Companies like Navigator Elder Homes of New England are teaming up with workforce housing developers to build apartment complexes for nursing home staff.

Removing financial barriers like access to capital and Medicaid underfunding would be a step toward nursing home innovation, Ryan said, like the shift to private rooms and the small home model.

“People vote with their feet,” Ponthie said, adding that traditional rural providers are facing unprecedented closures. “During COVID, we grew our census. Everyone else had huge declines. Drop the mic. We’re done. The demand is there.” 

Residents can continue to live in a Green House home as their care needs progress, without having to undergo transfers to different facilities, which can be more traumatic as people age. Deinstitutionalization is a core value.

“It’s important to me that we incentivize what we want to see incentivized and figure out how we increase quality at a lower cost and create something that meets consumer demand.”

The Green House Project wants to provide a full continuum of care for residents, bridging the gap between home care and more extensive institutional care.

Listen to Passamaquoddy Lodge board president Caroline Davies and Nova Scotia Centre on Aging director Janice Keefe discuss the power of a proposed new Canadian Green House community set for groundbreaking in 2023!

"The Green House Project is an innovative, nationally recognized model in LTCFs that creates small homes that recognize the individuality of residents and respect their autonomy, choice, privacy, and dignity, yet are also affordable." 

"We get a lot of referrals. ... We get people from other counties and other states. They come here and they're like, 'When I retire, when I have to go into a home, this is where I want to be because it's so homelike, it's so personal.'"