I presented an abbreviated version of this post at the Kendal Residents Association meeting on November 10, 2025.

I’m the current Kendal representative to the CCRC Area Council (CAC), a group run by the residents of 14 retirement communities in our area. We meet in person quarterly, and we exchange questions via email between meetings. The in-person meetings rotate among the member communities, and the most recent one, in mid-September, was at Waverly Heights in Gladwyn, PA.

Waverly Heights offers an interesting comparison to Kendal. It is very similar in some ways, and very different in others. The differences reveal different management approaches, different priorities, and (perhaps most of all) a different resident demographic.

Prior to my September visit, I checked out on-line sources of information to learn more about Waverly Heights. The main ones I used are listed in “Information Sources”, at the end of this post.  

Just looking at on-line descriptions of the two facilities, you might get the impression that they were quite similar. They are both non-profits, and both offer similar “Type A LifePlan” contracts (your monthly fee remains the same as you move from one level of care to another). Neither one is part of a chain. Each is certified as an arboretum. The waiting list is long at both. Waverly Heights is smaller, but only slightly (342 residents vs 391 at Kendal before the new apartments opened). And Waverly Heights is about to embark on a building program that will bring its resident population back to approximately the level of Kendal.

There is one striking difference between Waverly Heights and Kendal that shows up in on-line research: their fees. Waverly Heights is far more expensive. In particular, the entrance fees at Waverly Heights are two to three times higher for a comparable type of housing. The minimum entrance fee at Waverly Heights is $313,000 for a single person in a one-bedroom apartment. That’s far more than double the minimum for a one-bedroom at KCC, which is $138,000. (This doesn’t count studios, which Waverly Heights doesn’t offer.)  The maximum entrance fee at Waverly heights is $1,242,000. Again, that’s more than double the highest at KCC, which is $604,000 (for a duplex with a basement).

Monthly fees at Waverly Heights, however, are much closer to Kendal’s. They run about 20%-30% above ours.

The impression you get when you visit Waverly Heights in person is quite different from Kendal. If Kendal’s Center seems a bit like an updated relative of a country inn, then Waverly Heights’ Center is an updated relative of a traditional resort hotel. I would describe the vibe at Waverly Heights as “understated elegance”. I suppose this reflects the fact that the CEO, Tim Garvin, comes from the hospitality (restaurant and hotel) industry and emphasizes the “hospitality mentality” with his staff and in the style of the community. Garvin’s approach is evidently successful: Waverly Heights (like KCC) has has high occupancy and hundreds of people on its waiting list.

What do residents get for the higher fees? From reading the disclosure documents that both communities file with the state and federal government, you can begin to see how Waverly Heights uses its higher fees. A lot goes into staffing. Waverly Heights has about 25% more staff than KCC, on a per-resident basis. (25% probably understates the true difference. Waverly Heights outsources some services, such as culinary management and physical therapy. The people who provide those services at KCC are employees, but they are not at Waverly Heights.)

Some of that additional staff maintains the classy grounds, which include a manicured putting green, beautifully kept croquet court and two grass bocce courts. The acreage is much less than Kendal-Crosslands (63 acres vs over 500 for KCC) but it clearly gets a lot of attention. At Waverly Heights, I didn’t see any sign of anything comparable to the native-plant meadows on our two campuses.

Independent-living residents live either in one of three apartment buildings or 69 “villas”. I didn’t get a chance to visit any of the housing units. They are, on average, larger than our housing units. One of the “deluxe” apartments is over 3,000 square feet, and 14 of them are over 2,000 square feet.

The central building. The main building at Waverly Heights has the same general kinds of facilities as our Center does. There is a large dining room and the café is huge. There is also a small, more formal dining room (the Carleton Dining Room) with a special menu. The double glass walls that separate this dining room from the adjoining corridor contain floor-to-ceiling racks of wine bottles. There is a small pub, which serves as a popular gathering area in the evening, I was told. It has its own menu of about a dozen pub-style items.

Residents tell me the food is excellent. Certainly, the lunch that the CAC visitors got was very good. A highlight was the light, buttery croissants. In talking with the head chef, who circulated among the tables after lunch, we learned that the croissant dough was overnighted in from Paris. Food service is handled through a contractor, UniDine, and the head chef was employed by them, not by Waverly Heights.

There is a large auditorium and a small (but luxurious) theater, where an opera broadcast was being shown after lunch.  There are two libraries: one for fiction in the main building and one for non-fiction in the elegant old mansion that was the original structure on the site. The mansion is connected by a hallway to the main building, and its upstairs bedrooms can be rented for visitors. My impression is that many community functions get somewhat more space in the Waverly Heights center than they do at Kendal.

Waverly Heights does not have anything comparable to our weaving room or our pottery room. There is a small but nice arts and crafts room, but when I visited it was spotlessly tidy, with everything put away in cabinets—quite unlike our art room, which is full of work in progress. I assume that the serious artists at Waverly Heights have studio space at home. There is a small but well-equipped wood shop, run by residents.

I didn’t learn much about the health care offerings at Waverly Heights, but on paper they are similar to ours. One difference: physical therapy, like culinary service, is handled by a contractor, not by employees.

My visit to Waverly Heights reinforced what I already knew: at first glance, CCRCs often seem similar, but there can be major differences under the surface, and they appeal to different groups of retirees.

Information sources. In addition to my visit, I used some other resources that shed light on the comparison between KCC and Waverly Heights. Here are the resources I found most helpful.  

One resource is the public-facing website of each organization. You can learn quite a bit about an organization by a careful review of how it promotes itself to the public. The public-facing Waverly Heights website is https://www.waverlyheights.org/; the corresponding public-facing website for KCC is https://www.kendal-crosslands.org/.

There is also state and federal regulatory information available on line. Both Waverly Heights and KCC offer “Type A” contracts (under which your monthly fee does not change as you move among different levels of care). That means both are required to file an “Act 82 Disclosure” with the Pennsylvania Insurance Department (any community that offers a Type A contract must do so). Residents receive these each year, and they can be requested for any other CCRC from this site.

Both Waverly and KCC are non-profits and file an annual “Form 990” with the IRS (all non-profits must do so). These are public documents, and they provide a way to compare financial information and basic service offerings. The Form 990s can be found on various websites, including this one.

As an aside: only 5 of the 14 CAC members (or 6, if you count Kendal and Crosslands as separate units) file helpful Act 82 Disclosures and Form 990s. Two are for-profit corporations, so they don’t file 990s.  Four are members of chains, so their 990s apply to the whole chain and don’t tell you much about individual campuses. Two others are stand-alone non-profits but don’t offer a Type A plan. That means they don’t file an Act 82 Disclosure.