All eyes on Adelaide’s U City for progressive retirement living

U City model raises the bar for future of retirement living

Our recent Retirement Living conference Where to next for seniors living? held at Crown Perth opened with discussions around the Royal Commission into Aged Care and the likely significant impact on the retirement living sector.

One of the most attention-grabbing sessions of the day came from Simon Schrapel, CEO of Uniting Communities, who presented a case study on Uniting Communities’ visionary and innovative village and care development, U City, in Adelaide.

This 20-storey development encompasses 1200sqm of floor space – with the top six floors dedicated to retirement living. The City of Adelaide has a strong focus on revitalising the CBD – and U City aims to achieve just that.

30 per cent of the development will encompass 41 retirement apartments with a mix of one to three-bedroom apartments. The original design had more one-bedroom apartments but demand proved to be for more two to three-bedroom apartments, so the design layout was changed to fit demand, highlighting flexibility as an important part of Uniting Communities’ approach to this unprecedented development.

A large portion of the building is made up of commercial tenancies. Significant market testing was done on the viability of retirement living coming into a building with this mix. For example, a law firm will have a tenancy – how that will work for their clients? Careful consideration has been given to the people living on the top floors and how these will impact on the commercial customer space. A significant function space has also been included in the lower floors.

Part of the building is dedicated to specialist disability accommodation with 21 long stay apartments meeting high physical support needs, with assistant tech, lifters etc. There are also 18 NDIS supported short-stay apartments for people with quite significant disabilities. Uniting Communities aims to pitch these at the accessible tourism market. A 24/7 concierge will be in operation to support the short-stay which will have benefits for all users.

Serviced suites will provide spaces for community legal services, drug and alcohol programs, counselling, youth help services, dentist, allied health services specifically targeted at retirement living market and more. And on the ground floors there will be retail offerings available to tenants, residents and members of the public including a café and a bar restaurant which will be activated 7 days a week.

Community is key

Creating lots of opportunities for people to come together was really important in shaping the development. This has been achieved by creating internal and external communal spaces – with a large publicly accessible space for people who use the services in the building and communal areas for the retirement village itself to create points of interaction.

Exemplar environmental outcomes

The U City design has a strong emphasis on low carbon living and its environmental footprint, using 45 per cent less energy and 30 per cent less water than your standard mixed-use building of this capacity.

With a 6 Star Green Star Rating awarded by the Green Building Council of Australia – U City has achieved South Australia’s greenest building EVER – a significant achievement for Adelaide being the first building outside of government to achieve that.

The wrap

This is a transformative and unique development that builds upon the ideology behind the stock standard ‘mixed use’ development and takes it into the future.

Uniting Communities have shaped U City by identifying the gap in the retirement market. The goal was to create a really vibrant, active and integrated building with long and short-term visitors, temporary residents and people who call U City their home. A lot of effort has gone into making all those mixes work together in the one building, with building management one of the key challenges in the implementation.

For Western Australian developers, the opportunities provided by a project like U City are exciting and really demonstrate the outcomes that can be achieved in the seniors’ living market with a little bit of innovation and risk-taking. Having the right governance framework is critical too, and the WA’s new Community Titles and Strata Titles legislation will be key to bringing product like U City to the market. 

For more on U City visit http://www.ucity.com.au.