Retirement community focuses on Indian-Americans
As reported in Crain’s Chicago Business on October 18, 2018 by Dennis Rodkin:
A long-vacant site in Hanover Park is set to become the Chicago area's first retirement community focused on Indian-Americans, with the first few of a planned 55 townhomes to be unveiled at an event Oct. 28.
Verandah Retirement Community, on an 11-acre parcel on Irving Park Road that has been vacant since a Menards home-improvement store closed a decade ago, also will include 75 condominiums and a clubhouse for all residents, said Anuja Gupta, general partner of the development firm, Aman Living, based in south suburban Frankfort.
Eleven of the 55 townhouses are sold, she said, and the first will be ready for occupancy in March. Prices on the two- and three-bedroom townhouses start at $290,000.
Sales are targeting but are not exclusive to Indian-Americans. Meals in the 15,000-square-foot clubhouse will be Indian and vegetarian, Gupta said; the holidays and festivals of India will be celebrated along with Christmas and other western holidays, and most of the staff will be bilingual.
"The food and the language barrier are two of the main reasons that Indian-Americans leave (conventional) retirement communities," Gupta said. Non-Indians will be welcome at Verandah, she said.
The 11 sold units went to Indian-American buyers, she said. One of them, B.S. Kesavan, is a retired physician from downstate Galesburg who said he and his wife are moving to the community to be close to their children, grandchildren and friends in Chicago. Kesavan said the vegetarian meals and Indian celebrations appeal to him and his wife, Geetha, and that "although we don't have a language barrier, yes, many people do."
The location is about 40 minutes from the temple they plan to attend, Kesavan said. Gupta said there are eight temples, four large Indian grocery stores and 11 Indian restaurants within a 30-minute drive of the location.
Verandah, scheduled for completion in 2020, will include an assisted-living and memory-care component, with 80 beds in all and a full-time medical staff of 27 (working in shifts).
One goal in combining retirement homes with an assisted-living facility is that a resident of the townhouses or condos may be able to stay in place when his or her partner moves into assisted living. "When a retirement community doesn't have a medical facility, it's on a different trajectory, because when those residents have health problems, they may have to sell their home and move to another facility," said Gupta, a trained cardiologist who shifted to real estate development. She has a portfolio of rentals in the city, and her firm developed a 22-unit rental community in Bourbonnais.
The $43 million Hanover Park project is being financed by a group of doctors who are investors, a bank loan and $6.3 million from a Hanover Park tax-increment financing district.
The Verandah project "is absolutely marvelous for Hanover Park," said Village President Rodney Craig. "It's a great improvement to a dead corner that we identified as a problem, and it's a benefit to our diverse community. We speak so many languages here."
Gupta said Verandah will be the nation's first combined retirement and medical care community, known as a continuing-care retirement community, to focus on Indian-Americans.
Verandah, she said, "is the first of its kind in the country to have the whole spectrum of medical care and cater to the cultural preferences" of Indian-Americans.
Link to original story here: https://www.chicagobusiness.com/residential-real-estate/retirement-community-focuses-indian-americans
