BERNE — Eager residents crammed into Town Hall last week and applauded a proposal for community senior housing.

The Helderberg Retirement Community, to be built just outside the hamlet, includes two modern two-story buildings, each with 48 rental units. People 55 and older would be eligible for the apartments.

The project has long been in its planning stages. Last week, developer Jeff Thomas and his architect, Dominick Ranieri, outlined the plan for the town board, which voted unanimously to pass the project on to the planning board for review. The parcel along Canaday Hill Road would require a zoning change from residential forestry to traditional mixed-use two.
"This is a large step forward for all the seniors in the Hilltowns," said Supervisor Kevin Crosier. "Not just Berne, but Rensselaerville, Knox, and Westerlo."
"It’ll be a place where people who have lived in the Hilltowns all their lives and choose to spend their golden years here, will now have that opportunity," he said.

The two buildings, Ranieri said, could be built in phases. Construction, Thomas said, would begin after the town’s sewer project is completed if the project is allowed. Councilman Joseph Golden estimated in October that the sewer project will be finished in 2008.

Thomas is currently proposing two other senior-housing projects — one on Brandle Road just outside of Altamont and another at the site of the old Bavarian Chalet off Western Avenue in Guilderland.
"[The retirement community] doesn’t have a ton of amenities, but it has enough amenities to give you comfortable living so you don’t have to worry about the upkeep, and you can pretty much enjoy yourself around a group of seniors," said Thomas.

The senior community center, he said, has many floor plans and many options.
"I think it’s going to take care of a lot of the senior needs up here — not all of them, but most of them," he said.

Seniors with no options

Thomas said last week he got involved in senior housing when he bought an old Victorian house in the village of Altamont — The Park House Apartments — located across from the park, in 1999. He refurbished the nine-unit complex in 2000.

As he refurbished the house, Thomas said, he was inundated with calls from seniors interested in living at the apartment building.
"I didn’t think it was the place for them to live so I began to turn them away," he said, adding that the house wasn’t senior-friendly. It had narrow stairways, a lot of stairs, and, he said, "the toilet rooms weren’t proper."
"I said, ‘This isn’t really for you,’" Thomas said. "And they didn’t want to turn away. Then I realized they had no options," he said.

The seniors interested in the units in Altamont, he said, wanted to downsize; they didn’t want to worry about shoveling snow, mowing, painting, and dealing with roof problems.
"They just wanted to live and maybe only worry about what they were going to wear to the pool that day," he said.

Plans and possibilities
"I think our seniors around here deserve an option to stay in the community they love, and the area they love," Thomas said.

Thomas estimated the cost for a one-bedroom unit at $600 plus utilities, and the cost for a two-bedroom unit between $600 and $890, plus utilities. Cost for the units, he said, will depend on grants. They will be affordable but will not be defined as low-income housing, he said.
All units, Thomas said, will all have energy- and water-saving devices. "It’s amazing what we can do right now with water-saving devices," he said. A leaky toilet, he said, can go through 800 to 1,000 gallons per day.
Ranieri, Thomas’s architect, got involved in the project two years ago. He said Thomas explained the complex to him as "not just a warehouse for the aging," but "a building that represented something that everyone could be proud of."
"The people living in it could be proud of it. The community could be proud of it," he said.
His forte, as an architect and land planner, he said, is New Urbanism concepts. Ranieri said New Urbanism communities are designed around the human experience instead of around such things as automobiles, "and some of the other things we’ve all"allowed to control our lives now."

A group of architects — Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck — developed New Urbanism to reverse the patterns of the last half-century, replacing car-driven suburbia with walkable communities where businesses are built next to homes.

The buildings in the Berne proposal, Ranieri said, were designed around the New Urbanism principle.
Ranieri said the complex’s location, just outside the hamlet, would not be in the "hustle-bustle" part of Berne, but on its edge. "It’s still part of the town," he said.

Possibilities for the senior complex include: an English community garden, with seniors having quadrants; a gazebo; a stocked detention pond; second-floor libraries with fireplaces; porches on the backsides of the buildings; exercise rooms; storage units on the backs of the garages; walking trails; and a putting green.

The ground-floor rooms will have terraces, and the top-floor units will have balconies. Both buildings will have an elevator.

The bathrooms and showers will be accessible to those with handicaps. If all 96 units are built, estimated water use would be between 8,000 and 10,000 gallons per day, said Francis Bosselini, the project’s civil engineer.

The first 48 units, Crosier said, will work with the town’s sewer district; if additions and improvements are needed to the sewer district to accommodate the next 48 units, the cost would be at the developer’s expense.

The rooms Ranieri outlined are 747 square feet and 900 square feet in size.
"We have a variety of floor plans. There’s at least four floor plans," said Thomas, adding that some may want more amenities and others may not.

Thomas said condominiums and cottages for purchase could be added on the site and considered at a later date. In Altamont, he said, the majority of seniors want to reinvest and own rather than rent their homes.