Why every other count is bigger
Search for assisted living in Pasadena and you will be told there are hundreds of options. That figure is built by mixing several different things together: home care agencies that send caregivers to a private house, independent living buildings that hold no care licence at all, skilled nursing facilities licensed by a different department, and homes in Arcadia, Glendale and Alhambra listed as though they were in Pasadena.
Our count is one thing only. Residential care facilities for the elderly, in Los Angeles County, with a status of licensed, filtered to this city. That is 32 homes, holding 2,278 licensed beds between them.
You do not have to take our word for the number. The register page names every home, its capacity and its licence number, and states the state data source and extract date it was built from. Count the rows.
Three sizes, and two of them barely exist
17 of Pasadena's homes are licensed for six residents or fewer. 14 are licensed for twenty five or more. 1 sits between those, somewhere in the seven to twenty four band.
The largest single home in the city is licensed for 340 people. Put that next to a house licensed for six and you have the entire range of Pasadena in one comparison, with 2,278 licensed beds spread across the 32 homes.
Notice which way round that works. The six bed houses are the more numerous front doors, 17 of them against 14 large buildings, but every one of those houses is capped at six residents by its licence, so the bed total is overwhelmingly a count of the big buildings. Counting homes and counting beds give you two different pictures of the same city, and a search that sorts by either one alone will mislead you.
The practical upshot is that the question to settle before you tour is not which home. It is which of the two kinds of home, because there is no middle option here to hedge with.
A licensed bed is not a room, and not a resident
Capacity is the maximum number of residents the state permits a home to accept. It is not how many people live there today, and it is certainly not how many rooms there are. Plenty of those beds are second beds in shared rooms.
So a home licensed for two hundred is not necessarily full, and a home licensed for six is not necessarily six private bedrooms. When you tour, ask two separate questions: how many residents live here right now, and is the room you are showing me private or shared. Both answers change the price and the daily experience.
Capacity is still worth knowing before you visit, because it tells you the scale of the building you are walking into and roughly what kind of operation it has to be.
Where they are, ZIP by ZIP
The homes are not evenly distributed. 11 sit in 91104 on the north side, above Washington Boulevard and around Garfield. 8 are in 91107, east Pasadena toward Hastings Ranch and Sierra Madre Villa. 4 are in 91101 downtown, within reach of Lake Avenue and Colorado Boulevard. 4 are in 91106 around Del Mar and Caltech, 3 in 91103 on the northwest side along Fair Oaks and Raymond, and 2 in 91105 on the Arroyo side, the ZIP that also contains Huntington Hospital.
That distribution is worth a few minutes of your attention. A downtown home near Lake Avenue means a resident can still be walked to a coffee shop, and it means visitors can park badly and briefly. An east Pasadena home is quieter and greener and further from everything. Neither is better. They suit different people, and the person who has to make the drive four times a week should get a vote.
Look past the city line before you decide
Outside Pasadena there are 43 more licensed homes in the ring around it, and they are not interchangeable. Arcadia has 13, Altadena has 7, Monrovia has 7, Duarte has 5, Sierra Madre has 4, La Canada Flintridge has 3, South Pasadena has 2, Temple City has 2.
Read those as bed counts as well as home counts and the picture shifts. Arcadia holds 557 licensed beds. La Canada Flintridge holds 18, spread across 3 six bed houses and nothing larger. So a family set on one particular town may be choosing between 3 homes and a waiting list, while ten minutes down the 210 there is real choice.
How to check a facility yourself
Every home has a licence number, and the state publishes what has happened at that licence. You can look up inspection visits, citations, and substantiated complaints, and you should, particularly for any home that has impressed you.
Do not stop at the score. Read what the citations were actually for. A paperwork finding about a missing signature is a different animal from a finding about medication errors or unreported injuries, and a home that was cited once four years ago and fixed it is not the same as one with a pattern.
Then ask the administrator directly when the last inspection was and what it found. The answer, and the speed of the answer, tells you as much as the record does.
On the visit, ignore the lobby
Lobbies are built for you, not for your mother. Go at an awkward time, ideally late afternoon, and look at the parts nobody staged.
- The smell at four in the afternoon, not at ten in the morning
- Whether staff use residents' names without checking a badge or a door card
- The bathroom your mother would use: grab rails, a call cord within reach of the floor
- What is genuinely happening in the activity room, as opposed to what is on the calendar
- A real mealtime, and whether anyone who needs help eating is getting it
- How long a call light stays lit before someone walks toward it
- Who is on the floor overnight, and whether they are awake
Get the short list narrowed for you
Looking at 75 homes is a manageable research project and an unmanageable week if your father is being discharged on Thursday. That is the situation we exist for.
Tell us the level of help he needs, the budget, and which part of town has to work for the family. We will come back with a handful of homes that can actually take him, and we will tell you which of the ones you have already found are not right. There is no cost to your family and no obligation to use anyone we suggest.
Written and reviewed by Senior Placement Pasadena, , against the California Department of Social Services licence register.