Bendix Anderson, a veteran journalist and longtime contributor to Seniors Housing Business, passed away suddenly Thursday, April 17. He was 53 years old. A versatile writer with expertise in the affordable housing sector, Anderson covered multiple real estate asset classes over the course of his career and wrote on everything from property insurance to private equity.
“Bendix was an extremely bright and unassuming person who had a great rapport with his sources. In the wake of his death, several real estate professionals in the seniors housing space have told me how much they enjoyed working with him. He was a true gentleman and he will be missed dearly,” says Seniors Housing Business Editor Matt Valley.
At the time of his death, Anderson had just completed the cover story on private equity for the April issue of the magazine, which launched 14 years ago.
Anderson grew up in the Village of Lake Bluff, Illinois, one of the string of communities that comprise Chicago’s North Shore. He earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Grinnell College in 1994. Grinnell is a private liberal arts school located in Grinnell, Iowa, approximately 50 miles northeast of Des Moines.
In 1995, Anderson attended the Radcliffe Publishing Course at Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The six-week summer program provided extensive training in book, magazine and digital publishing. (The course moved to Columbia University in New York City in 2001 and was renamed the Columbia Publishing Course.)
In the mid-1990s, Anderson moved to Brooklyn, New York, where he resided for approximately a decade before he moved to Fleetwood, a village in Westchester County near Sarah Lawrence College where his wife was attending graduate school at the time.
He moved back to Brooklyn in early 2009 and lived there with his wife, Vanessa DeSantis, in the Prospect Heights neighborhood until March 2022. From March 2022 until the time of his death, Anderson lived in White Plains, New York, in Westchester County, with his wife and cat, Blossom.
During his nearly 30 years in New York, Anderson wrote for several trade publications in the commercial real estate sector, including National Real Estate Investor, Multifamily Executive and Affordable Housing Finance.
In his free time, Anderson sang bass in a well-regarded amateur chorus known as the New Amsterdam Singers based in New York City. He was active in the chorus from 1997 until the time of his death.