Local Company Wants To Bring More 'Age-In-Place-Friendly' Housing To Traverse City

“Don’t waste a good crisis as an innovator. Try to solve it instead.”

That philosophy is what brought Bruce Thompson, co-founder of the local housing company Urbaneer, to northern Michigan. He also believes it’s the key to solving not one but two mighty challenges facing the local region.

“It's a perfect storm here, to have an aging population and a housing crisis that makes it unaffordable for younger talent to live here,” Thompson tells The Ticker. “It's not a sustainable situation if you have those two factors together.”

Thompson isn’t the first person to acknowledge the pickle Traverse City is in. The Ticker has reported numerous times about the region’s growing demand for nursing home professionals and in-home caregivers – and about how local senior care companies can’t find workers to fill those jobs due to limited housing.

Enter Urbaneer, a company that seeks to “enable placemakers to create living spaces that care for the occupant.” Right now, the company is working with a downstate builder to develop an “age-in-place-friendly” living community in West Michigan, geared specifically toward buyers in the 55-plus age range. Similarly, in Minnesota, Urbaneer is collaborating with Destination Medical Center to design a cluster of “tech-enabled homes,” also intended for what Thompson calls “third-chapter living.”

“A lot of us in my peer group are starting to focus on our ‘healthspan’ versus lifespan, and I think that’s a generational shift,” says Thompson, 62. Those in the “third chapter,” he explains, may be retirees, semi-retirees, empty-nesters, or even just older adults moving to new places or starting second careers now that they’ve achieved financial stability. He’s sensed a desire among people in this demographic to live life a little differently than they did in their earlier life chapters. Housing – and specifically, downsizing – is a part of that equation.

As Thompson tells the story, he and his wife, Brenda – who is Urbaneer’s designer – first started to downsize in 2013. Stints living abroad in Munich and Barcelona, he says, did a lot to shake the couple from the quintessentially American pursuit of more – more stuff, more wealth, more square footage.

While Thompson jokes that downsizing “is like turning an aircraft carrier around to head in the complete opposite direction,” he and Brenda eventually made some headway. In Grand Rapids, they built an 800-square-foot bungalow (pictured), incorporating features like movable walls and murphy beds to make the home “live more like 1,200 feet,” per a 2016 report from MLive. The home was meant as a proof-of-concept for Urbaneer, which started in 2014 with a focus on smaller-scale living. The emphasis on third-chapter living came later.

“What we came to realize is that a lot of our peers were also starting to go through that downsizing process, and wanting to do it sooner than our parents did,” Thompson explains. “For a lot of us, our parents have passed now, but we worked through helping them downsize when they were nearing the end of their lives, or even after they passed, and that’s difficult. If you’ve been in a home for 30-40 years, that's just a lot of stuff to deal with.”

Seeing a shared desire among their peers to scale down, Bruce and Brenda set their sights on a community they thought made sense as “a very early adopter market” for Urbaneer’s ideas: Traverse City.

“If you look at this area demographically, in a few years, half the population is going to be over 65,” Thompson says. “We purposely moved our business up here to serve that market, because I saw the opportunity.”

Rather than develop more nursing homes or traditional senior living communities, the Thompsons want to build small homes here where older adults can downsize their lives and feel comfortable aging in place. In addition to smaller footprints and more flexible or modular living spaces, Urbaneer’s homes incorporate design elements and technology integrations to make those spaces more adaptable to the aging resident. Physical elements might include things like curbless showers and grab bars or blocking, to account for mobility changes.

On the tech side, meanwhile, Thompson says Urbaneer is “working with multiple companies that have different sensors to monitor things,” from taking a homeowner’s vital signs to flagging irregularities in how often they are getting out of bed in the night. In the case of emergency or anomaly, those technologies can alert healthcare providers, caregivers, or family members, ensuring a rapid response.

If Urbaneer does things right, Thompson is confident the company can create a win-win situation for Traverse City. The top goal is giving seniors easier-to-manage homes that adapt with them as they age. But side benefits could include lifesaving assistance for healthcare providers, peace of mind for families and loved ones, and maybe even a positive domino effect for the rest of the housing market.

“Then we get people out of the bigger homes, free up households for the younger generation, and build communities for seniors in areas that are going to be walkable, where you can be social,” Thompson says. “One out of three people over 60 now lives by themselves, and loneliness is an epidemic. So, all these things are converging, and I think we can help.”

Asked when Urbaneer’s first northern Michigan projects will see the light of day, Thompson says the company is “working on a couple of things early-stage” that will be announced soon.