Green Hills is one of a new breed of retirement communities being built on or near college campuses. Last month, the Marriott Corp. dedicated the Colonnades at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. The nonprofit Kendal Corp. opened Kendal at Hanover near Dartmouth in July, and hopes to break ground for Kendal at Oberlin next year. Plans are in the works for more Kendal facilities near Lehigh and Cornell. Some such communities were initiated by university officials; others have no formal link to the schools beyond attracting alumni and retired faculty as residents. Even so, universities generally welcome their presence. “It can have a positive impact on alumni giving,” says Bob Wheeler, president of the firm that runs Meadowood, near the University of Indiana at Bloomington. And for residents, “it’s like an ongoing college reunion.”
The relationships have other advantages, too. U. Va. medical and nursing students can train at the Colonnades’s nursing-care center, and the new Center on Aging will have a source of volunteers for research projects. In turn residents have access to classes, concerts, libraries and research facilities. The bustle of campus activities is helping the Colonnades attract a far younger clientele than ordinary life-care communities.
At Green Hills, 76-year-old Kenneth Carlander often walks by the house he and his wife once owned on his way to the office the former zoology and fishery professor still maintains at ISU. “Many of our friends thought we were giving up too early to move into a place like this,” he says. “But we know too many people who waited too long.”
