In the late '90s, Dick Benner and Lavinia Gordon dreamed of buying a building to open a bookstore and perhaps live in a condo above.

The bookstore idea fell to the wayside, but the conversation about how the couple wanted to live in retirement endured.

Benner and Gordon and four other couples recently moved into Ankeny Row, a pocket village of five townhouses in Southeast Portland that, thanks to energy-efficient construction and solar panels, will have a net-zero draw on the electric grid. But they're more than residents: The couples came together to develop the property to suit their needs.

All of the residents -- partners in a company formed to oversee the development -- are retired or nearing retirement and wanted to downsize, but hoped to do so in a way that aligned with their values and their vision for their golden years.

"We had lived in these big houses and we wanted to downsize in an environmentally sustainable way," said Francie Royce, who with her husband, became Benner and Gordon's first partners. "And we wanted to live with friends."

The Metro regional government and other forecasters expect the retirement-age population of the Portland-Vancouver-Hillsboro area to more than double by 2040, when nearly two in 10 Portlanders would be over age 65.

The baby boomer-led retirement wave will be a major driver of development in coming years, too, similar to the way recent apartment construction has catered primarily to millennials.

In the meantime, some boomers are taking their retirement housing into their own hands.

"We're starting to see boomers ... realize they need to be proactive about how they're going to age and try to stay in their own neighborhoods," said Margaret Neal, director of the Institute on Aging at Portland State University.

Ankeny Row, designed and built for its residents by Portland-based Green Hammer, comes with an array of efficient features with a target of using no more electricity than is generated by rooftop solar panels.

If you go

Ankeny Row will be open for public tours April 25 in a fundraiser for Green Empowerment, a Portland nonprofit that provides renewable energy to villages in the developing world.

Where:

Southeast 25th Avenue and Ankeny Street

When:

Saturday, April 25, 3 to 6 p.m.

Cost:

$15 per person. Tickets available at

.

But the townhouses also have aging-friendly features that much of the housing stock available today lacks: ground-floor master bedrooms, for example, and wheelchair accessible entryways.

It also embraces elements of co-housing, a development style that emphasizes common areas and community. The townhouses have balconies that look out on a common courtyard, and there's a common room where residents can gather for meals or other events.

A much larger group of boomers are planning a larger co-housing development nearby.

The future residents of PDX Commons, a 55-and-older co-housing development, haven't even purchased land or fully designed their development yet, but 15 of the proposed 27 units are spoken for.

Their development would include a mix of one-, two- and three-bedroom condos, but about one-third of the building's square footage would be used for common areas. That would include a community dining room for up to 45 people as well as two shared guest rooms.

For Jim Swenson, one of the founding members of PDX Commons, the impetus for his own retirement planning came from trying to find a place for his own parents to live.

"Our generation, I think, is not going to be happy with the solutions are available today, the kind of nursing facilities and retirement homes that we saw our parents go through," Swenson said.

Many who signed on to the PDX Commons project had considered other options: downsizing into a smaller house or a condo, for example.

But while those options might address accessibility concerns, Swenson said the sense of community built into a cohousing development will become more important as residents age and perhaps develop health problems.

"The experience has been that people really help each other out," he said. "It's a much more old-fashioned system of caring for each other."

Developments like these will likely be an example of a small niche in senior housing. Not everyone has the resources to build an ideal home for retirement.

"We have a huge affordable housing problem in Portland," Neal said. "Layer on top of that a little bit of need for health services, and then you're looking at assisted living. Something like that really gets expensive pretty quickly."

Preferences, too, will vary. Some retirees will prefer to stay in the suburbs and in single-family houses.

Alan DeLaTorre, a researcher at the Institute on Aging, said in an email that developers and others in the real estate industry have already started to catch on to the need for aging-friendly housing.

But one of the biggest barriers might be boomers themselves, who often aren't eager to start planning ahead for retirement and old age.

"Once older adults stop denying that they're aging and/or realize that accessible housing is just good housing, it should become the norm," he said.

-- Elliot Njus

enjus@oregonian.com

503-294-5034

@enjus