hit 60 this year, the term “retirement” is being redefined. Some of these aging boomers hope to continue working until they go feet up. Others seek second careers for fun and adventure. And still others are cashing out and devoting 100 percent of their time to leisure, which can include any variety of endeavors from taking up water polo to becoming a bridge master.

Age 65, once regarded as “retirement age,” holds little meaning any more, except when calculating your Social Security income. By definition, a retirement community has a minimum age requirement. But these days, you can be as young as 55 to gain entry. At Westminster-Canterbury in Richmond, for instance, the minimum age is 62. But where couples are concerned, only one of the pair has to meet the requirement. “Historically, older people moved to retirement communities,” says Marjorie Bertolino of The Bertolino Group in Richmond, which specializes in marketing to seniors. “Now younger, healthier people are moving in while they’re still maintaining active lifestyles.”

An obsession with health, fitness and staying young is a hallmark of boomer culture. They proved it in the 1980s, prompting the growth of private health clubs and the proliferation of exercise shows on television. Whereas Jack LaLanne taught their parents to stretch and kick, Richard Simmons turned boomers on to living-room fitness. Before you could say “feel the burn,” every celebrity whose career was on a downward arc pumped out an exercise video. The exercise video craze has cooled, but boomers are no less obsessed. They’ve just found more options to help them stay young.

Social historian Theodore Roszak calls it “the longevity revolution,” which is also the title of his book about boomers and aging. Life expectancy charts show that Americans are living longer and healthier. A 2004 report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that someone born in 1900 was lucky to make it to age 47. Nowadays, we can expect to reach 77. The federal agency attributes the dramatic rise in life expectancy to improved medical care and preventive measures such as exercise and diet.

Consequently, Roszak says, half of all the people who ever lived to age 65 are alive today. And real estate developers are taking them head on with what now is a niche: age-targeted development.

Faced with a huge influx of like-minded mid-lifers with plenty of time and cash on their hands, forward-thinking developers have been promoting healthy lifestyles in community settings without the fuss of home maintenance. This trend isn’t a huge leap for over-the-hill hippies who reinvented communal living in the 1960s. To accommodate them in their mature years, a host of retirement communities are springing up with promises to make the second half of life better than the first. Fitness centers and Internet capabilities are prerequisites. Beautiful surroundings are assumed. And amenities you never even thought of are being lumped on like extra dollops of whipped cream.

Get this: The Marque at Heritage Hunt in Gainesville touts a pampered lifestyle, including a list of services from ear candling to animal acupuncture. Residents of The Fairmont in Manassas can snap up a chef-prepared breakfast before walking a short distance to Tai Chi or calligraphy lessons.

Want someone to design a health program tailored to your own strengths, weaknesses and overall health? Personal wellness counseling at The Park-Oak Grove Retirement Community in Roanoke makes it all about you.

Research shows that boomers place premium value on independence. “We want autonomy,” says Bertolino, who is on the front end of the baby boom. “We like choices, and we want to direct our own courses.” Services and amenities these days are designed to ease residents into a healthy, leisurely life, with as much independence as possible. “Folks are concerned about who is going to meet their needs later on,” says Don Lecky, president and CEO of Westminster-Canterbury in Richmond. “Many have children all over the world. Having mom and dad move in with you doesn’t happen like it used to.”

Taking that into consideration, niche-directed developers are offering ways to make later life fun and easy. Burke-based Slenker Land Corp., for instance, includes “Carefree Living” home maintenance programs in all of its active-adult communities. Its new development in Loudoun County, Central Parke at Lowes Island, touts its Resort Club for swimming, exercising and social activities. All 181 units sold out last December. And Celebrate by Del Webb, a new active-adult community near Fredericksburg, is loaded with opportunities to keep fit and healthy amid luxurious, fret-free living, including an indoor pool and track, putting green and walking trails.

In addition to wooing potential residents with resort-worthy amenities, new style communities provide access to better than basic options in retail, entertainment and services. If it can’t be found on the grounds, it can be found nearby. “These communities are based on the New Town design,” says Bertolino, adding that communities are strategically located in areas where shopping, health care and entertainment already exist. “You have your own little town with everything you need.”

Retirement communities are still evolving. And as the competition grows, many are seeking to broaden their appeal to capture a wider swath of the market. “Many CCRCs [continuing-care retirement communities] are reinventing themselves and adding more active-adult neighborhoods,” notes Bertolino. Westminster-Canterbury in Richmond, for instance, is wrapping up a 700,000-square-foot expansion that includes more independent living options, such as cottages and condos. And Sunnyside in Harrisonburg, one of the region’s oldest CCRCs, now has villas, cottages and apartments for those with a yen for independence. “The expansion residences are allowing us to attract a segment of the market that we weren’t able to accommodate in such large numbers before,” says Bill King, vice president of marketing for Richmond’s Westminster-Canterbury. The extension added 210 new independent living units, making a total of 863 residences on campus.

Another step in the evolution is the emergence of destination communities. Instead of spending weeks at a time at the “rivah” house, folks are enjoying what seems like a permanent vacation. “We attract people who are looking to pursue more of the things they’ve enjoyed over time,” says Faye Krejci, vice president of marketing and community relations for Rappahannock Westminster-Canterbury in Irvington in the Northern Neck.

The retirement community is just a mile or so from the river, even closer to The Tides Inn and just across the street from the Golden Eagle Golf Course.

While other retirement communities draw overwhelmingly from their local markets, destination communities draw the majority of their residents from farther locales. “In a destination location, you have a broader appeal because of where they are,” says Krejci. “One of the things that makes a destination location popular is that kids and grandchildren enjoy visiting.”

Whatever the size or the sprawl, the keyword in retirement living is “community.” “As we grow older, we can become isolated. We might outlive friends, family,” says Lecky. “Having that sense of community is extremely important.”