Anita’s Gardens plans large facility in Saukville

Anita’s Gardens is closing its Port Washington assisted living facility to make way for a larger, better-equipped building that will be built starting this month in Saukville’s Northern Gateway Community Collective development.

Plans for the 58-room memory care and senior assisted living complex, which will house 62 people and employ almost 50, were approved by the Saukville Village Board last week.

The new Northern Gateway facility, along with a similarly sized facility in Brookfield that opened three months ago, will bring Anita’s Gardens from a small business to a medium or even large company, CEO Nick Benavides said.

The growth is necessary to keep pace with costs and wage increases in the medical care system, as well as to build a management staff to sort through the bureaucracy, he said.

“We needed to increase our profit margin so we can have more management staff,” he said. “When you run a small business you wear many hats, but where we were at with two facilities, it was almost too much. We were pulled apart.”

Once all the positions are filled at Anita’s two new facilities and its Grafton location, the company will have 150 employees, Benavides said. The Saukville facility will employ 40 to 50 people, which will require an additional 35 to 50 hires on top of transferring Port staff.

“We are trying to make that transition as smooth as possible,” he said. “You have growth pains expanding this quickly, but it’s exciting.”

The management team that was hired over the last few years brought more than 100 years of combined experience in assisted living, Benavides said.

Expanding will allow Anita’s to offer higher wages and draw more qualified applicants right out the gate at Saukville, he said. Applicants with experience and training in memory care will also be offered higher salaries.

“The industry has changed over the years. Before Covid, care staff was making $14 an hour. Now, it’s hard to get staff for $17 dollars an hour,” he said.

  Anita’s will be able to keep up with technological innovations and use tools like Dementia Reality, a virtual reality device that shows assisted living staff what it is like to suffer from dementia.

“They have captured the concepts of someone operating a day-to-day life with dementia,” he said. “Even how your senses change.”

Building up profits will also allow Anita’s to continue accepting Medicare, unlike most other providers, Benavides said, “We feel that is unfair.”

Anita’s requires two years of private pay before a patient switches to Medicare.

The Port facility opened as Anita’s Gardens’ first location in 2007. The building on Van Buren Street is the former St. Mary’s rectory and was built in the 1960s.

The building has plenty of issues, Benavides said. It has multiple floors and lots of nooks and crannies that make keeping track of residents difficult. 

Additionally, it’s soon going to need a new roof. This year alone, Anita’s spent $10,000 on work to the building, he said.

“The building would have needed a lot more work to keep using it,” Benavides said, adding that there are more bedrooms than bathrooms so residents have to share.

Nevertheless, leaving the building where founders Bridgette Benavides and Kathleen Mahoney Benavides put in countless hours of sweat equity to build Anita’s Gardens from the ground up is tough.

“I actually cried when I saw that for sale sign — that was our baby, that was our home base,” Bridgette said. “But, we know the change is needed.”

The facility is listed as a commercial property with an asking price of $699,000.

All of the 16 Port residents pay through Medicare. They are invited to move to the Saukville location when it opens, Nick said.

The Northern Gateway facility has been in the works for years. He said the family originally hoped to complete construction in 2019 but the pandemic and project delays repeatedly pushed that date out.

A couple of years ago, Bridgette and Kathleen considered selling Anita’s Gardens but Nick, their son who has a degree in healthcare administration from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, stepped forward and proposed expanding the business.

“He convinced us,” Bridgette said. She and Kathleen are now consultants.

Nick said Ansay Development, which is creating Northern Gateway, worked with them to integrate Anita’s Gardens into the project’s overall vision of building a self-contained community.

“It’s a real nice hand-in-hand project we’ve been going through with them,” he said.

Northern Gateway contains a large American Orthodontics production facility, The Daniels apartments and the Gateway Sports Academy. Project plans also include a large hotel, a daycare facility, and mixed-density housing.

Kathleen said the walkable distance between the housing and Anita’s will be convenient for employees.

“One of the problems in long-term care is the shortage of qualified staff,” she said. “Because there will be housing there, it can be a good fit for someone to live in the apartments and even walk to work.”

Northern Gateway’s location just off I-43 will allow for commuting from Milwaukee, Nick said.

“It’s a little bit closer to the city, but we are able to get staff in Port Washington and Grafton still,” he said.

Bridgette said Northern Gateway will provide residents’ families plenty of things to do while visiting.

“There will be restaurants and the sports center so it’s great for when families visit,” she said.

But, it will be residents who benefit the most, Nick said.

“We want them to access and take part in the community. We don’t want people to be locked away,” he said.

Northern Gateway will offer the convenience of having recreational amenities, businesses and restaurants but won’t strip residents of the small town surroundings they are used to in the area, Nick said.

“People still want that small-town feel. We are not trying to create a corporate environment,” he said. “Especially with the split facilities for memory care, the building will feel homey.

Nick said facilities that house 70 or more people start to lose that charm and feel more like an institution.

“You start to feel like you’re in a hotel,” he said.

There will be rooms available in the assisted living section with kitchenettes.

Anita’s growth has been buoyed by Ozaukee and Washington counties’ aging population, Nick said. 

“The demographics are really supporting it,” he said. “You can see the population aging.”

Kathleen said Anita’s expansion is a reflection of their love for the community.

“We have had our roots in Ozaukee County for a long time. It’s a community we have lived and worked in for a long time. So we want to keep supporting the community,” she said.

The project’s groundbreaking will be this month. It will open by summer or early fall next year.