By Steve Moran

If the media can find a way to attack senior living they will.

It should not surprise us. The stories tug at the heartstrings, causes emotional distress, and give the audience the ability to feel self righteous and outraged about what “appears” to be a noble cause.

The most recent comes from the Seattle Times, “Seattle-Area Assisted Living Comes With a Crushing Price Tag.” It is true but misleading. They want the public to read the article and feel outraged at those greedy senior living operators who simply don’t care about poor, vulnerable elders. They would lead you to believe that some senior living operators are hardly better than con artists fleecing residents and their families of a lifetime of savings.

In Fairness

In reading the article a second time it is more balanced than many. It extensively quotes Dwayne Clark, the CEO of Aegis Living, on some of the reasons Seattle senior living is so expensive. It also talks about how government funding is inadequate.

Votes and Policy Have Consequences

I am fascinated by politics and political maneuvering and hate writing about politics because it is a sure way to make half of any audience mad (and sometimes the entire audience). This is about as close as I will ever come.

A big part of the reason that Seattle senior living is so expensive is that without really realizing what they were doing, the voters of the state and region elected leaders who enacted policies that result in higher costs.

  • In a desire to protect the environment and neighborhoods (a noble endeavor), the number of parcels senior living communities can be built on is extremely limited. This increases the price.
  • Further protecting the environment, the development process is long, complicated, and expensive. This increases costs.
  • As Dwayne Clark points out in the article, Seattle has some of the highest minimum wages in the country. A high minimum wage sounds like a noble way to increase the quality of life for those on the lowest tiers of the economy, but that money has to come from someplace — in this case the senior living consumer.

What ends up happening is that we end up having to live with unintended consequences. As an industry we should spend more time talking about how unintended consequences can have a profound impact on our residents and our team members.

Balance

We need balance in policy. I am not suggesting senior living or anything else should be allowed wherever someone wants to build it. I am not suggesting there should be no planning approval process or environmental review. We know that to do that would be to invite unscrupulous shysters to run wild, but it is possible to overprotect.

As individuals we need to guard against this, and we need to protect the people we serve by talking about it.