Landis Homes Launches $16M Expansion
By Tim MeKeel
Staff Writer
Intelligencer Journal
Lancaster New Era
September 23, 2009
Responding to demand for two-bedroom housing at Landis Homes, the retirement community Tuesday started a $16 million expansion.
More than 100 people attended a ceremonial groundbreaking, done with two dozen members of the project's design team using ropes to pull an antique potato plow.
"For the last 10 or 12 years, we've been working at improving our health care (skilled nursing) and assisted living," said Linford Good, vice president of planning and marketing.
"Now we're going back and increasing our residential living. Some folks might think it's not a good time. But for us, it's been a while," he said.
Good noted that Landis Homes, a continuing care retirement community, last added to its residential living quarters in 1995.
More than 80 percent of the community's 362 cottages and apartments are one-bedroom or studio units.
That's left the 650-resident East Oregon Road community unable to fill requests for two-bedroom units, he said.
So all 47 units to be constructed in this expansion - the first phase in a three-phase, $50 million venture - will be two-bedroom units.
Included in this phase will be 24 hybrid homes, a blend of an apartment and a patio cottage that's new to Landis Homes.
Like cottages, the hybrid homes will have more than one outside wall, a patio and no corridor leading to its front door. Rather, the entrance will be off a central lobby.
Like apartments, they will have a shared hearth room per floor and a shared community room per building, encouraging social interaction with neighbors.
The hybrid homes will be in a pair of three-story buildings, with parking on the first floor and six homes on each upper floor.
In addition to the hybrid homes, the first phase will have 10 cottage duplexes and one cottage triplex.
The entire phase will incorporate numerous green construction facets, such as geothermal heating and cooling, rain water collection and reuse and environmentally sensitive materials.
Those green techniques will earn the phase Silver LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification.
Completion of this first phase is scheduled for late spring 2010. Benchmark Construction is the general contractor.
In total, the three phases will add 142 hybrid homes and cottages, to be completed in 2012.
tmekeel@lnpnews.com
© 2009 Lancaster Newspapers
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