Nearly 100 dementia patients are being evicted from their Redondo Beach home. Why its sparking outrage

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Set us as preferred Jennifer Aust’s heart is breaking.Her whole life, she watched her dad, Pat, give back to the South Bay community he was raised in.He joined the Redondo Beach Fire Department in 1970 and held nearly every rank inside the department — including chief — before retiring in 2002.Then came eight years as a City Council member.

Finally, he was on the board of a healthcare district that leases land to a care home for seniors with dementia — a much-loved community resource that has, in a tragic twist of fate, become his own home.Now that same board is evicting Aust and nearly 100 other patients from the Silverado Beach Cities Memory Care Community.Families are furious.They say there are not enough facilities in the region that can provide the specialized care their loved ones need, and they worry that the forced move poses serious health threats.

“When I think of how he’s being treated by elected leaders now, I think he would be so mad and disappointed because he had so much passion for this community,” Jennifer Aust said.She can only speculate on how her father would feel.Neither he nor most of the other patients who live at the home have the cognitive ability to understand what’s happening to them.On May 27, the Beach Cities Health District board of directors voted to move forward with a redevelopment plan for its 11-acre Redondo Beach campus that will permanently close Silverado.

Within the next year, all the residents will need to leave.Dr.

David Presser, an emergency medicine physician, wrote a letter urging the district to spare Silverado.Moving patients with Alzheimer’s disease, he said, is associated with “behavioral destabilization, increased agitation, accelerated functional decline and a higher likelihood of acute care utilization.”“Continuity of caregivers, physical environmen...