By Kenneth S. Allen
THE ERICKSON TRIBUNE
As nearly 400 priority list members looked on, shovels of earth turned in a symbolic groundbreaking for Windsor Run.
Erickson Retirement Communities Founder and CEO John Erickson told the crowd that construction will begin in early 2009 and take about a year.
He also announced that interest in Windsor Run is so great that construction plans have been scaled up.
"Windsor Run has had a record-breaking start," Erickson said. "There are over 400 priority list members already. That is the largest number of people who have said ‘yes’ to an Erickson community in this short of a period."
The priority list is a group of people who have put down a fully refundable $1,000 deposit to reserve their place in line for the apartment home of their choice at Windsor Run.
Erickson said that because of the heightened interest, Windsor Run would open with at least two residence buildings, and perhaps three.
He gave a wide-ranging talk at the ceremony, outlining his philosophy of retirement living, health care, social responsibility, and the secret to life.
The early days
Erickson told of his early days as a developer of homes for people retiring to Florida. He noticed two things that would drive his future endeavors:
"For every person who moved to Florida, 20 stayed in their house," he said. Erickson thought those people represented a good market.
Second, he observed that most of the attention was on the first phase of retirement. "We can do better for the last half of their retirement than the first half," Erickson said. "We can make it better—a lot better—if we put our minds to it."
Erickson got the opportunity to take action at an abandoned seminary near Baltimore that became Charlestown, the first Erickson community. There, Erickson began implementing his ideas from transportation to recreation to spirituality to health care.