Anyone looking into or live in an active seniors community?

sbinaz
Tue, 13 Jan 2026 16:12:29 +0000

One thing I’m definitely going to be looking for/considering when it comes time later on to find senior housing is proximity to ride services & ability to get groceries delivered.

For the last ~ 3 yr of her life, MIL didn’t drive. She lived in a big suburban housing development in a single family home. BUT the nearest grocery store was a 15-20 min drive away and NO grocery delivery was available. At all. On top of it, the development was enough on the outskirts of town that there was no ride service available. A taxi ride to a doctor’s office would cost upwards of $75. We tried to encourage her to move to a senior apartment complex, a CCRC or assisted living facility of some type. She always refused and found a friend who was willing to pretty much spend all of her waking hours with my MIL. Like, the friend would pick her up mid-morning and they’d spend all day together doing stuff.

Where we currently live, the grocery store is about 1.5 miles away. Convenience store is 1 mile away. Local grocery store does deliveries that you can schedule online. And our doctor offices are all about 15-20 min away from where we currently live.

Definitely when I’m retired, I don’t think that I want to live on the outskirts of town. Also don’t want to live in a rural area. And when I’m older & to the point where mobility is more limited, I think it would be wise for me to live near one of my kids. In the last couple of months of my MIL’s life when she was in the hospital for weeks and dealing with cancer (and then in hospice care), the 1.5 hr 1-way drive from our home to where she was became really really hard on our immediate family. I don’t want to make my kids go through that.