“We are seeing this collision of uses come together in individual properties, [enabling facilitation of] a lifestyle where you can live, work and now even retire and have all the amenities around you in close proximity,” said Greg Whitney, a Los Angeles–based senior vice president of retail development at JLL.

Consider the 330-unit senior-housing community being built to replace a former Canadian Tire anchor store in the enclosed Galeries Aylmer shopping center, in Québec. This community, called L’Initial, is being developed by Le Group Maurice, one of Canada’s largest developers of housing for seniors. Upon its completion sometime next February, L’Initial will join the center’s existing supermarket and will link directly to the rest of Galeries Aylmer’s 72 retailers, which include a health clinic, a pharmacy, a liquor store and a movie theater. The center is within walking distance of the town of Aylmer, which has retail shops of its own.

Demand for senior housing, both present and future, is clear. At present, the American Association of Retired Persons reports, some 10,000 baby boomers turn 65 every day, and the organization anticipates that this pace will continue into the 2030s. By 2061, some 3 million people in Québec will be age 65 or older, according to Group Maurice.

Though senior-housing construction is comparatively slow versus the broader multifamily residential industry, it nonetheless comprises significant numbers of residents. According to the National Investment Center for Seniors Housing & Care, senior-housing construction starts during the second quarter totaled 4,083 units: 2,065 independent-living and 2,018 assisted-living units. This was up by 3.3 percent from the first quarter, and 28,000 new senior-housing units are still to see completion this year, according to research from Lancaster Pollard, which arranges financing for senior-housing developers.

The renewed focus on senior housing as a viable-partner option for retail landlords comes as department store closures have forced many retail center owners to consider alternative uses, observes Todd Caruso, a CBRE senior managing director who oversees the firm’s work with retail landlords in the Americas. “I like the trend very much, because it is spurring activity,” said Caruso. “It has been driven by the disruption, and the disruption is shining a light on those assets that need to transform and adaptively reuse them.”

Whitney agrees. “In today’s environment, with rising land costs [and] with a shrinking amount of total retail demand, you are seeing the integration of these two uses together to make sense of the economics of many projects,” he said. “We are seeing a lot of the ‘B’ and ‘C’ malls look to residential and seniors-housing uses to fill space and rightsize the amount of retail that they have.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, demographic shifts are a major catalyst behind this movement. “The resident today is different from the resident of 20 years ago,” said Beth Mace, chief economist of the National Investment Center. “Today’s resident is really more of what we call the Silent Generation — right before the baby boomers and after the Greatest Generation.”

The age of a typical resident in senior housing now is 82 or older, says Mace, and today the oldest boomer is about 72, so the boomers have some time yet before they become the dominant residents of senior housing. “However, the baby boomers have influence,” said Mace. “Because they are often the decision maker for where their adult parent moves, they are major influencers.”

Senior-housing developer Harbor Retirement Associates is known for selecting sites based on the types of retailers that have located to an area. The firm targets locations where the likes of Talbots or Coldwater Creek have a presence, because the customers of those stores tend to mirror the typical decision maker for today’s senior-housing resident: say, a 55-year-old daughter, perhaps.

Boomers do continue to be a strong resident base for senior-housing projects that are targeting the 55-and-older segment, says Whitney. “Particularly for the aging baby boomer population, they still want to be close to amenities, as they want to be able to live in a place where they can also be close to restaurants and shopping,” Whitney said. “And I think it is a great use and a solution for some of these malls that are looking to intensify the development of the property and [to] right-size retail.”

Creating synergies between senior housing and retail uses has been an integral part of the planning for Lake Nona Town Center, in Orlando, Fla. This project, built by Tavistock Development Co. in partnership with retail planning and leasing firm Steiner & Associates, is the 100-acre centerpiece of Tavistock’s 17-square-mile Lake Nona community, a few miles from Orlando International Airport. The first phase of the Lake Nona Town Center opened in January 2016, with an office building, hotels, 16,000 square feet of retail and restaurant space and a multilevel parking structure. The next phases will comprise 1 million square feet of retail, restaurant, entertainment, office and hospitality uses.

In conjunction with all this development, senior housing is becoming a more prominent component of the Lake Nona residential mix. Tavistock says it will accelerate the development of senior-living projects over the next two years: namely, an urban age-55-and-over community, plus additional communities for assisted and independent living, and all within walking distance of the town center. “We believe a lot of different [senior] product types meet a lot of different needs,” said Ralph Ireland, vice president of development operations at Tavistock. “We are trying to create a living, breathing city, which we think is absolutely paramount to creating a great mixed-use town center for our retailers.”

More retailers are looking to senior-housing developments as a way to raise their profiles and position them to cater to this customer base, Mace points out. “We are seeing some seniors-housing operators bring more retail into the property and trying to get more of the public into the property, so it is going two ways,” said Mace. “You might see some properties that have a coffee house in their entry-level area, which would bring more of the neighborhood population toward that location. The idea is that people want to be more integrated with a fuller population.”

This sense of community is also seeing many senior-housing developers favor centrally positioned, 24-7 locations in urban areas, rather than the stand-alone, suburban ones. Balfour at Riverfront Park, a $74 million project that Balfour Senior Living completed in downtown Denver in 2015, is a case in point. Its residents enjoy easy access to local dining and entertainment. “That project is much more integrated into a broader urban setting, and they have had pretty good success there,” said Mace.

As an industry, senior housing is coming into its own after decades of change. “Seniors housing has changed a lot and is not considered as much a niche industry investment sector as it once was, and that is largely because now we have really good data,” said Mace. “We are growing up.”