SENIORS—New Alzheimer’s Residences Offer Upscale Amenities

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A few companies in Los Angeles are trying to carve out a niche in the growing yet competitive senior-care business by opening upscale residences for Alzheimer’s patients.

The facilities have been cropping up with increasing frequency in the past few years and provide a variety of elegant amenities. One residence even plans to offer valet parking.

In the past year alone, Silverado Senior Living, an Aliso Viejo-based company established in 1997, has opened four assisted living centers dedicated to caring for Alzheimer’s and other dementia patients. It now has a total of seven facilities, including ones in Alhambra, Azusa and Calabasas.

Belmont Corp, a Houston-based company, has built four of its Belmont Village assisted living facilities, each with a dedicated Alzheimer’s and dementia wing, since its founding in 1997.

It is now entering the California market, with plans for five facilities, including one next year in Hollywood and another some time later in Burbank.

Indeed, with the population of the state’s seniors expected to grow from 4.9 million today to 9 million in 2020 and the 85-and-older segment growing the fastest of all there is expected to be clear demand for such homes.

The numbers of Alzheimer’s patients in Los Angeles County, the state and the country are all expected to double over the next decade, according to the Alzheimer’s Association of Los Angeles. It currently estimates that there are 150,000 Alzheimer’s patients in the county.

One of these new facilities is the 36-bed Allview Luxury Living in Hollywood. Tucked between a 7-Eleven store and a run-down apartment complex, this two-story building with a modern fa & #231;ade stands out on this not-particularly-attractive stretch of Yucca Avenue.

Its entrance, monitored by two video cameras, features an interior fountain showing two young children playing, while its lobby furniture is all polished cherry wood.

“We have created a home-like environment here with a lot of attention to detail,” said Tim Lytle, a former general contractor who owns and operates Allview with this mother and admits to worrying about the competition. “(But) we are a small mom-and-pop organization, only we are mom and son.”

Although Lytle has competition from a few larger companies, so far the big industry players, such as Marriott Senior Living Services and Sunrise Assisted Living, have barely touched the market, operating fewer than half a dozen assisted living homes in the Los Angeles area between them. Their facilities serve all seniors, including offering special programs for dementia patients.

Officials with the Community Care Licensing division of the state Department of Social Service, which licenses assisted living centers, say they do not know how many wholly or partially dedicated dementia facilities are operating in California.

If the residents do not require 24-hour nursing care, the facilities are licensed within the larger category of residential care facilities for the elderly. But even so, state officials acknowledge that the number of such facilities is growing.

“Absolutely, we are seeing more,” said Carole Jacobi, the licensing division’s policy bureau chief. “It’s anecdotal, but it’s a trend.”

Michael Alexander, a Mount Washington resident, recently placed his elderly mother, Millie, in Allview, after his father passed away five years ago and the family and hired caretakers could no longer take care of her.

“About three years ago, it finally reached the point she could not do even modest amounts of care for herself,” he said. “Then we heard about this new place and checked it out.”

Alexander was impressed with Allview, which features “memory boxes” stuffed with photos and other memorabilia outside doors to help residents find their rooms, as well as other memory-trigger touches. Lytle said his ideas were all drawn from recent Alzheimer’s research and the staff gets special training.

“I am quite content that my mother is happier now than she has ever been in the last five years, but it’s not cheap,” said Alexander, 53, who pays about $3,500 a month to board his mother at Allview, which features a certified sous chef and likes to boast of its “gourmet” cooking.

Allview’s costs are not out of line for the sector. The average cost is about $4,000 monthly at one of Silverado’s homes, though a company official says its marketing materials don’t mention “luxury.”

“We don’t use luxury in our terminology, but it is extremely upscale. We use such terms as upscale and elegant,” said Jack Peters, a regional administrator for Silverado.

The company targets its marketing efforts at potential residents’ children in their 50s with a household income of at least $75,000 a year, or spouses of potential residents who have fixed incomes of at least $45,000 a year, he said.

Monthly costs at the Houston Belmont Village, meanwhile, are $1,535 to $2,175 per person, with the prices for its planned Los Angeles facilities expected to be higher, said Jeff DeBevec, Belmont’s communications director.

“The families become financial participants,” said DeBevec. “We are really reaching two customers, and by and large, it’s private pay.”

The problem is that the homes, because they are not skilled-nursing facilities, do not allow residents to tap into any government funds outside of Social Security or Supplemental Social Security.

Alexander said he is only able to afford Allview, because his father, a retired electrician, had a healthy pension and some other resources that his mother could access.

“I don’t know what I would have been able to do without it,” Alexander said. “I possibly would have had to move my mother into a convalescent hospital.”

Jon Pynoos, a USC gerontology professor, said that while the new dementia dedicated care homes are definitely providing a needed service, their cost is a definite issue.

“It’s unfortunate they are so costly that most older persons and their families cannot afford them,” he said. “What we really need to do is widen the market to meet the needs of the segment that can’t afford the private-pay prices.”

Pynoos is also concerned about the quality of care offered by such places, even if they are modeled after the latest research.

“Many of these newer places are trying to develop good models,” he said. “The issue is always, it’s easier to copy some model than to make it work really well.”

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