Some studies suggest that once we reach the age of 45, we have only two or three household moves left in our lives. I don’t know about you, but I’ve already cleared that bar. Since my mid-fifties, I’ve moved a total of four times, including twice in the past two years. And I still have many, many years of healthy living still to go, fingers crossed.

I’m planning to renew my latest annual lease. But how much longer will it work for me … and where would I go next? For insights, I reached out to Matt Thornhill. He’s 65 and had a long career in marketing and advertising. After retiring from this work, Matt started a consulting business. And that led him to come up with a real estate development idea: The Cozy Home Community. Matt says his idea came from his deep knowledge of his generation. He even wrote a book about it, “The Boomer Consumer.”

Matt is anticipating breaking ground for the first Cozy Home Community. It’s in western Pennsylvania, adjacent to Slippery Rock University.

Here’s an excerpt of my conversation with Matt, from the latest DWG/APM radio broadcast special, “The Way We Live.”

Haven’t had the opportunity to listen? Read the transcript — and leave a comment! How many times have you moved … and how many more do you have left in you?

MATT THORNHILL: We tried to do research to understand the mindset of boomers and that led to getting hired by everyone from Walmart to Google to AARP. Hershey’s called me up once and said Matt, we think people over 50 still eat chocolate.

LAURA STASSI [laughter]

MATT THORNHILL: I’m like, really? But along the way, the senior housing community, senior living communities, started calling and saying help us understand boomers, because they’re making the decisions for their parents. This is in the early 2000s — 2015, 2016, they started calling us again saying, hey, boomers are going to be our next consumer. And I said, no, they’re not. They’re not interested in your product, they don’t want to go there. In fact, I found one of the kind of untold secrets of the senior housing community, their sector, is that the average age of someone moving into independent living, which is the first level of care, is 81 years old.

LAURA STASSI

Oh, my goodness.

MATT THORNHILL

And they put it off. People put it off until they have to move there. Nobody moves there because they want to, or very few do. It’s mostly a needs-based business and that got me thinking. It’s like well, why do people not want to move there? It’s because it’s not really designed around community. They’re called communities but it wasn’t really fostering community, and that’s what got me thinking up the idea for Cozy Home Community.

LAURA STASSI What’s the difference between a Cozy Home Community, your concept, and something like an active 55 plus community like The Villages or Margaritaville?

MATT THORNHILL

We are essentially an active adult, 55 and older. We’re not going to have any services that we provide in the community, that we, the company, provide. We’re going to lean into the fact that there are resources in the broader community outside of our boundaries where we can tap into. A lot of them are nonprofit.

 LAURA STASSI

So people are independently living, but there are services in the community where they can either go out or can come in if necessary.

MATT THORNHILL

Correct. I don’t need to have an on-site yoga instructor. I’ll do a deal with the local yoga instructors and have them come in Right, or whatever the things may be that people need. I’m aggregating seniors so I can cost effectively deliver things Like, for example, it’s great to live somewhere where they’ll give you three square meals a day with their chef, but most people at that age don’t eat as much as they used to. Yeah, so what if we just had? You know what? We’re going to have community-wide opportunities for dining that will bring meals in from the Tuesday night spaghetti night. We get the local Italian restaurant to say, okay, it’s $7 a plate and people can afford $7 a plate. They can’t afford $25 to go out.

LAURA STASSI

Yeah.

 LAURA STASSI People don’t buy in, they’re renting?

MATT THORNHILL:  It’s rental. Our target is middle income, and what we mean by that are people that are earning a dime too much to get affordable housing that’s funded by the government and can’t afford those $150,000 down payments and $4,000 or $5,000 a month. So they’re typically making probably between $50,000 to $100,000 a year in retirement income.

The reason we want to make it rental is I want to get people to sell their homes and put that equity in the bank so they can use it to pay for I don’t know health care needs as they’re coming down the road. Everyone thinks that Medicare pays for everything and it doesn’t, and Medicaid doesn’t pay for everything.

LAURA STASSI Right.

MATT THORNHILL

So let’s unleash that equity in your home, and a reverse mortgage is not a way to do it. It’s sell the home, which now creates inventory of homes for young people to buy.

 LAURA STASSI Tell me how you’re deciding where to build these communities.

MATT THORNHILL

Well, because I’m trying to do it so that the end game is cost-effective rent for the people that we’re trying to attract. Our two-bedroom, two-bath, 1,000-square-foot  unit is going to be $1,800 a month rent.

LAURA STASSI: Mmm.

 MATT THORNHILL

What we’ve built into the concept is we want to make sure you know your neighbors and that your neighbors know you. So we’ve developed a profile that you fill out when you move in, that you then share with your neighbors and they share theirs with you.

And there’s actually been studies done by a professor at University of Kansas that says someone moving from casual acquaintance to a friend takes about 40 or 50 hours of conversations and then from a friend to a close friend takes about another 40 or 50. And from a close friend to a bestie takes another 40 or 50 hours. And I took that and used my research background and said well, wait a second. If I can collect information about your backstory in a fun, interesting way and then share it with your neighbor when you move in, I might be able to find out in about five minutes enough about you that we can start our conversation almost like it’s 10 or 15 hours in, so to speak, versus having it just be parsed out every time I go out to take out the trash and I wave at you and we have a little five-minute conversation. So we’re just trying to facilitate that getting to know you better.

So we’re going to market intentionally to people to say, if you want to be on an island and live by yourself, this is not the community for you. If you want to live together in community where we can help each other, this is the place for you. So one of the requirements when you sign that lease is as long as you’re able, you’ve got to donate 10 hours a month back to the community.

LAURA STASSI

Okay, so there’s an obligation involved.

MATT THORNHILL

Yes.

LAURA STASSI

An obligation to our fellow neighbors.

MATT THORNHILL

Other passengers on this big blue marble. And the reason that we are doing it this way again is research has shown that people are more than willing to help their neighbors, but people who need help are reluctant to ask. So if you set up, it’s almost like a time bank, with deposits and credits and withdrawals, so that everyone knows that everyone has 10 hours they have to give. Now it’s not to come over and help with your activities of daily living. But it’s like you know hey, I’m going to the grocery store, give me your shopping list, I’ll go get your stuff. Or do you need someone to go with you to your breast cancer treatments? I’ll come sit with you while you go through that.

LAURA STASSI

Or your colonoscopy, I need a ride home.

MATT THORNHILL

Exactly so. It’s a way of being intentional in creating community.

 Episode transcripts are posted on the Dating While Gray website before they are thoroughly proofread. The audio of this episode is the authoritative record. For terms of use and permissions, please email laura@datingwhilegray.com.