I'm getting to an age that I may need to live in a senior home too. Learned a lot here and will come back again for any new posts. I'm lucky for I'm healthy, though living in Hawaii and things may be different locally than it's on the mainland. Good to learn though.
I had missed this thread before, but I have seen senior communities I would like to live in when I was younger, let's say when I was between 30 and 40 years old, because they say to be peaceful places, and I was living days in a very, very noisy environment. I don't think that I would like to live in a senior community or home with assisted support, but as we grow old, there might come the day when we need to look into this, and it's better we start searching what are options are... just in case.
My sis and bro-in-law winter over in Texas. We went to visit, I always thought that's what I wanted to do once the time came. Boy, not for me. The people couldn't be nicer where they are at, but man, it's like they reverted back to high school. Cliques, fights, gossip and let there be a single guy and watch the women (single) fight over him! Man oh man. All these guys did was eat shitty food at the center, ride around on golf carts (even saw a guy 'walking' his basset hound while he rode in the cart) and drink. It was a home, trailer and rv area. Like I said, the folks there couldn't of been nicer, but just not my scene. (Newbie to these boards)
My mother and father in law from my first marriage lived in a Senior Mobile Home Park near Puyallup for a while, it was a beautiful place. They owned their own trailer and rented the lot, similar to what @Dave Sun does in Florida; but on a much smaller scale. It was a long time ago; but it seems to me like ther ewas a clubhouse, and maybe even a swimming pool at the park, and everything was well-maintained. Since it was a seniors-only park, there were no children there except as visitors. I actually like that idea, even if it were not specifically a senior park; because you still have your own home, and it is not part of an apartment complex with neighbors just on the other side of a wall. It is somewhere in between owning and renting, and has benefits of both options.
When I was living in Los Fresnos, Texas, there was a senior RV park outside of town. A fairly large park, it included some rental spaces, but most of those who wintered there had purchased a lifetime membership, coming to the warm weather of the Rio Grande Valley each winter rather than staying in their homes in Michigan, Wisconsin, or other cold-weather states. The Valley has several similar parks, and sees a lot of "Winter Texans." One year, they came to their park with their motor homes and house trailers only to find that, without notice, the park had been sold and the new owner wasn't recognizing their "lifetime memberships." It seems that once the original owner had sold too many lifetime memberships, he didn't have any income coming in. I wouldn't doubt that the "new owner" was related.