The creators of a new apartment building in Rockville think there’s a growing market for older adults who don’t want to move into a traditional age-restricted retirement community.
Rockville-based developer Federal Realty Investment Trust and Baltimore-based development and management services company Smart Living 360 had that in mind when building The Stories at Congressional Plaza, a five-floor, 48-unit apartment building behind the Congressional Plaza shopping center that welcomes tenants of all ages, but offers features geared toward baby boomers moving out of their homes. Move-ins at the building will start this month.
“There’s a group of people who aren’t interested in moving to what I call Shady Acres and they want to stay in their communities,” said Ryan Frederick, founder and CEO of Smart Living 360. “They don’t want to move miles away from where all the people they know are.”
The building includes a small conference room that can be used for either in-person or teleconference medical exams. There’s a fitness studio Frederick said was designed with space for physical therapy sessions. The building’s units have bathrooms with skid-resistant flooring and most have walk-in showers, as opposed to tubs, that include seating areas—something Frederick said he learned was important to older residents in a series of focus groups.
Photos of the model unit at The Stories at Congressional Plaza and the main lobby and lounge. Photos by Dan Gross for Federal Realty.
Federal Realty hired Greg Timpone, a former concierge at luxury hotels in Los Angeles and professional cook, as the building’s lifestyle ambassador. His job is to connect residents to services, help them customize wall colors, light fixtures and other design elements of their apartments and to schedule programming such as seminars on downsizing.
Each floor includes storage units that can be rented out for an extra monthly fee.
“We’re running into a number of people who have lived in their homes for a long time and they’ve effectively never rented before, or had they rented, it was a totally different product and it was like, ‘Why would you ever rent,’ ” Frederick said. “That’s why customization is so important, because we want this environment to feel like home. It is your home.”
Frederick convinced Federal Realty CEO Don Wood of the potential of the idea. In 2014, the developer decided to put The Stories project next to its East Jefferson Street headquarters in a spot the company had planned for a traditional apartment building.
Frederick thinks there’s potential for The Stories brand to expand into other Federal Realty projects.
Most of the building’s 48 units are two-bedroom and three-bedroom apartments with the option for a longer-than-traditional lease term. Four apartments have been leased so far and the first couple to lease has signed a three-year contract.
Apartment sizes range from the smallest one-bedroom unit at 760 square feet to the largest three-bedroom unit at 1,429 square feet.
Last week, Federal Realty and Smart Living 360 hosted a panel entitled the “Future of Housing for Grown-Ups” at the building.
Anand Parekh, an adviser at a Washington, D.C., think tank, joined Debra Whitman, chief public policy officer of the AARP and Leslie Marks, a senior fellow in Montgomery County’s Department of Housing and Community Affairs, to talk about the lack of adequate housing for an expected boom in the number of seniors both locally and nationally.
While Montgomery County has aggressively pursued income-restricted affordable housing projects for seniors and private developers are building high-end luxury housing projects catering to empty-nesters, Frederick said there are plenty of people who fall into a gap between those two demographics.
“It’s a big group,” Frederick said. “A number of people are craving community. They want to be around other people where they have these connects and they like the idea of having housing that’s more thoughtfully designed for their needs.”
