Senior-Living Community's Residents Push for Greener Lifestyle

By Kate Harrington, Austin Business Journal 

August 22, 2008

There's a new market clamoring for access to a green lifestyle, and it's among the generation that helped make suburban sprawl an American reality. 

Senior-oriented residential communities throughout Texas are increasingly incorporating environmentally friendly features in new facilities, designers and developers say. And one community in Austin hopes to wield its green influence on future projects. 

Querencia at Barton Creek is home to several notable residents, including former University of Texas head football coach Darrell Royal and ex-Navy Admiral John Mooney. When it opened in summer 2007, many of those residents sought to stay active and involved, leading to Querencia's energy task force, which has reached beyond that community's walls. 

Mooney says he started to think about what Querencia's residents could do after he attended a meeting about saving energy at the U.S. Department of Energy in Washington, D.C. 

"The people who are staying here, a good number are people who have been in the energy business for years," Mooney says. "You've got a bunch of folks here with lots of talent, and a lot left in their life to give. They didn't just want to come here and vegetate." 

The result of Mooney's task force has been partly internal. The community has installed light harvesting in parts of its buildings, is buying renewable energy from Austin Energy, and plans to install solar panels for pool heating and tinting for westward-facing windows. 

But it has also reached outside its walls to the University of Texas to talk about a possible partnership. 

"At the moment, it's informal discussions," says David Allen, director for UT's Center for Energy & Environmental Resources. "We're looking forward or exploring how that residential community, as well as other potential communities, may explore energy efficiency." 

Leslie Dominguez, director of marketing for Querencia, says its parent company, Dallas-based Senior Quality Lifestyles Corp., is planning to add more environmentally friendly elements to its two planned senior communities in Corpus Christi and Fort Worth after seeing Querencia's green changes and hearing more demand from seniors for a green lifestyle. 

"There's more interest in this," Dominguez says. "We do get seniors who ask us about it, and we used to not get that. It does come up when people are investigating potential residential communities, and I think in future years it [green building] will be a must." 

Lea von Kaenel, a partner with Austin-based interior design firm StudioSIX5, says more retirement-age people demand green and sustainable features in communities when they shop for a new home because of ethical and aesthetic concerns among that generation. StudioSIX5 specializes in interior design for senior living communities. 

"I'm getting requests to develop places more like Querencia," she says. "Maybe not to [Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design] levels, but incorporating green principles into a project. ... And I think it will happen really fast. I think now is the time, it's the way of the future, and it's happening fast."