BREMERTON, Wash. (AP) – Nancy Nystrom leans on the railing of her back deck describing the eight gardens, wide paths and waterfall she eventually wants to have installed across the broad expanse of rolling lawn.

For now a relatively blank slate, the property and its two houses will eventually serve as a home for elderly women only. The plan is loosely modeled after cohousing communities, where residents own their own homes but share a common space, perhaps a separate house with a kitchen, sitting area and crafts room.

In recent years, elderly cohousing has gained ground, as aging baby boomers head into retirement. Nystrom and her partner Teresa Jones have taken it a step further with plans for a version that caters to lesbians.

“One of the things I think is that older lesbians, as a group, create more social support networks and create more help systems to grow old together,” said Nystrom, a lecturer for the School of Social Work at the University of Washington.

The development of suburbs in the late 1940s marked the demise of multigenerational housing. People started moving out, that generational link disappeared “and we developed no social systems to offset the needs” of older people, Nystrom said.

“We have to start as a society developing some of those systems. And that’s what cohousing is about,” she said. “It’s totally a support network designed to help everybody have an easier time growing old.”

Nystrom said she got the idea for the community while speaking around the country about affordable housing for older women.

The country, she said, faces an impending crisis if more time and money isn’t made available to establish options for people to live affordably.

“If we can delay a fall into poverty, if we can delay entry into nursing homes because we maintain better health, our overall aging process is more successful,” she said.

There are about 90 cohousing communities around the United States, mostly clustered in Denver and Boulder, Colo., northern California, Seattle, Massachusetts and Washington, D.C.

Seattle is one of four places in the country that has more than seven such communities, while California has the most with 14.

Cohousing communities offer people places to live while maintaining a connection to their neighbors that is often lost in traditional settings, said Joani Blank, a former board member and volunteer with the Cohousing Association of the United States.

“For several generations, people have not known their neighbors,” she said. “People are beginning to feel very isolated by their fortresses.”

Blank said there are very few “special focus” communities like Nystrom and Jones envision.

“That will be the first one in the country that has a gender restriction,” she said.

However, similar efforts to develop housing targeted to the older lesbian and gay population have been under way in the past few years.

“Even half a century ago members of the community were aware of the need for such housing, and wanting to build it,” said Gerard Koskovich, staff liaison for the Lesbian and Gay Aging Issues Network of the American Society on Aging in San Francisco.

The idea only recently came to fruition, in part, he said, because the gay community now has the assets and social networking to realize such goals.

The number of gay seniors is estimated at 3 to 4 million, according to Services & Advocacy for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Elders.

“That could increase to as much as 6 million in the next 20 years,” said Michael Adams, the group’s executive director.

Today there are six such communities of various kinds in operation around the country, including the non-profit Triangle Square, which opened last month in Hollywood, and the for-profit RainbowVision in Santa Fe, N.M.

An estimated 22 more are being planned or are under construction, Koskovich said.

Nystrom and Jones said they focused on women because they live longer than men, and lesbians because there is still fear among the gay and lesbian community of discrimination, abuse and being “hidden away” as they grow older.

They’ve spent the past few years slowly remodeling their nearly 2-acre site in Bremerton, west of Seattle across Puget Sound. They eventually want to add a second story to one of the homes and build a wheelchair accessible breezeway between the two for easy access to both.

The property overlooking Port Orchard Bay is nestled against a 700-acre nature preserve and includes a third lot that Nystrom, 62, and Jones, 55, hope to turn into a community garden.

Dubbed KitsHarbour, it will be open to women between the ages of 55 and 78. There is a one-time membership fee of $2,500, with rent set at $650 a month.

Nystrom said besides herself, Jones and another woman already living in the second home, four other women from around the country plan to retire at KitsHarbour. Meanwhile, there are 15 waiting to get in.

“It’s obvious that there’s an issue here that we need to address that is primarily affecting older women,” Nystrom said. “We have to start dealing with the realities of that.”