The 38 Board and Care Homes Licensed in Long Beach

What you are actually walking into

Picture a three or four bedroom house. Two of the bedrooms are shared, one is private and costs more. There is a caregiver on shift, sometimes two, and in a lot of them the owner lives there or is there most days. Meals happen at one table at a set time. The television is in the living room and it is usually on.

What that buys you is attention. Six residents and a caregiver on the floor means somebody notices that your mother did not touch her breakfast, or that she has started holding the wall on her way to the bathroom. In a building of a hundred and fifty, that gets noticed later, if at all.

What it does not buy you is a programme. There is no activity director, no gym, no bus. If your father was a man who needed somewhere to go every day, a six bed house on a quiet street can feel like a smaller version of the isolation you were trying to get him out of. That is a real trade and it is worth saying out loud before you fall in love with the ratio.

Why Long Beach is full of them

Look at the ZIP codes. 90815 holds 17 licensed homes and 17 of them are licensed for six or fewer. 90807 holds 14, with 11 at that size. That is Los Altos, Park Estates and the streets around El Dorado Park, then Bixby Knolls, California Heights and Los Cerritos. Flat lots, wide streets, postwar three and four bedroom houses with a hallway wide enough for a walker and a bathroom you can get a wheelchair into.

That housing stock is the building this licence fits into, which is why the small homes cluster where they do. It also explains the gaps, and the gaps are wider than the totals suggest. 90803, which is Belmont Shore, Belmont Heights and Naples, has 1 licensed home in it, and it is licensed for far more than six, so the number of board and care homes down there is 0. 90805, all of North Long Beach, is the same story: 0 homes of this kind. If you have promised your mother she can stay within a few streets of where she raised you, that promise is easier to keep in some parts of this city than others.

Go on a weekday afternoon, not a Sunday morning

Ask to come at two or three on a Tuesday. That is when a house is being itself. Then look at the residents rather than the house, because a clean kitchen tells you about the owner and the residents tell you about the care.

• Is anyone awake, dressed and out of their room, or is everybody parked in front of the television
• Fingernails, hair, shoes on the right feet. That is daily care you can see
• How does the caregiver speak to the residents when she does not know you are listening
• Who works the overnight shift, how long has she been here, and is she awake or asleep
• What happens at three in the morning if someone falls, and who gets called first
• What would make you send a resident to hospital, and what would make you give a family notice
• The licence number, which you can look up yourself before you go back a second time

Where these homes fall down

Ask whether there is a nurse in the house. Usually there is not. A board and care home is a care home, not a medical facility, and that difference shows up at three in the morning when something goes wrong and the answer is to call 911.

Two person transfers are the other common wall. If your father can no longer take any weight and needs two people and a lift to get out of bed, a house with one caregiver on shift cannot do it, however much they like him. Some will take him anyway and then call you in six weeks. Ask directly, and ask what changes if he gets worse.

The third thing families are not warned about is how fragile a good house is. A six bed home is one or two people. If the caregiver who has been there nine years leaves, the place your mother moved into is not the place she is living in a month later. That is not a reason to avoid them. It is a reason to ask who works there and how long they have stayed, and to keep paying attention after the move.

Cost, and why nobody will quote you on the phone

Most small homes quote one monthly figure. A shared room is cheaper than a private one, and some add a care charge on top once they have assessed your parent. That assessment is why they will not give you a price over the phone, and honestly they should not, because a number given before anyone has met your mother is a number that changes after she moves in.

We are not going to print an average on this page. The figures you find for Los Angeles County put a six bed house in Carson Park and a community licensed for 300 residents into the same arithmetic, and the result describes neither of them. Ask each home for its own rate in writing, ask what is included, and ask specifically about incontinence supplies, laundry, transport to dialysis or infusion, and what happens to the rate at the next reassessment.

One more thing worth knowing early: many small homes take private pay only. Ask about that on the first call rather than the fourth, because it saves everybody a week.

The same market keeps going past the city line

Long Beach families narrow their search to Long Beach and then wonder why nothing has an opening. Carson has 28 licensed homes and 27 of them are licensed for six or fewer. Cerritos has 21, with 20 small. Norwalk has 18. Lakewood has 12, and not one of them is licensed for more than 6 residents, so every option there is this kind of home.

For a daughter driving from Los Altos, a house off Del Amo in Lakewood is a shorter trip than one in North Long Beach. The city line matters for your parent's mail. It does not matter for the drive, and it should not be what rules a good home out.

Start from the register, not from an ad

Every small home worth your time is on the public state list, because being on it is the condition of being allowed to operate. We keep the whole register for this catchment on one page: all 159 homes licensed in Long Beach and the rest of the catchment, with bed counts and licence numbers, filterable down to homes licensed for six or fewer.

Then call us and we will tell you which of them has a bed this week, which will take your father as he is today, and which ones we would not put our own parent in. That part is free, and we will say no out loud when no is the answer.