Assisted living and board and care help in Harbor City

Harbor City is a community of the City of Los Angeles, tucked between Torrance, Lomita, Wilmington and the Palos Verdes hills. Its neighborhood council draws the lines this way: Sepulveda Boulevard on the north, Figueroa Street on the east, Palos Verdes Drive North on the south, and Western Avenue out to the Lomita city limits on the west. Los Angeles Harbor College and Ken Malloy Harbor Regional Park both sit inside those lines.

So does Kaiser Permanente South Bay Medical Center, on Vermont Avenue. A hospital stay there is often where a family's search begins.

The council lists seven local neighborhoods: Green Meadows, Green Meadows West, Narbonne, Central, Old Towne, PCH and The Pines. Los Angeles City Planning describes the wider Wilmington and Harbor City plan area as mostly level, with a small amount of hillside terrain in the southwest next to Rancho Palos Verdes.

One stated aim of the city's updated community plan for Wilmington and Harbor City is to maintain stable single-family and multi-family residential neighborhoods. In practice, that means streets of houses and apartments that are not expected to change much.

On streets like these, the option you would expect to find is a board and care home, licensed in California as a residential care facility for the elderly (RCFE): a small home in a regular house, with a small number of residents and caregivers on site. Larger assisted living communities carry the same RCFE license but look and feel different. The guide to RCFE versus assisted living explains the difference.

Because Harbor City is small, a search rarely stops at its borders. Torrance, Lomita, San Pedro and Carson are all a short drive, and Hamssa will usually include homes there if they suit your parent and keep visits easy for the family.

Hamssa Benrekia holds an RCFE Administrator Certificate and comes from palliative care, hospice care and home health. She follows the same steps with every family, described in more detail on the how it works page.

1. 1

   A conversation

   You tell her about your parent's care needs, health conditions, preferences, daily routine and monthly budget.

2. 2

   A short list

   She suggests homes that fit. She refers families only to homes licensed by the State of California that she has toured herself, after checking each one’s licensing record for citations and complaints.

3. 3

   Tours, together

   She schedules the visits and goes with you. The tour checklist shows what to look at and ask.

4. 4

   Terms

   She helps you talk through the monthly rate and the admission agreement with the home.

5. 5

   After the move

   She checks in to see how your parent is settling.

Kaiser Permanente lists a discharge planning department at its South Bay Medical Center for the coordination of care after a hospital stay. Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, the county hospital on West Carson Street, is the other hospital close to Harbor City.

If the hospital team says your father needs daily help and cannot return to his apartment, ask for the expected discharge date and a plain list of what he needs help with. Then call Hamssa. She has worked with families whose relative was in a hospital or skilled nursing facility, and has coordinated with case workers and social workers during discharge. She is independent of both hospitals.

If the doctors recommend skilled nursing or rehabilitation first, the hospital arranges that. It is a different kind of facility from assisted living. More detail is on the hospital discharge placement page.

Hamssa's placement help is free for families, and the page on whether senior placement is free explains how. What the home itself charges each month depends on the home, the room and the level of care, so ask every home for its rate and its care fees in writing.

The California Department of Social Services licenses and monitors every RCFE. You can look up any home on the state's public search before you visit. The guide on checking an RCFE license shows how.

To start, contact Hamssa by phone, text or WhatsApp at 310-594-0694. Her office is in Torrance, next door to Harbor City.