Retirement Communities in general (need help)

**Joan.of.the.Arch** · 08-26-2015, 04:14 PM

My Mom lived several years in a retirement high-rise that had some of the same perks as the place you linked. Well, supposedly it did. But sometimes the extras would be closed without noticed or off bounds for days at a time. For example, the tenant laundry was connected to a banquet room and commercial scale kitchen. Sometimes those facilities got rented out for parties and receptions. So tenants could not do their laundry. The really large storage lockers wer on the same floor and to keep the cheery atmosphere, tenants were not supposed t even go to that floor on party days. So if you were chilly with the approach of winter with the heat not yet on and wanted to go get your quilt out of storage-- tough luck.

Donated books comprised the library. I thought my Mom would read anything that came her way, but she quickly ran out of anything of interest in that library. Also, there were no tables or desks in the library, but only fragile little armless chairs in which you had to sit stick straight or you would slide right out. Believe me, a lot of people in the building could no longer sit straight.

Transportation to grocery stores was fairly good when she first moved in. It was by special arrangement with the city bus system. It actually arrived and then departed from the store at the appointed time. But some of her new friends had trouble using that service because of their ailments preventing them from stepping in and out of a bus. After a while the city stopped providing the service and the managers did not make any other arrangements. The outings to special events such as concerts or a museum exhibit did not have transport either. Instead, there were simply discount or free tickets available at the office; make your owns plans to get together with others and share the drive or a taxi.

By the time I saw the fitness center there were only two working treadmills and those were of lesser quality than I would expect to serve hundreds of possible users. There were exercise classes-- up in that concrete floor banquet room rather than in the fitness center. The totally hard floor might have been dangerous, and classes would get cancelled when someone was setting up for a party in the room.

I stayed in the guest suite once. It was like a nice hotel with kitchen. But I kept waking up all through the night because there was a strong, horrendous smell of cigarettes. That was awful, awful! Eventually, the building did ban cigarette smoking, which would have been a burden to some people late in life.

Oh, a kind of funny but thoughtless thing-- Every year the management arranged a Thanksgiving dinner in the banquet room. My Mom went to it twice. My Mom can eat just about anything, but she told me that on the second year, the chefs put nuts in just about everything. In the stuffing, in the green beans, in the cranberry sauce, in the pies, teh the candied yams, in the ice cream. A lot of people of my parents age do not have the ability to chew nuts and it would be a pain to try to pick them out of all your food. That just seemed really insensitive to me.

When I visited I saw passive aggressive, snarky, and whiny notes from the management posted all over. They were on the front doors, at the front desk, in the elevators, on the doors to every facility, on the bulletin boards. It was if some powerless, ego-bruised, bully was the manager.

There were frequent fire alarms with the fire department arriving, and the tenants who'd not been there long piling out the front door. After living there a few months my mother no longer made the trip down from the 17th floor, for the small kitchen fires that were put out before the fire department even arrived. But these alarms were quite frequent. The tenants were supposed to use the stairs, never the elevators during such an event. Mom was 82 when she moved out of there. Seventeen flights down the stirs was just too hard. She said her legs ached for days afterward.

The thing that most bothered Mom, was that the building was perpetually having plumbing problems which necessitated cutting off the water to the whole building, or first one section, then another. They usually got notice about four days ahead, but not always. Mom learned to keep several gallons of water stored away.

Mom told me that conversations with some of her fellow tenants could be odd. People who had memory problems was actually a small to big issue socially. There would be serious disagreements among tenants that Mom thinks were due in part to memory problems. Mom herself only had to put up with small frustrations due to that. However, she had a friend across the hall who would call her to ask her what time it was maybe five times in an hour. That wasn't every day, but frequent enough. As you can imagine, there could be a lot of that level of memory problem even in independent living.

With better management and a newer building, some of these problems would have been greatly reduced. But it was a retirement building (I won't say community) that looks very good on paper and was even pretty nice-looking in person. But there were a lot of short-comings.

Maybe have your parents rent out that guest suite for a while or see about a very short term contract before they permanently move in.

**snafu** · 08-26-2015, 04:20 PM

Have your parents been evaluated for the type of accommodation and services that would best serve their needs for the next 5 years? There are so many different levels of senior communities and their health, current medical issues anticipated issues, social, religious and transportation preferences each adds an element to what's needed.

If I were taking on your task, I'd start with religious affiliation so something was familiar. Added to all that is almost hotel-like ratings.,,2 star, 3 star, 5 star from visual appearances. I liked the local, TV noon show's discussion about Chartwell Senior Residence in Calgary so I made it a point to drive by and look at the complex. I liked what I saw and ended up buying TSX stock lol.

You will find such variation in cost I'm not sure it makes sense. There are what I'd describe as villa style 'group homes' in the next community's suburbs which seems to charge about the same as a rental apartment of similar square footage. I see their mini bus at the big Superstore/Loblaws and residents buy their own food but I know they have an option to take meals together. The operators seem to think it's important to eat in a social setting.

Retirement Communities in general (need help)