Days of Wine and...
Today's active-adult communities appeal to aging boomers with spas, hiking trails-even vineyards
Maureen Christiansen is looking forward to learning how to play bocce and is hoping to find a group to teach her bridge, too. She wants to improve her swimming, get out on some vineyard-rimmed walking trails with her husband, Edward, and maybe play more golf. Her husband is excited about attending cooking classes and wine tastings.
No, it's not their next cruise or resort vacation, but if it sounds that way, well, that's just the point. The Christiansens, 60 and 64, respectively, recently bought a home at Trilogy at the Vineyards, an active-adult community built just for baby boomers about an hour east of San Francisco. Homes there range in price from just over $600,000 to nearly $900,000 and in size from 1,750 to 2,900 square feet. The couple's stylish two-bedroom home will be finished by early fall, and Maureen estimates that in October they'll begin a new phase in their lives by moving all of 20 minutes away from where they live now, still close to their grown sons and to Edward's job with Wells Fargo in Walnut Creek, a San Francisco Bay area suburb.
Cafe society. Welcome to what developers hope is the new face of housing for maturing baby boomers. Active-adult communities are by now an old idea, but developers have been puzzling over how to make them appeal to boomers. They think they've finally found the magic formula: location-specific, "resort style" communities like Trilogy. They're often far from the Sun Belt and are built to evoke the lifestyle associated with their surroundings in California wine country, Colorado ski country, or even the outskirts of Chicago or Washington, D.C. These communities aim to give boomers even more convenience, luxury, and fun than they thought they wanted in their later years by offering yoga, walking trails, high-speed computer access, guest speakers, day spas, chic cafes, and wine bars-all at their doorsteps.
"If you say active-adult community to boomers, they think retirement community, and they resist it," says Dan O'Brien, president of Trilogy's northern California division. "But we hope if they hear about us, they'll be curious enough to check it out, and that when they get here, the whole community will just look good and feel good to them."
The Christiansens hadn't thought about living in such a place at all until their son mentioned playing golf on a nice course at another Trilogy development about an hour north of where they lived. They drove up out of idle curiosity, Maureen says, and pretty quickly "drank the Kool-Aid."
The community was orderly but stopped short of being too cookie cutter. They saw the chance to downsize to a smaller home and yard while still living in a house with upscale amenities like a gourmet kitchen. With the wide social networks they had at the peak of their work and family lives dwindling, they liked being able to build a new social circle with people their age. "And we liked that everything was right there, and there was a lot of stuff going on," she says.
Even an hour away from their current community seemed too far to move. But when Trilogy began selling homes for its Vineyards community-so called because it's near the Livermore Valley wine country and will have grapevines and olive groves, a wine-making facility, and maybe even the community's own wine label-the couple quickly snapped up a lot. "If you told me five years ago that we would do this, I would have said you were insane because we were living in our dream house," Maureen Christiansen says. "But it's amazing how quickly your outlook can change."
Active-adult communities have been around since the 1960s, when Del Webb began building them in Arizona. With a few thousand identical homes built around golf courses, he reinvented retirement by giving old folks permission to be active, indulge themselves, and have fun, says Marc Freedman, author of Prime Time: How Baby Boomers Will Revolutionize Retirement and Transform America. "Even people who didn't move to these places became more active, and retirement changed from this awkward thing people dreaded to something they looked forward to and worked toward."
Bill Feinberg, an architect in Voorhees, N.J., who has done extensive focus group research on baby boomers, says, "Affluent baby boomers want a certain level of lifestyle for themselves as they get older and downsize, but they believe they can get that lifestyle in several different ways." And active-adult builders aren't the only ones courting them.
For example, home-building firm RÃÂöhe & Wright in Houston doesn't label its developments "adult," but it targets this group with urban and semiurban locales, high-end customization, and $1 million price tags. The firm is almost done building two dozen townhouses near the city's premier medical center and not far from its business and entertainment districts. "All but one of the 25 buyers are empty nesters," says Andrew Suman, a partner with the firm.
Feinberg says that a few years ago, adult-community builders began to worry that boomers wouldn't gravitate to their homes at all. In response, they began branching out of the Sun Belt to urban and suburban communities, where they'd never built before. According to J. D. Power & Associates, Phoenix is still the top destination for people buying into 55-and-over communities, but fewer than a fifth of recent buyers in a fall 2006 survey chose that area. The other top markets for active-adult communities were Chicago, "Inland Empire" (southeast of Los Angeles), Las Vegas, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C.
Party on. In addition to building where prospective buyers already live, developers began brainstorming how to make their homes and clubhouses irresistible to them. Trilogy, which began building its communities in 2000, has been tinkering with its formula almost perpetually in response to its own market research.
The company's attempt to appeal to boomers is everywhere as perspective buyers tour the model home gallery at the Vineyards. Beatles and Fleetwood Mac tunes waft across a landscaped cul-de-sac where each housing style evokes a different wine region. Inside a "Napa-style" one-story home, O'Brien enthuses, "Is this a cool party space or what?" A large open kitchen, dining room, and living room wrap around a patio with a stone fireplace and glass doors on two sides. It is indeed easy to imagine your life as one long series of wine soirees and bunco nights.
Trilogy isn't the only company trying to lure boomers with resort-style amenities and revved-up, place-specific lifestyles. Webb himself might not recognize the communities that carry his name today. Residents at Anthem Ranch in Broomfield, Colo., get to pick from housing styles whose names reflect famous ski towns, like Aspen and Steamboat. They organize ski trips to area slopes, take cross-country-ski clinics, and go on daylong hikes. Scott Hysler, a former Naval Academy athletic coach who is the development's "lifestyle director," has organized a flying club this spring and even tried introducing residents to sky diving last year (he got one jumper).
At the community he previously worked at in Falls Run, Va., homeowners were "less outdoorsy and more focused on culture" but no less active. Hysler organized visits to Civil War sites, scored private tours of Mount Vernon, and invited speakers from the Smithsonian to complement trips to museums in Washington, D.C.
Gradually, boomers are responding. Tom and Angie Drzewiecki moved from California to Seattle a year ago, to be near their son and his wife. They looked at several housing options, initially thinking they would buy a condominium near the city. But then they visited Trilogy at Redmond Ridge in Redmond, Wash., and immediately liked everything about it.
"It was one gorgeous community. It had the golf course, lots of activities, and the style of the homes really reflected the Pacific Northwest," says Tom, 63, a retired human-resources executive. Angie, 60, a semiretired career counselor, recalls lunching at the clubhouse and being struck by residents' "great sense of energy and involvement and enthusiasm."
On the move. The Drzewieckis now live in a house that looks out on trees and mountains and often take two-hour walks through forests that abut the development. She's taking yoga classes and line dancing, and he's playing golf a few times a week with different foursomes. And they make a point of driving 30 minutes into Seattle at least a few times a month, to eat out, go to Mariners games, or take houseguests to Pike Place Market. "We weren't looking for this at all, but we have a lifestyle here," says Tom Drzewiecki. "I don't feel retired at all because of the environment."
Of course, no amount of swimming and day-tripping is going to keep old age completely at bay. "Five people in our little division have died in the 2
"We originally thought these would be the last homes they buy, but now we think they'll move on at some point," says O'Brien. But it seems unlikely that people would spend 10 or 20 years building a social network of their peers only to break off from them at a stage when making new friends will be less easy.
Darcy Stewart, the developer behind the large SunRiver community in St. George, Utah, is hedging his bets by setting aside land adjacent to the development for an assisted-living center. "The idea of aging in place is alive and well. Many people here are thinking about that next phase, and we are supporting that," he says.
The Christiansens, who have met some of their future neighbors at pizza parties and breakfasts organized by Trilogy, already feel attached to them. "If I'm left alone or my husband is, I can't think of a better place to be-it's safe and there's a social community already in place," says Maureen.
In the meantime, there's a bocce court free, and the wine is chilling.
This story appears in the May 14, 2007 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.