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Housing
Information
The Cathedral Square Difference
Featured Community
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Whitney Hill Homestead Whitney Hill Homestead is designed in the style of an extended farmhouse with long porches and courtyards. It provides a warm and gracious setting for those 55 and older who wish to combine independent living with reduced maintenance. With its pastoral setting, Whitney Hill offers a relaxed environm... More Information.
News Around the Square
National Honor Goes to Cathedral Square
Cathedral Square’s executive director, Nancy Eldridge, recently received the highest honor awarded by LeadingAge for her dedication to coordinating housing and health care services for Vermont’s elderly population. LeadingAge, a national association of 5,600 not-for-profit organizations dedicated to expanding the world of possibilities for aging, selected Eldridge from a highly accomplished list of nominees to receive the Award of Honor at its 50th Anniversary Celebration in Washington D. C. Eldridge was honored for exemplifying the creativity, compassion and leadership which results in a better world for seniors.
Eldridge was chosen for her tireless work to bring housing and service providers together to provide a more robust and focused approach to care coordination. Eldridge is the visionary behind the Support and Services at Home (SASH) program, which creates customized, at-home healthy aging plans and support coordination. SASH is a collaboration with myriad partners – from health care and housing providers to social service agencies. Working with the Blueprint for Health to reduce costs while improving the health and quality of life for Medicare beneficiaries of all ages in Vermont, Eldridge pioneered a system that will bring new support services to 112 nonprofit housing communities state-wide.
“We know that problems such as avoidable falls and nursing home stays, unmanaged chronic health conditions, excessive use of emergency room services and medication misuse can be approached in a better way. SASH tackles these issues head on,” says Eldridge. “We have great partners in this work, including the Visiting Nurse Association, PACE, Vermont Health Foundation, Fletcher Allen Health Care, the University of Vermont, Champlain Valley Agency on Aging, HowardCenter, and many others. It is a program that has something to offer everyone, from preventive services to support of complex conditions.”
The demographics of Vermont’s aging population show a rapid growth rate in the number of people 65 years and older. Projections for 2030 show the senior population increasing 149% in the decades between 2000 and 2030. Cathedral Square is acutely aware of Vermont’s elderly population and the need to plan for and provide housing services to this growing segment of the population. Under Eldridge’s leadership, most of Vermont’s nonprofit housing providers have committed to providing the care coordination and services that will help keep seniors healthy and safe at home.
Eldridge has been the executive director of Cathedral Square Corporation for the past twelve years and has been active in LeadingAge policy work at a national level, as well as in her state and region. She chaired its Affordable Housing Finance Cabinet, served on the House of Delegates, served as an active member of the Northern New England Association of Homes and Services for the Aging, and is the current president of LeadingAge Vermont. A leader in many statewide and regional initiatives related to aging and affordable housing, she also serves on the board of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Vermont.
Did You Know?
Two Decades of Homesteading on Whitney Hill
A luncheon gala on December 13th marked the 20th anniversary of Whitney Hill Homestead, the Williston senior housing community that was embarked upon in the late 1980’s as a community outreach project of the Federated Church. The grass-roots project, pledged to providing affordable housing for Williston seniors no longer able to maintain their large, energy-inefficient farmhouses, attracted vital seed money, galvanized selectboard support, and evolved into a joint development partnership involving three entities: Williston Elder Housing, Inc., the group formed to oversee the venture, Housing Vermont, and Cathedral Square Corporation, which has managed the property since it opened for occupancy and acquired it outright five years ago.
Among the 75 on hand to celebrate and reminisce were 31 residents, three of whom -- Dot Howe, Betty Blaine, and Bill Stringer -- were recognized for having lived at Whitney Hill from the day it opened. They were among that first group of homesteaders who participated in a lottery to determine which apartments would be theirs.
Also sharing in the festivities was a wide-ranging turnout of state and local luminaries, including: Vermont Senator Ginny Lyons; VT Representatives Terry Macaig and Jim McCullough; Williston Town Manager Rick McQuire; Williston Fire Chief Ken Morton and several of his firefighters; and WHH’s first property manager Clara Bond. Those who shared recollections and spoke in high praise for the community-wide support the project continues to receive were: Karin Davis, a founding member of Williston Elder Housing; Sarah Carpenter, executive director of the Vermont Housing Financing Agency, who headed up Cathedral Square at the time Whitney Hill was being built; and Amy Wright, current director of development for Cathedral Square.
Davis, who served on Whitney Hill’s board for nine years, still facilitates a resident social interaction group called Lifetimes that meets in the community room every Thursday afternoon. She’s currently a member of the board at Richmond Terrace, another CSC property.
The 44-unit Whitney Hill Homestead occupies a secluded, wooded parcel originally owned by the Pecor family. It was designed in the style of an extended farmhouse, with long porches and courtyards, incorporating existing stone walls -- fitting in with the bucolic character of Williston and the prevailing lifestyle of its townspeople. “You wouldn’t want to have left a house built in the 1850’s to move into a high rise,” Davis pointed out. “And I personally wouldn’t have wanted to be involved in building housing in which I wouldn’t want to live myself.”
Dot Howe, Karin Davis, Bill Stringer, and Betty Blaine
Support and Services at Home (SASH)
To learn more about SASH, click here.
Meet Joan Carstens
Joan Carstens loves to travel. At age 79, she drove cross-country and back this year, all alone in her 1995 Toyota Tercel, that already had logged 246,000 miles since she purchased it brand new! “I’ve never had car trouble on any of my trips,” Joan boasts, which speaks to the vaunted Toyota reliability and, maybe just a little bit of luck. “If I ever get in a bind,” she continues, “there’s always my AAA membership.”
The first stop on her whirlwind, 40-day, 10,000-mile tour was Portland, Maine, and the graduation of a grandson from the University of New England. From there she motored to Virginia and North Carolina to visit a cousin who summers in the area. Then on to Austin, Texas to check in on her son and his wife.
She persevered on to Colorado Springs, across the High Plains, up and over the Rockies, through southern Utah and onto “the loneliest road in America,” a godforsaken, but “beautiful in its own way” 240-mile stretch of I-50 through the barren desert. “You pick up a book in Ely, Nevada, and if you get it stamped at five destination points along the way, you’ve officially survived ‘the loneliest road’.” Eventually, she swung up to Bellingham, Washington and onto Vancouver Island to visit remaining family members in Duncan and Campbell River where Joan grew up, the daughter of parents who had emigrated to Canada from Finland (her mother) and Denmark (her father). After joyously reconnecting with family, Joan took to the roads again, making her way back east across Canada to Montreal, with stopovers in Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Ontario to visit friends. Her incredible journey was documented in a story that appeared last summer in the St. Albans Messenger.
But traversing North America is only one tale of Joan’s happy wandering. She’s a passport-carrying globetrotter. “I’ve been everywhere,” she enthuses, then retreats a little. “Well maybe not everywhere, but pretty close.” Pretty close includes adventures abroad to London, Paris, Amsterdam, Venice, Costa Rica, Turkey, Cambodia, India, China, Japan, New Zealand, Australia, Fiji, and five countries in the Middle East. “Egypt is one of my favorite places. I’ve stood on the Golan Heights -- I understand why everyone wants a piece of that land.” In September, 2010, Joan was strolling the streets of Damascus only months before a political uprising, partaking of Syrian food at street side cafes.
Fourwinds, the Cathedral Square community Joan now calls home, is her 37th residence. She chose it because of the size and layout of the apartments, the fact that the units are on one level, and the handy driving distance to her daughter’s family in nearby Fairfield. There, Joan has six grandchildren, ranging in age from five to 20.
Since Joan doesn’t live vicariously, she doesn’t need or want a TV. She reads up to four books a week, mostly biographies and novels. She gets her news from National Public Radio, and when she hears about events in a faraway place she’s never been to, she gets out her atlas. Map-reading is a favorite hobby. So is listening to country music. And that pre-dates her life in Vermont. “I grew up listening to Hank Snow, Eddy Arnold, Tex Ritter, and Minnie Pearl. They use to tour the towns of Vancouver Island by car back in the day.”
What is next for Joan? “Now I’ve got this brain wave that I’d like to do the Alaskan Highway again.” She wants to retrace the journey that she and her husband and their kids took, mostly along gravel roads, in 1969. This time, she wants her two daughters and daughter-in-law along with her. “Not cross-country in my car, though -- instead they’ll fly to Seattle, meet me in Bellingham, and we’ll tour the places where we once lived in Olympia, Washington, and on Vancouver Island. Then I'll set out alone on the Alaskan Highway, which, of course, is an excellent paved road now. “They have to let me know by January if they’re going to go.”
Joan wonders about the people who don’t have a sense of where places are, no interest in the lay of the land -- their own or anyone else’s. Closer to home, she’s been to all 251 towns in Vermont, without benefit of a formal tour. Her curiosity about places and their inhabitants is never-ending. After all, “what you are is where you were when.”
