RoseVilla Senior Living in Portland, Ore., has built a legacy as a sustainable leader in the senior living sector. The continuing care retirement community (CCRC) is home to two zero-energy neighborhood designed to Passive House standards as well as a greywater system that saves approximately 303,214 gallons of potable water per year. “Our residents really have a desire to live in a place that reflects values that are important to them,” says Glen Lewis, CEO at RoseVilla.
Three years ago, reacting to several extreme weather events—from ice storms to heat waves—across the Pacific Northwest, RoseVilla sought to make its campus even more resilient. Working with longtime partner Green Hammer Design Build (Portland), the community set out to develop a Resiliency Action Plan (RAP) with a focus on maintaining operational stability, community safety, and sustainability of its built environment during and in the aftermath of extreme weather and natural disasters.
“The frequency of extreme climactic events—that stress everyone out, but especially a community that is supporting an aging population—is increasing every year, and that costs RoseVilla money” says Laura Squillace, an architect at Green Hammer who worked on the RAP. “So it’s smart business sense to be resilient.”
How RoseVilla expanded campus resiliency
The goals set for the RAP included: reducing energy use by 50 percent; providing energy for essential medical services for 2-3 weeks during an outage; reducing water use by 25 percent; providing water and sanitation to meet critical needs for as long as four weeks; and reinforcing older buildings to better seismic resilience standards.
The team outlined projects to meet these goals, including retrofitting existing carports into 12 ROSE (Resilient Operations and Sustainable Energy” Ports to serve as neighborhood resilient hubs and shelter during emergency events. The units would be equipped with a water cistern and a roof-top solar power array and battery storage system. “We noticed that there were already carports distributed across campus and they could easily be renovated to support solar power to produce energy on campus cleanly and renewably and independently of the grid if and when the grid goes down,” Squillace says.
The first ROSE Port was built in 2025 on the site of a former garage that had burned down on the campus. The materials for the unit are chosen to convey resilience and sustainability, including mass timber plywood for the roof and glulam posts and beams, all of which help offset the high carbon footprint of existing concrete, which was not structurally damaged in the garage fire. The Ports also use three larger support posts instead of multiple steel joists that are typical in other carports on the campus. “We were going for something that felt contemporary” to fit with the existing homes on the campus, Squillance says.
Future projects planned in the RAP include retrofitting or replacing cottages to be more energy and water efficient (called ROSE Homes).
Planning for future senior living campus safety and security
Though the RAP calls for 12 ROSE Ports by 2040, Lewis says RoseVilla may revise that plan based on the success of the first one. For now, he expects to have two more on campus within the next five years.
RoseVilla residents, he adds, are excited about the project. “In addition to really liking the look and feel of the ROSE Port, people are excited about what it represents—that we made a commitment to design and build this—and the safety and security that come along with it,” Lewis says.
Robert McCune is senior editor of Environments for Aging and can be reached at [email protected].
