News

Assisted living beds, senior units approved on South Allen Road

By Lightning Reports, Published: December 3, 2020

The Hendersonville City Council on Thursday cleared the way for a 58-bed assisted living facility and 83 independent living apartments on 8½ acres on South Allen Road.

Hickory-based ALG Senior won council approval for the 32,000-square-foot assisted living facility and an 85,000-square-foot apartment building near Four Seasons hospice’s Elizabeth House and Hendersonville Health and Rehabilitation. The council also voted to annex the property, currently in unincorporated Henderson County, and rezoned it from office-institutional to planned residential development.

ALG owns 140 senior communities in the South and has another 30 under development.

“We take care of the frail and elderly,” ALG project manager Kench Waldrep told the City Council. "We treat everyone that lives with us like our own mother and our own father."

“We help residents with all their activities of daily living," Waldrep told the Planning Board. "We know that families want their loved ones or their parents to live within 5-10 miles of where they live. We hire local people to take care of local people and we think there is a very big demand.”

Construction manager Corey Mabus of Sanford-based Carolina Commercial Contractors told the Planning Board the owner-operator of the facility had received a certificate of need from state regulators authorizing 58 assisted living beds.

“We’re pretty hungry to get after it,” he said. “We’d like to start as soon as possible with construction.”

The City Council approved the rezoning and annexation with little discussion, adding just one condition. It asked that the developer install "dark sky" compliant lighting providing the lower wattage lighting does not conflict with state law governing lighting for elderly housing campuses.