[Massplanners] Senior Housing Definitions

[Perry, Catherine]

Rob,

Bedford recently looked into definitions of various types of senior living and care facilities. We found it useful to refer to the state's categories for regulating the ones that involve an element of care. There are old-style Nursing Homes and there is Assisted Living.  We focused on the latter for our new Assisted Living Overlay District. We also made an allowance for 25% of units on the site to be Independent Living. To my mind, unless there's an age rule, the latter simply means housing. Towns that want to make senior housing a separate use category usually require at least one resident of each unit to be over a certain age. So far, Bedford has avoided that type of housing on its own, but does have it within a Continuing Care campus (Carleton-Willard) which has its own complex zoning rules.

Here's a link to our Zoning Bylaw. The new ALOD is Section 23 right at the end. Carleton-Willard is Section 10 (its title of Nursing Care Facility is inaccurate and may get changed to Continuing Care campus or something similar). We actually still have Nursing Home on the books as well but it's never been used.
zoningbylaws_poststmnov2021.pdf (bedfordma.gov)<https://www.bedfordma.gov/sites/g/files/vyhlif6866/f/pages/zoningbylaws_poststmnov2021.pdf>

Catherine Perry AICP
Assistant Planner
Town of Bedford

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://masscptc.org/pipermail/massplanners_masscptc.org/attachments/20220331/8e98d479/attachment.htm>