Recently, three new senior housing apartment towers opened in the greater metropolitan area of Portland, Oregon.
The developers of these buildings bet on senior housing at a time when few other developers in this submarket were starting construction. They bet on high-rise construction when most senior developments were just a few stories tall. And they bet on downtown development in the years just after the coronavirus pandemic, when several Portland neighborhoods were making headlines for crime and urban homelessness.
All three projects are now leasing quickly, according to their developers.
“High-rise senior housing definitely seems like a product that is well-positioned to see its moment,” says Deborah Myerson, senior research and policy fellow at the Urban Land Institute’s Terwilliger Center for Housing; and founder and principal of Myerson Consulting, based in Bloomington, Indiana.
“A lot of people are reaching the stage of life for senior living—and housing costs remain high,” she says. “A way to reduce housing costs in high-demand areas is to build more units at higher density.”
Alliance Residential builds up
Until very recently, few private-pay senior housing buildings stood higher than a few stories.
Alliance Residential, one of the nation’s largest apartment developers, has built 15 housing projects for seniors over the last 10 years. In February 2024, it finished work on its first senior tower.
Holden of Pearl is a 16-story high-rise with 237 apartments. It includes independent living, assisted living, and memory care units in downtown Portland, Oregon’s Pearl District.
“[Most] senior housing projects are two stories or less,” says Dale Boyles, managing director of the seniors housing and active adult platforms for Alliance Residential, headquartered in Scottsdale, Arizona. “The seniors housing industry for the last 30 years has embraced the two-story, stick-built product around much of the United States.”
That’s largely because stick-built construction is less expensive than concrete and steel. Most cities and towns have building codes that limit stick-built structures to just two stories if they are to be home to nonambulatory residents, such as elderly people who have wheelchairs, walkers, or memory impairment.
More recently, senior housing developers have become increasingly drawn to urban locations. The small number of senior units in a two-story building is unlikely to earn enough income to pay for an expensive development site downtown. “To make it financeable, it has to be a higher-density project,” Boyles says.
In addition to higher density, luxury rental is also moving to the forefront. “We felt that bringing an upscale, high-rise, month-to-month rental to the market would be something different,” Boyles says. In downtown Portland, the existing life-plan communities—also known as continuing care retirement communities (CCRCs)—were at full occupancy, with multi-year wait lists.
According to Boyles, Holden has a “very small” move-in fee that is “certainly [an order of] magnitude less than what a CCRC charges.” The additional monthly rent at Holden starts around $4,000 a month.
Subtle differences in submarkets also make a huge difference for high-rise projects in urban neighborhoods. The Holden’s location in Portland’s Pearl District is quite different—and more desirable—than neighborhoods in South Portland that have experienced unrest in recent years.
Alliance preleased apartments for 10 months before its independent living units opened in November 2023. By December 2024, the 237-unit community was about 50 percent occupied.
Alliance has worked to establish its local credentials with potential residents who are committed to downtown Portland. It has partnered with a local arts program to bring area artists to the building and engage nearby schools.
“It’s been a fun way to connect with the community—so that people say, ‘you’re not an outsider, you’re one of us,’” Boyles says. “Some of the initial challenge was just breaking through that. Once we figured out how to be a good citizen of Portland, [we saw] our leasing accelerate.”
Downtown Vancouver senior rentals
In early October 2024, the first residents moved into The Springs at the Waterfront, a new high-rise senior housing property in Vancouver, Washington. Just two months later, the community was almost 40 percent deposited. The 12-story building includes 250 units in a “blended community” of independent living, assisted living, and memory care, just across the Columbia River from Portland.
“The market acceptance has been spectacular—we are ahead of schedule,” says Fee Stubblefield, founder and CEO of The Springs Living, based in McMinnville, Oregon, an owner and operator of 20 senior housing communities in the Pacific Northwest.
Before this property, the developer had never built anything taller than a six-story mid-rise building. “This is our first high-rise,” Stubblefield says. “It won’t be our last.”
‘An epic location’
The Springs at the Waterfront is attracting residents who want to live near such amenities as restaurants and Vancouver’s Waterfront Park, which is next door to the buildings. The location is rated “somewhat walkable,” according to WalkScore.com, with outlets including the Vancouver Farmers Market and grocery stores less than a mile away.
“Our residents want to thrive, and they want to be in the action. They don’t want to be put out on this cheap piece of land in the back of a planned urban development, where there’s a pastoral view and they just look out at the birds and the cows and the trees,” Stubblefield says.
Residents at The Springs at the Waterfront don’t give up views in exchange for their downtown location, however. “You can see eagles soaring, [from] your window, over the rivers . . . sea lions, bait balls, boiling of fish,” Stubblefield says. “It’s an epic location.”
That “epic location” drew the developer to build on the site. “If we didn’t have that natural feature, we probably wouldn’t have been so bold,” Stubblefield says. A high-rise development was the only way to build on the site.
The 12-story building includes two floors of underground parking. Construction required careful timing to dig the foundation as the water level receded during the spring. The concrete underground levels needed to be cast with enough weight to stay in the ground as water levels rose again during the fall. The complicated project cost more than $900,000 per unit to build.
Residents pay a nonrefundable deposit of $50,000 to $100,000. Monthly rents start at $5,600 per month for a studio.
“We [probably had] the highest price per unit in the entire country when we started this thing,” Stubblefield says. “Most people moving into [The Springs at the Waterfront] had homes with similar value [to] our development cost per unit.”
To attract these wealthy seniors, the developer designed units larger than ones at comparable urban properties. “We had to make sure they were ample units—the expectations of our customers were a little more suburban,” Stubblefield says.
Before Parkview opened, Terwilliger Plaza had a total of 306 senior housing apartments, including 59 units of assisted living—which works out to about 20 percent of the units. That mix brought the right balance between independent living and health care–related senior housing units such as assisted living, memory care, and skilled nursing.
Terwilliger Plaza high-rise
In February 2024, Terwilliger Plaza Retirement Community finished a new, 10-story tower called Parkview, adding 127 new units of independent-living senior housing to a high-rise CCRC perched on a hillside at the edge of downtown Portland.
High-rise development was the natural choice for Terwilliger Plaza, which opened its first 12-story tower at the community in 1962. “In a city setting like Portland, our footprint is very much limited,” says Ryan Miller, president and CEO of Terwilliger Plaza, the nonprofit owner and operator of the CCRC, its only property. “To get the economies of scale you’re looking for, you have to go up.”
Terwilliger Plaza needed to grow. “We didn’t have enough independent living units at our community to be in a strong, sustainable, long-term position,” Miller says.
Before Parkview opened, Terwilliger Plaza had a total of 306 senior housing apartments, including 59 units of assisted living—which works out to about 20 percent of the units. That mix brought the right balance between independent living and health care–related senior housing units such as assisted living, memory care, and skilled nursing.
“That’s changing,” Miller says. Today, seniors can receive more health care services in their homes, outside of a residential care facility. That allows more seniors to age in place, in their independent living apartments—without having to move. Terwilliger Plaza has its own proprietary home care program.
According to Miller, “Seventeen percent of our community as health care units is a better number for us. We have to take that into consideration with the decision to grow.”
Next phase
Terwilliger Plaza is planning yet another phase of high-rise senior housing units, which are set to open within the next eight years.
The downtown location of Terwilliger Plaza has helped it attract residents. Residents are also attracted to the design of Parkview, which has been certified as a Passive House building—a well-constructed building that needs almost no energy to heat.
“Parkview’s Passive House certification is a huge, huge attraction because of the air quality . . . in that building,” says Chuck Archer, principal with Portland-based LRS Architects, designer of Parkview.
The new Parkview tower is leasing up quickly. “We’re slightly ahead of our models,” Miller says. The development is on track to be fully occupied and is already able to pay off its short-term construction financing. “We are in the process of paying back all of our short-term loans that, technically, didn’t need to be fully repaid until 2028.
“We’re the only nonprofit CCRC truly in downtown Portland,” Miller says, “We’re literally one bus stop from the heart of the city.”
Residents don’t seem concerned by recent newspaper headlines describing crime and homelessness in Portland. That’s partially because of the CCRC’s hillside location on the other side of Interstate 405 from Portland’s urban core. “It’s a pretty great buffer,” Miller says.
The developer is a strong believer in high-rise seniors development—especially as the need continues to grow. “The demand for what we do is still growing,” Miller says. “We’re going to need to keep building more and more of these towers.”
