Friendship Village in Upper St. Clair embarks on $39.5 million expansion
Sloan Bentley, president and chief executive officer of Lifespace Communities Inc., gets ready to board an excavator for a distinctive ceremonial groundbreaking at Friendship Village of South Hills.
George Yatsko, a resident of Friendship Village of South Hills, speaks during the ceremonial groundbreaking.
Sloan Bentley, left, and Amy LaCroix of Lifespace Communities Inc. pose for the ceremonial groundbreaking.
Sloan Bentley operates the excavator successfully.
Friendship Village of South Hills held a groundbreaking ceremony June 7 for its $39.5 million expansion project.
The new building will add 50 assisted living apartments and 32 memory support suites.
“(The groundbreaking was) a great day for Friendship Village in that this has been a long time in the planning,” Bryan Welty, executive director, said. “This will certainly add to our continuum of Care for our residents, future residents and the greater Upper St. Clair and South Hills community.”
Friendship Village is owned by Lifespace Communities, which is one of the 10 largest nonprofit organizations that provide senior housing and care in the United States. Sloan Bentley, Lifespace president and chief executive officer, kicked off the groundbreaking in distinctive fashion.
Bentley elevated herself into the excavator and operated the machine, with some help from a professional, to dig the first hole of the construction.
“We are just thrilled to be making this investment in Friendship Village of South Hills,” Bentley said.
Friendship Village has undergone several redevelopment projects by Lifespace. The latest of those projects was a $15 million plan to improve the common areas, ended in 2014,
“Lifespace has really invested significant amount of money and resources in Friendship Village,” Welty said.
Des Moines, Iowa-based Lifespace, which has 12 communities in seven states, always looks for a way to improve its facilities, according to Bentley.
“We continually reinvest,” she said. “This will be a brand new building, and we are very excited to bring assisted living and memory support here to this campus.”
Planning for the expansion began when the previous project ended in 2014.
“It takes a while to find exactly, because this is a brand new building, where it’s best on this campus and what’s least destructive during the construction,” Bentley said. “But also it has the connectivity to the current building because many of our residents will want to come and visit or they may have a spouse here or friends here so we want that connectivity.”
Friendship Village is home to 450 residents and 25 team members, and Welty said adding assisted living apartments and memory support suites will improve the services the facility can provide.
“It’s going to add to the care for residents that may need assistance in living,” he said. “Currently, we have an assisted living Ddpartment where team members go into the residents’ homes and help them out, so now we’ll have apartments suited for those services, as well.”
Construction will begin this summer.