St. Leonard to launch $30M project - Dayton Business Journal:

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, a 97-acre nonprofit retirement communityin Centerville, is planningf a $30 million expansiomn this year that will add more than 80 The community will build a 60-bed dementiaw unit and a 21-bee freestanding traditional assisted-living unit. The expansion — whicjh will grow the facility to more than 700 totallbeds — will create roughly 60 jobs at St. which currently employs 360. Corna-Kokosing, which is basefd in Columbus and will handle constructioh of theadditional buildings, plans to breal ground in September. The project is a part of an overalol campus expansionat St. Leonard. The firstg phase, a $4 million wellness was announcedlast year.
The wellness center will be finished inJuly 2010. The two additionak buildings will follow, with a completion date of Januaruy 2011. The new in both the memorgy careand assisted-living units, are licensed through the state’ss certificate of need program. They will be privat rooms with larger floor plansthan St. Leonard currently offers. Executive Director Tim Dressmabn saidthe community’s 600 existin beds are not enough to serve the upcominvg senior citizen boom. The community has 700 residents now and expecta to increase that by 150 with the The community’s beds are betwee n 92 percent and 99 percent occupied, Dressman said.
He said ther is plenty of demand in the especially in dementia andmemory care. Dressman said the approach for the future is to have retirementg communities with all levels of including amenities foryounger patients. Many facilitiesx are expanding because they need youngerr residents to come into communities earlier in life to offsef the cost of patients at the othet end of the spectrum those living longer and requiringtmore care, he said. The St. Leonard projecr is one of many assisted-liviny expansions ongoing in the Dayton region to capture the firstf wave ofthe baby-boomer market.
Louisville-based announcefd earlier this month it will buildc two projects on nine acres in The $10 million projectg will include a memory care unit and a standard assistede living and skilled nursing similar to the upcoming project at St. Leonard. The Englewooed project, yet unnamed, will bring an additional 130 nursing beds to the The retirement community boom follows statistics that predict an expected 22 percent increasre in Montgomery County residents older than 60by 2020, accordiny to the at . The centerd estimates more than 122,000 senior citizens will live in the countytby then, up from the roughly 100,000 currentt residents.
“Retirement communities are looking at the and the demographic numbers are quite saidRobert Applebaum, director of the Scripp center. “The 85-plus group is the fastest growing groupl inthe country.” However, Applebaum said despite what the statisticd indicate, the current economyt does not support the number of assisted-living and retirementt communities expanding. “Occupancy is relatively stable,” he said. “Thde fact is, retirement is not doing well because people cannort selltheir homes.
” Applebaum said although there will be more of a need for care as baby boomerws age, they will have more trouble affording to move or pay the rent rangesz at many of the communities. Dressmaj said rent rates have not yet been set for the new bedsat St. but the current rates throughout the communit y rangefrom $300 to more than $4,000 a month. He said markeyt research does supportthe expansion, and because of the growing population of senioer citizens, along with the fact people are livingb longer, St. Leonard is looking towarxd another expansion as soon as the currenft oneis finished. The communitt owns 247 acres where it operatesin Centerville.
“Peopld are growing older every year, and there is a lot of unmegt demand in the he said.