From the What Were They Thinking Department?’ comes this story from the Wall Street Journal last week about a new nursing home being built in San Francisco …On a hill overlooking the city, the cavernous Laguna Honda nursing home stands as a living relic of another era. Inside, hundreds of its residents live in impersonal wards of up to 28 beds each, an arrangement conjuring up institutions that warehoused the elderly and frail decades ago …

The city’s effort to spend roughly $620 million to replace a huge old nursing home with a huge new one bucks a tenuous trend across the country aimed at changing how the elderly and infirm live their last years. Increasingly, states and cities have begun to shift toward providing services in homes or home-like settings such as ‘assisted-living’ facilities sprinkled through communities …