(Save the date: RealShare L.A.comes to the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza in Los Angeles, CA on March 27, 2013 and save the date: RealShare Apartments East comes to the Hyatt Regency Miami, Florida on February 26^th, 2013)

LOS ANGELES-Multifamily developers have two primary objectives. The first is to build attractive, financially successful projects that attract renters. The second is to build communities that become known as “the” place to live—projects which fulfill the developer's desire to have facilitated a better city.

This profession attracts people who want to do both. Clearly, development is tough, risky work.  As a group, we multifamily developers really do have a desire to make a difference—or we would just do something a whole lot easier.

So how can a multifamily developer make a difference?

There are a lot of communities that have lavish exteriors and very expensive interior elements.  Those can be attractive, but the history of our industry is rife with examples of projects at which extra money was spent in the wrong places.

Beauty is, after all, only skin deep.  At Meta Housing Corp., we have made a priority for reaching further into the design of a new community, past the pretty gates and landscaping, all the way into the heart of a community—the lives of our residents.

As senior housing specialists, we are dealing with a population of residents who have isolation as their primary enemy. Isolation can lead to depression and hinder the health of the residents.  Yet forced or overly engineered interaction may engender the very isolation we seek to prevent.

With this in mind, we decided years ago to begin building projects which gently encourage voluntary participation in creativity and the arts. There is a growing understanding of how creativity and the arts can play an essential role in maintaining both mental and physical health, and we utilize that awareness to create projects where residents can improve their health, thrive and enjoy.

The thematic elements that we include to accomplish this have grown from community to community. In each one we include large open areas that serve as centers of activity, and we are careful to design these areas with ample light and visibility, giving residents the opportunity to observe and be observed. As people observe others engaged in activities, there is an increased likelihood that they will also get involved.

In addition, we continue to build new types of spaces which allow residents to realize dreams of artistic participation not generally available elsewhere. 

For example, we recently completed a new, 126-unit senior housing community in North Hollywood, called the NoHo Senior Arts Colony, which is fully centered around this integrated, artistic lifestyle. 

To achieve this, we built spaces into the project that will serve as visual and digital arts studios, editing rooms, practice rooms, classrooms, a modern fitness studio, an eco-meditation garden, etc., while also including luxury amenities such as a large terrace for social gatherings, a computer/business center and a heated swimming pool. These all help fulfill the basic goals of quality residential function, neighborhood (intra-project) interaction and community interaction.

For the NoHo community, we went an enormous step further, and decided to build a professional, open-to-the-public theatre into the actual project and ensure that it was more than just another architectural element.

We brought in as a partner the Road Theatre Co., an award-winning theatre group already established as an artistic success in Los Angeles, which will occupy the theatre and produce full-scale professional productions open to the public. Our community's residents will have the opportunity to get involved in every aspect of the theatre, from auditioning for roles to volunteering as set design painters or ushers.

We believe this to be the first on-site professional theatre in a senior apartment community anywhere, and we also believe this is an excellent way to encourage residents' engagement first with each other, then with larger community. 

It is in this engagement that our residents' lifestyles really benefit most. We want to first attract seniors to live in our apartments, and then attract them to come out and actually spend their time with one another in common areas involved in activities that require complex interaction and voluntarily accepted mutual responsibility. This allows our residents to experience the increased interactivity and voluntary social entanglement that we refer to as engagement.

We will continue to develop projects infused with architectural elements which encourage interactivity and engagement, and we believe that this is a trend we will begin to see more and more throughout the senior housing industry. 

At the end of the day, our goal is that our projects are distinguished not by what we do for our residents, but by what our residents can do.

John Huskey is the president of Meta Housing Corporation. He can be contacted at [email protected]. The views in this column are the author's own.