For decades, the Edenwald retirement community has towered over the Goucher College campus, on land purchased from the college many years ago. Edenwald residents have enjoyed their proximity to the campus loop and to the trails that wind through the college’s acres of woods. Now plans are underway to expand this arrangement by creating what’s known as a University Retirement Community, or URC.
The partnership between Goucher and Edenwald would involve opportunities for Edenwald residents to take classes and participate in travel programs, in addition to other benefits. Love & Company, a Frederick, MD-based senior living marketing firm, has been assisting with the project.
While the concept of URCs is not new, interest is growing. URCs have been established at Notre Dame, Stanford, the University of Texas at Austin, Arizona State, and other places. The URC connecting Goucher and Edenwald, however, will be the first in Maryland, according to Mark Beggs, president and CEO of Edenwald.
Why create a URC?
Demand for senior living options is fueling the project. “The way people are aging is changing,” says Beggs. “The expectations that people have are different than they were when life-plan communities first evolved. They don’t want to be cared for — they want to be engaged in the world around them. They want to be relevant.”
The project would also provide financial benefits to Goucher. Edenwald plans to lease land from the college to build three new residential towers of up to 12 stories in height, a total of 127 apartments. Edenwald residents looking to audit classes at Goucher would most likely pay tuition – at a rate still to be determined. The college has for years explored ways to improve its financial profile, including a controversial 2018 decision to drop a number of majors and add others thought to be more in sync with market demands.
“When you start to realize what’s occurring demographically across the country,” Beggs says, “with an aging population and a shrinking [traditional-age] student population, Goucher understands that bringing in an older student is one of their strategies towards success.”
Beggs anticipates no problem filling the 127 units in the planned new towers, and he is confident that the arrangement with Goucher will increase Edenwald’s attractiveness. Beggs points out that more than 10 percent of Edenwald residents attended Goucher, and the retirement community’s partnership with Goucher figures to draw even more.
Planning session held
Earlier this year, a brochure was sent to some community members inviting them to a planning session at Goucher where they could “share [their] ideas about developing senior living residences.” Recipients who planned to attend were asked to fill out a 13-question survey. About half of the survey questions sought input on how attractive recipients found retirement communities (including Edenwald) and the URC concept, and about half sought to gather demographic information, including recipients’ estimated annual income and household net worth.
The planning session, held June 19 at Goucher, was well attended. Beggs reports that around 200 people showed up, and several put down a $1,000 “priority deposit” that gives them first choice of apartment options in the new towers.
“The entire Goucher campus is excited and engaged in the process,” Beggs said in an email.
But Beggs’s enthusiasm belies the fact that the response from Goucher has been almost non-existent. Two faculty members said to be deeply involved with the project have either referred inquiries elsewhere or have not responded to repeated requests for comment. A request for comment sent to the student newspaper has gone unanswered. The most prominent mention of the planned URC on the college’s website is more than two years old. Multiple attempts to contact Goucher president Kent Devereaux have been unsuccessful. Goucher’s official response has been to defer any questions until the fall, when there will be “much more to announce and discuss.”
The college said in an email that any request for information is “premature for us at this time.”
Goucher and Edenwald have signed a letter of intent to pursue the partnership. Mark Beggs says he has initial approval to expand Edenwald from the Maryland Department of Aging, and is moving through the process of getting community-development plan approval from Baltimore County, to ensure that the expansion meets existing codes and to give the community an opportunity to comment. He hopes to break ground on the new towers in late 2025. Before then — possibly as soon as the end of 2024 — he expects to have many of the programmatic elements of the URC partnership in place. “We’re starting our priority deposit so people [will] be first on the list to get an apartment when we make them available,” he says. “We will be considered a university-based retirement community probably before the end of the calendar year.”
The project has been keeping Beggs busy — and is advancing.
“It’s been exciting to work on it,” he says. “Just to make something like this happen in the Baltimore market I think is really a great opportunity for me professionally and I think it’s going to be a great opportunity for those who are aging in the local community.”
