Former troubled assisted living center now bills itself as 55-plus apartments

Pacifica Senior Living in Santa Fe appears to have made a transition from troubled assisted living center to senior housing with “serene Santa Fe charm.”

Leaders of the former assisted living and memory care facility on Galisteo Road informed residents in mid-April they had to relocate by May 9 in preparation for major renovations and a shift to apartments for residents 55 and older.

The complex at 2961 Galisteo Road is now listed online as Sierra Blanca Apartments — “a premier 55+ active adult living community,” its website states. Real estate rental sites such as Zillow list apartments at the complex — from 325-square-foot studios to two-bedroom units — available for prices ranging from $1,100 to $1,700 a month.

Multiple calls to the facility went unanswered Wednesday.

Margaret Acton, whose mother was a resident of the former Pacifica Senior Living until earlier this year, told The New Mexican the residents have been gone for some time now.

“It’s over,” she said. “They are closed now while they are converting the rest of the units into apartments.”

In the months leading up to Pacifica’s closure, the facility was sued multiple times, and several families came forward with complaints of substandard conditions, high staff turnover and a lack of trained medical providers on site. Some also made complaints to state leaders.

During a Wednesday news conference in which state officials unveiled the results of 91 surprise visits to long-term care living facilities, New Mexico Health Secretary Patrick Allen revealed he met earlier this year with corporate leaders from the San Diego headquarters of Pacifica Senior Living, a company owned and operated by private equity firm Pacifica Cos., according to industry website Senior Housing News.

“We had been in that facility over and over and over again with corrective action plans and revisits over and over and over again [and] civil penalties being assessed,” Allen said of the Santa Fe site. “It wasn’t working.”

Several weeks before the surprise visits, Allen said, he called a meeting with Pacifica leaders.

“I demanded that their corporate offices in California send senior executives to Santa Fe, and sat them down in our conference room and basically asked them, ‘What the heck?’ ” Allen said. “ ‘Why does this seem to be such a challenge? ... Why does it seem you’re not taking this seriously?’ ”

By that point, the company’s plan to convert the Santa Fe location to 55-and-up housing was well underway.

By the weekend of May 17, when state workers came in unannounced, only a single person was still living in the facility, inside the memory care unit, according to LeAnn Behrens, director of operations for the New Mexico Department of Health.

Pacifica passed the visit with flying colors, one of only 11 facilities to receive a perfect score — albeit under a much different scenario than was the case just a few weeks prior.

The team that visited Pacifica wrote they initially visited May 17 and were told the facility was closed.

“On Sunday 05/19/24, we returned (unexpectedly) and asked to see the one memory care patient,” the team wrote in site visit notes, provided by Behrens. “She was sitting in a clean but empty environment. Normally this area would be a common area. She was sitting by a couch with her 1:1 attendant. She was not asleep.”