Project Aims to Meet Needs of Elderly Gays

John DeLeo, 55, is an openly gay man and has been out of the closet for years. As he approached middle age, he began to worry a bit and to ask himself some troubling questions: Where could he retire and not have to deal with discrimination? Would he too encounter the isolation he’d heard about from other gay seniors?

“As I got into my 50s, I started becoming concerned about my own long-term care,” said DeLeo, who has a career background in assisted-living facilities.

As a gay man and a veteran of the long-term care industry, DeLeo knew firsthand that many gay retirees are forced into living situations that are much less diverse than they’ve grown accustomed to. That can result in some aging gay people going back into hiding to avoid the loneliness of being outcasts in their retirement homes.

And often, even if they aren’t open about their sexual orientation, they are pegged as different and isolated anyway.

“It’s very difficult to live with people who have no common history, no common ground,” says DeLeo.

But the enterprising DeLeo has come up with an ambitious plan to solve his retirement dilemma, as well as to help many other gay men and women.

He and business partner Jeffrey Dillon have founded Florida-based Arbours Development Group, and the company is developing a gay retirement community near Palm Springs.

Called Arbours at Cathedral City, it will be a mixed-used luxury retirement resort community designed to meet the lifestyle and personal care needs of gay and lesbian seniors and baby boomers.

The community, slated to break ground in February on a 20-acre site, will include 180 luxury apartment-style homes, 90 assisted-living suites and 50 interval ownership residences set amid a series of paseos and courtyards with desert oasis landscaping and water features. The project will also feature eight luxury penthouses with views of the Santa Rosa Mountains.

The apartments will have entry fees ranging from $225,000 to $455,000, plus monthly maintenance and services fees. The assisted-care units will range from $2,100 to $3,695 a month.

The community will also include more than 130,000 square feet of retail shops, restaurants, a performing arts theater, a fitness center and spa, an interactive computer room and business facilities.

It doesn’t appear that DeLeo and Dillon will have trouble selling the housing units.

Ever since Cathedral City approved the plans in October, DeLeo says, he has been getting calls from reporters and gay people around the world.

“There’s an enormous need out there,” he says. DeLeo and his partner are also planning, in association with Formation Development, a movie theater complex and retail center and a four-star boutique hotel across the street.

Both developments are in the heart of Cathedral City, near its town square and civic center, and that was part of the plan, says DeLeo.

“It’s part of the downtown area, so you can take advantage of shopping and the performing arts,” says DeLeo. “The whole concept behind it is that we don’t want to be isolated from the rest of the community.”

The community will be geared toward gay retirees but not restricted to them, says DeLeo.

“We expect about 20% straight folk,” he says. “We want this community to be generational and diverse. Segregating seniors off all by themselves is what sucks the life out of them.”

The gay lifestyle is tough enough for most people to accept, let alone older generations. Nobody knows how this might evolve, but newspapers continue to document cases of discrimination and violence against gays, even in retirement facilities.

One 76-year-old resident of a Los Angeles retirement home, who came out when she was 12, said she has been made to feel like an ashamed little girl again. She hides her sexual orientation from her fellow residents.

“This is a hard way to live, having to be someone you’re not,” she told the New York Times. “I’m closeted again. I hate it.”

The awareness of the housing challenges faced by gay seniors is bringing the issue to the attention of developers across the country. Gay retirement communities are being planned in Los Angeles, Atlanta, Florida and other cities.

In Boston, there are plans for the Stonewall Communities, a gay urban development named after the famous gay bar in New York’s Greenwich Village that was at the center of the gay rights movement during the late 1960s.

And in New York, Seniors Active in a Gay Environment is working with a real estate development company to find a site and investors for a 100-unit, mixed-income assisted living facility.

“In the mainstream aging community, there is the assumption that everyone is straight,” said Terry Kaelber, executive director of the New York organization. “We have a place that does not assume that. In fact, it assumes that old people can be attracted to old people of the same gender.”

Arbours Development is also planning a 270-unit assisted-care high-rise in downtown Fort Lauderdale, Fla. That’s where DeLeo says he plans to live.

“I expect to be on the highest floor I can muster, watching out over the ocean,” he says.

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For more details on the Arbours at Cathedral, call (954) 522-3311 or e-mail johnd.arbours@mindspring.com.

Distributed by Inman News Features.

golden ro art (cathedral city sketch)