Save Keiro Elder Care

Around 500 people packed the First Southern Baptist Church in Gardena to oppose the sale of Keiro, an elder care facility in Los Angeles and Gardena that is operated by a nonprofit in the Japanese American community.

Keiro is a nonprofit care facility serving the Japanese American community, mainly supporting Japanese-language care.

The board of Keiro is selling the facility to Pacifica. This is NOT the radio station; it's a real estate developer that will operate the facility as a for-profit operation. The price is $40 million.

Keiro has tried to keep this sale SECRET!

* Information about the sale was announced at arts and crafts classes at the retirement home. They made little effort to inform the residents.

* When nonprofits are sold to for-profit companies, there is supposed to be a hearing. However, the Attorney General can waive that hearing. Keiro's board requested the waiver, and got it. Thus THERE WAS NO PUBLIC HEARING ABOUT THIS SALE.

* There are different facilities, including a retirement home and a nursing home. The retirement home is solvent, but the nursing home is 70% people on Medi-Cal and Medicare. These residents are at risk of being thrown out.

* The price was based on a 2-year old appraisal. The Boyle Heights facility is within a rapidly gentrifying area, so that price may be much lower than it's present market value.

Mo Nishida started a movement against the sale. It has grown to hundreds, perhaps thousands of community people. The petition opposing the sale has over 9,000 signatures.

This is a fight not only for this facility, but to protect the idea of nonprofit elder care, and in a broader sense, against treating dying, elderly people as a profit center. Community people who rely on nonprofits are affected by boards that want to cash-out of a nonprofit.

This now has the support of local politicians, most notably Maxine Waters and Judy Chu, who are aligning themselves against Attorney General Kamala Harris.

There is a push for a lawsuit to oppose this sale. Even if the sale goes through, there will be an effort to get the assets to make the residents there whole, to have a home until they pass away, perhaps even as far as twenty years into the future. Making a new facility has also been raised; there is sufficient money if the facility is sold.

Meetings of the Ad-Hoc Committee to Save Keiro are Saturday at 1PM, 333 San Pedro, just south of Little Tokyo.