A Danger to the Community? - The New Old Age Blog - NYTimes.com

By PAULA SPAN

So much for the stereotype of those nice, welcoming Minnesotans.

In Woodbury, Minn., a Twin Cities suburb, a proposed assisted living facility that would specialize in dementia care has run into angry opposition from some neighbors in a surrounding residential development called Stonemill Farms.

This is not, in itself, unheard of. Concerns about things like parking and traffic do sometimes surface when communities contemplate new assisted living projects. What’s unusual about Settler’s Pointe, a 45-unit facility that would replace a mostly empty retail strip, is that a number of its adversaries describe it as a potential threat to their children.

Here is Minneapolis Star Tribune columnist Jon Tevlin’s description of the controversy.

We’ll pause here for a moment to allow New Old Age readers, so many of whom have up-close experience with parents with dementia and with specialized dementia dwellings, to say: What?

We’ll also pause to acknowledge that only about 50 people signed the petition asking the city to reject the project, and about 75 showed up at a community meeting to oppose it. Stonemill Farms has close to 600 new homes, many clearly occupied by folks who don’t see the old and sick, even those in the 15 apartments slated for people who need “enhanced” care, as a danger to the elementary school across the street or the day care center next door (whose owner favors the new residence).

But the Stonemill Farmers opposed to this project sound scared. In a raft of e-mail messages to the city’s planning department, which made them available to me, they express their shock at finding a “high-density,” “locked-down facility” in their new residential development — perhaps not grasping that such buildings are secured not to protect neighborhoods from marauding old people, but to keep wandering dementia patients from endangering themselves. And maybe the neighbors don’t understand that 45 units, with one staff person for each five residents in the “enhanced” apartments and one to 10 in the others, constitutes a fairly modest size for an assisted living facility, not to mention a high level of supervision.
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