San Francisco Chronicle

April 2, 2008

Suburban seniors move on to city life

Susan Fornoff,
Chronicle Staff Writer

When El Cerrito septuagenarians Claude and Nina Gruen finally decided where they wanted to spend their golden years, nothing prepared them for the reaction they would get from their five sons.

"Our sons were not happy we decided to sell the family house," Nina said. "They're grown men, in their 40s and 50s, and they were all upset."

"Some just came out and said, 'Why the hell are you doing that?' " Claude said.

The parents patiently explained the appeal of a San Francisco penthouse condo at the SOMA Grand, next door to the new Federal Building on Mission Street. They still loved to work, and now would no longer have to suffer through a commute to their Howard Street office that used to take 20 minutes but began to last as long as 75.

They could walk to the Symphony, Opera and Ballet. A concierge would give them easy access to restaurants and other services. The sketchy neighborhood offered them almost twice the square footage they could afford at more upscale projects, such as the Four Seasons and the St. Regis. And the energy of the city would keep them vibrant "until we get dragged out feet first," Nina said.

Finally, Claude made the winning argument. "I said, 'Would you rather see us go into assisted living?' And they said, 'Well, OK, then.' Because whatever else they might say, this is a better alternative than assisted living."

Trendy move

The Gruens say they represent a national trend: Senior citizens, unwilling to live exclusively with their own age group, find everything they need (and can afford) to age gracefully by selling the family home and moving downtown.

"It's a massive trend!" said Nina. "It's happening all over America, and there's a good reason for it."

Nina speaks effusively and emphatically, with many exclamation points. Claude makes his points, when he can get them in, quietly and steadily. They met at Walnut Hills High School in Cincinnati when he was a junior and she was a freshman. Nina married during her freshman year at the University of Miami and had three sons - Les, now 55, Dale, 52, and Adam, 50. After her divorce and Claude's return from the Air Force, they began dating and married on Sept. 11, 1960. Claude immediately adopted the three boys; their try for a daughter resulted in twins Aaron and Joshua, 44. (Seven of their 12 grandchildren are girls.)

Nina, everyone including her points out, was never a "conventional suburban housewife." She didn't drive her kids to soccer practice or, for that matter, drive at all. Son Aaron, an attorney who anchors the Chicago branch of Gruen Gruen + Associates, expressed concern when told that this reporter had lunch at his parents' place. "She didn't cook for you, did she?" he asked, and then expressed relief when told that lunch was takeout. While other moms were driving and cooking, Nina was a sociologist partnering with Claude, an urban economist, to build a company renowned for its analyses of urban communities and real estate conditions. She studies the behavioral and demographic factors, and he looks at economics and financial factors. Among her published works: "Sociological and Cultural Variables in Housing Theory" (July 1984 issue of the Annals of Regional Science). Among his: a monthly Trends column for the Institutional Real Estate Letter.

Their clients have included many California builders and developers (see www.ggassoc.com for the list), so a move from suburbia to a sketchy (we say "sketchy," you say "seedy") neighborhood on the edge of San Francisco's Civic Center was not entered into lightly. In 1974, against the advice they usually give to invest in the best- possible location, they bought their office building in a then-run-down, now-thriving block of Howard Street between First and Second streets. "But I've never bought a home as an investment, and I don't see any point to it," Claude said.

For 43 years, home for the Gruens meant five bedrooms in the hills of El Cerrito, where they kept a teahouse, koi pond and roaming outdoor cat. (Their indoor cat, Tasha, made the move with them.) There were 3,400 square feet, with views of three bridges and lots of walls for the contemporary Russian art the couple started collecting in 1983 and have begun donating to Rutgers University.

"Today, only 20 percent of households have children," Claude notes. "When we bought, it was 50 percent. People moved to neighborhoods where they could afford enough room for their kids. I was teaching at Cal, and we looked in San Francisco for a house that was big enough for us, but we were so far from being able to afford that."

Time to make a move

After the boys managed to find rides, get fed and grow up, the couple would fill the ever-increasing commute time with talk about their next move.

"I'd think we'd better do it when we were young enough and energetic enough to do all the things involved in a move," Nina said.

Then she told Claude she wanted to remodel the kitchen. "I didn't know you knew where the kitchen was," Claude retorted. They did the remodel three years ago, and would occasionally have a chef come over and cook for a party. But on Thursdays they'd go to the Symphony, Friday the Ballet or the Opera.

"Several weekends we came into the city for social events, and the traffic was horrendous," Claude said. "And finally Nina said, 'We have to move.' We started talking to people who had made the move, and they all said they wished to hell they'd done it earlier."

Finding the right place

They shopped and studied carefully, rejecting the city's hills for the more easily walked Market Street corridor, visiting friends at the Four Seasons and the St. Regis. "Frankly, we could not afford a big unit in those places," Nina said. And the couple was not prepared to downsize from 3,400 square feet to the 1,450 square feet they eyeballed at the Four Seasons.

One day last May, they took the outside elevator at SOMA Grand up to the 22nd floor with AGI Capital executives Alexis Wong and Eric Tao, and were entranced with the expansive views of the Bay Bridge, East Bay and South San Francisco. They saw the shell of a 1,550-square-foot, two-bedroom unit with a 350-square-foot terrace and the 880- square-foot unit next door, and bought it all plus a parking space for a total of $2.658 million - about twice the asking price on the El Cerrito house for which they paid $62,000 in 1965.

Tao and Bill Long from Kwan Henmi Architects worked with them on adapting the floor plan to have lots of walls and closets, and Long and Mark Ashworth consulted with Nina on placing, hanging and lighting the art.

Each has an office space, and one room became Nina's closet; Claude has his bathroom and she has hers, a key, they say, to a successful marriage. There are living areas on either side of the new dining set from Ligne Roset, one with furniture they brought along and the other with a new white leather sectional.

They kept the second separate entrance to configure a bedroom-bathroom unit in case live-in care is needed.

"Of course we hope that's years away," said Nina, who is fond of a pillow her older sister gave her for her 60th birthday, embroidered with "Screw those golden years."

City life

On Dec. 17, they moved in. It was the night a vacant building on the other side of Mission Street burned down, and sirens blared into the next morning.

"I said, 'You'll get used to the sirens,' " Claude said. "She looked at me like I was a nut case."

"I did get used to it," Nina said.

The Gruens now have a 20-minute walk to work, or five-minute drive if they have to transport things. They take their dry cleaning down to the lobby, rely on concierges for restaurant reservations (Delfino is a favorite) and car service, schedule Pilates in the building's meditation garden every Wednesday, enjoy the twice-monthly housekeeping service. (Monthly dues and fees for all of this come to about 50 cents per square foot at SOMA Grand, Nina Gruen said.)

After work, they can pop home, freshen up and feed the cat before sitting down for takeout with a view or heading for a restaurant. They walk to the Opera House and Symphony Hall but take cabs home, because, yes, the neighborhood is still sketchy at night. At the end of the day, they lift the nifty remote-control window treatments installed to protect their art collection and enjoy their favorite part of life at SOMA Grand: nighttime views of San Francisco.

Yes, of course they've noticed that their new neighbors are younger than they are, but that's part of the point. Both of their mothers spent their later years in a popular assisted- living community in Cincinnati, and the sons all visited. It was not usually an uplifting experience.

Not that moving to the city is what they recommend to everyone their age. "I would ask: 'Where is much of your life taking place?' " Nina said. "And if the answer is that life is taking place near their suburban home, I would say they probably shouldn't do this."

"Where do you spend your free time?" Claude asked. "And," asked Nina, "where would you if you could?"

Long division

Downsizing is stressful and moving is expensive, especially when your house holds 43 years of memories. Here's a tip from Nina Gruen on coping:

"I went through everything, because friends said that if you don't do that, the kids will just toss it all because they don't have the time to do all that. It was an experience - we had 200 years of family letters from Germany, and I had school papers of my own."

"Then I made a list of everything we had to give away, and I gave the list to everyone in the family and asked them to please pick your top five choices, and mention anything else that you would like to have. Now it's really wonderful going to their homes and seeing how they're enjoying it."

Her husband, Claude, regrets that the couple didn't clear out their spare rooms and two attics long ago. "The thing we did wrong," he said, "was that we didn't purge anything we ever owned - until we were going to move."

E-mail Susan Fornoff at sfornoff@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page G - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle