This article was originally published by Finance-Commerce.com
Author: Katie Turner, BridgeTower Media Newswires // March 25, 2025
When Dr. Dana Bradley, dean of the Erickson School of Aging Studies at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, talks about aging, she’s quick to challenge old assumptions. “People don’t suddenly become old. They age,” she said. “There is no agreement on when people suddenly become old.”
Understanding aging as a continuum, rather than a stage or state of being, is fundamentally reshaping how we think about senior living. As Americans live longer, often with healthier lifespans, the traditional model of senior housing is transforming to changing expectations about what it means to live as an older adult.
With a projected 45% increase in people over 75 in the next decade — what Brian Lawrence, president and chief executive officer of FellowshipLIFE, a full-service aging care ecosystem, calls “the silver tsunami” — a major shift has been occurring in the aging industry, particularly in senior housing options across the Mid-Atlantic region.
The cornerstone of this evolution is a shift from viewing aging as decline to seeing it as development. “Developmental aging is the view that as we age, we’re able to continue to develop, and we just tap into different things that we didn’t necessarily tap into during our working years,” Bradley said. “The artistic, the creative, the writers who had never written before, the artists who had never painted before, and all these cool things that you can do when you’re older.”
This concept challenges the stereotype that moving to a senior community signals the end of growth. Instead, it positions these communities as places where residents can explore new interests and deepen existing ones, often as part of a broader community.
Kevin Heffner, president of LifeSpan Network, a mid-Atlantic senior care provider association, said that today’s seniors have different expectations than previous generations. “Baby boomers are different from the World War II generation,” Heffner observed. “The World War II generation would sort of look at a menu of services and say ‘I’ll take that.’ Baby boomers are saying ‘I don’t want any of that. I want you to build me something different.’”
This demand for something new, plus increasing pressure to make senior care more affordable and accessible for middle market consumers is resulting in a wave of innovation in senior living.
Examples of this range from communities built around particular themes or interests, like Disney or Jimmy Buffet, to those that cater to residents from similar ethnic or cultural backgrounds. Others are exploring village models, which are grass-roots organizations aimed at allowing older adults to stay in their homes through organized, community-based support.
In the greater Baltimore, Maryland, area, two colleges have partnered with retirement communities. Goucher College is working with Edenwald Senior Living to expand the retirement community onto the campus, the first step to establishing a university-based community for seniors there. And nearby Notre Dame University of Maryland is working with Brightview Senior Living Development to open a 170-unit senior living community.
More traditional continuing care retirement communities are also rethinking how they will adjust to increased needs for medical and memory care, as people live longer and need more of these services.
Creating community outside the ‘community’
Bradley is emphatic about what today’s older adults want: “The future is not segmented living. People, particularly in the United States, value independence, they value choice.”
“One big shift that’s happened in the industry is going from an isolated community that just serves those people that live there to having a greater engagement with the greater community,” said Lawrence. Perhaps the most visible aspect of this evolution is the integration of senior communities with their surrounding neighborhoods. “Just because you’re retired doesn’t mean your life ends,” he adds. “In some ways your life begins, because you have another third of your life to live.”
Lawrence points to FellowshipLIFE’s amenities: “We have a fitness center where members come in from outside, workout alongside our residents in exercise classes and in the gym.” One FellowshipLIFE community is home to a performing arts theater, and another boasts a bar where residents can socialize with each other and invite guests and family.
Heffner sees the same trend. “Retirement communities are more frequently doing ‘at home’ programs,” meaning they are offering services that allow people to age in place. “Even beyond that, retirement communities are trying to become more creative in how they get younger people in the community.” He cited examples of communities built on or near college campuses, allowing older adults to take classes and regularly interact across generations.
Recalling advice from a former colleague, Heffner said, “older people are the greatest repository of accumulated wisdom that the world has ever known.” Increasingly, senior living models are designed to tap into this wisdom by fostering cross-generational connections.
A continuous journey
The future of senior living will likely continue to move away from age-segregated facilities toward integrated communities that support development and engagement throughout the aging process. These communities aren’t just responding to market demands, they’re participating in a fundamental shift in how we view the later chapters of life.
As Heffner put it, “Someone once asked Julius Erving, ‘Dr. J, what was the best day of your life?’ And he said, ‘I hope I haven’t lived the best day of my life. That would mean that everything good is behind me. I hope the best day of my life is still coming,’ which I thought was really a neat way to look at things.”
