One building holds most of the beds
The file recorded exactly 1 facility in Carson larger than six residents, and named Carson Senior Assisted Living at 345 East Carson Street. The largest licensed capacity on the Carson list was 230, and together the larger records accounted for 230 of the 386 licensed beds in the city. The median capacity across every Carson record was 6.
So the city has a straight question in it early on. If that community suits your parent and has a room, the search is short. If not, the real choice inside Carson is 27 houses, and the week after that the search moves west.
It is worth saying plainly that this is not a failing of the city. A market made almost entirely of six bed homes gives a frail or easily confused parent a better daily life than a large building usually can. It is a poor fit for someone sociable and still walking, who wants a dining room, a calendar and other residents to choose from.
What 27 houses actually offer
California licenses a six bed home the same way it licenses a 230 bed community: as a residential care facility for the elderly. What separates them is scale. A licensed home with six residents is an ordinary house with a kitchen, a living room, a mix of private and shared bedrooms, and a garden.
Caregivers cook the meals and help with bathing, dressing, medication reminders and getting to the bathroom in the middle of the night, which is the hour that decides whether a placement holds. Two or three caregivers looking after six people is a fundamentally different day from a building with hundreds of residents. What you give up is a social calendar, an on site nurse and a wider circle.
These houses carry no signs, most have no website, and many have no phone listing under the licensed name. That is why a Carson search from a browser turns up one building and a lot of national directory pages, and why a register like this one is worth reading line by line.
- Ask how many residents one caregiver covers overnight, and whether that person is awake or asleep.
- Ask who cooks, and whether they can cook the food your father will actually eat.
- Ask whether the home holds a dementia care waiver, and what it does if somebody wanders at night.
- Ask how many homes the operator runs, then look every one of those licenses up, not only this address.
- Ask what happens if your father later needs a two person transfer or hospice, and whether that means moving again.
Carson sits in the middle of a much larger market
Carson is surrounded, and the state's own groupings show it. The file places the city inside the 907 ZIP code area, where the file recorded 110 licensed homes across 9 cities. Taking the other cities in it in the file's own order, Cerritos, Harbor City, Lomita and Lakewood between them accounted for 61 homes the file listed as licensed.
The wider grouping reaches further still: within the area covered by CDSS regional office 11 the file recorded 460 licensed homes across 26 places, from the Westside down through the South Bay to the harbor. Treat it as the outer edge of what exists rather than as a shortlist. The member of it a Carson family really drives to is Torrance, immediately west, which the same file credits with 90 licensed homes.
Harbor City and Lomita deserve a specific mention. The file gave Harbor City 15 licensed homes, 15 of them at six residents or fewer, and Lomita 13, 12 of them at six residents or fewer. Neither city gets written about much, which means their homes are close to invisible unless you are reading a register.
San Pedro, south past the 110, had 9 licensed homes of its own and has its own page here. The hospitals point the same way as the data does. Harbor UCLA Medical Center is in West Carson, Kaiser Permanente South Bay is in Harbor City and Providence Little Company of Mary is in Torrance. A discharge planner at any of the three is thinking about the whole South Bay rather than about Carson.
How old the Carson licenses are
The oldest first license date in the Carson records is from 1994 and the newest is from 2025, a few weeks before the state published the file. 19 of the 28 carry a first license date after May 2015, so this is a long running small home segment with a steady flow of new houses into it rather than a recent rush.
None of that measures experience, and it is worth being blunt about why. A license belongs to the licensee, not to the address. When a home is sold or the operating entity changes, a new license is issued and the date starts again. A house that has taken residents for twenty years can show a date from last year.
Read the column as this operator has held this license since. Then ask the administrator directly how long they have run the home and what changed when they took it on. How that question is answered tells you something no public file will.
Keep reading
- Licensed care homes in Torrance, the state list
- Licensed care homes in San Pedro, the state list
- Assisted living in Long Beach, our advice and placement page
- Every city in Los Angeles County, and what the state file listed in each
- Board and care homes and RCFEs explained
- Board and care compared with assisted living
- How to check a California RCFE license yourself
- What an RCFE license lets a home do, and where it stops
- How assisted living placement works across Los Angeles
- Low income and Medi-Cal assisted living in Los Angeles
Questions families ask us
- How many assisted living facilities are there in Carson?
- The state file dated May 25, 2025 listed 28 residential care facilities for the elderly as licensed in Carson, of which 27 were listed as licensed for six residents or fewer and 1 for 25 or more. All 28 are named on this page with licensed capacity and license number.
- Why did the state file record only 1 large assisted living community in Carson?
- That is what the licensing file records rather than something anyone decided. 27 of the 28 Carson licenses were six bed homes, and the larger community held 230 of the city's 386 licensed beds, set down in the data as 60 percent. If that building does not suit your parent or has no room, the real choice inside the city is houses.
- Is that a lot of licensed homes for a city this size?
- By count it puts Carson eighteenth of the 119 Los Angeles County cities with at least one licensed home, a position 2 cities share. Counted only on the six bed houses it sits fifteenth of the same 119. So on the state's own count Carson runs deep in six bed houses and thin in large communities, and that is the thing to plan around.
- Where in Carson are the licensed homes?
- Across all 28 licensed records the file put 23 in 90745 central and southern Carson around Carson Street, Avalon Boulevard, Main Street and Del Amo, 4 in 90746 on the north side toward Victoria and the university, and 1 in 90810 on the eastern edge where the Carson and Long Beach postal areas meet. 27 of the 28 were listed at six residents or fewer, so most of this list looks like the street it sits on.
- How much does a board and care home in Carson cost?
- Commonly about $3,500 to $6,000 a month, usually quoted as one all in rate covering room, meals and personal care rather than rent plus care fees. Every figure here is a typical market range for the area and nothing more. We do not set these rates, we do not receive them, and no number on this page is attached to a home in the table.
- Should I look outside Carson as well?
- Almost certainly. Torrance immediately west had 90 licensed homes and Long Beach to the east had 50. Closer in, within the 907 ZIP code area that Carson sits inside, the file recorded 110 licensed homes across 9 cities. Much of that is a shorter drive from a Carson address than the far side of Carson is.
- Which hospitals discharge into Carson?
- Harbor UCLA Medical Center in West Carson, Kaiser Permanente South Bay in Harbor City and Providence Little Company of Mary in Torrance are the three general hospitals closest to Carson. A discharge planner at any of them is working across the whole South Bay rather than inside one city, and so should you. If you have a discharge date, call us with it rather than after it.
- How current is this list?
- This page describes a single state file, the one published on May 25, 2025, and nothing that happened afterward. Homes close, change operator and have their capacity revised, sometimes within weeks. Before you rely on any row, look the license number up with the California Department of Social Services and read the current entry there.
- Are you one of the homes listed here?
- No. Senior Placement Agency LA is a free placement and referral service for families. We do not own, operate, manage or inspect any facility on this page, and a listing is a public record rather than a recommendation or an endorsement. You can contact any of these homes yourself without going through us.