From personal experience, I can tell you that $6K/month is not exclusively a Silicon-Valley phenomenon.

Basically you cover it with whatever SS, pension, savings, and other assets they have. When those don't cover it, you make compromises in quality of care, your finances, and your family's life.

This is actually one of the biggest reasons that socialized medicine is going to be a requirement rather than a nice to have.

Literally the cost of labor is just too high for this to not be part of a social safety net.

"Lead journalist" at VentureBeat must be more lucrative than I thought.

Is this housing cost a Silicon Valley thing? Like rents are completely insane, so elder housing is also completely insane?

It's not like I live in a cheap city, either. Boston is pretty pricey, but wow.

I suspect it's a labor thing as much as anything else. My father lived out his life at home, so I didn't have to deal with assisted living. However, the IRS is crystal clear that domestic employees are in fact employees subject to all the things like overtime and UI. California has even more generous overtime rules, but even just the base pay gets expensive. $20 * 24 * 7 = $3,360 in base pay per week. Using an agency simplifies things but is usually a bit more expensive.

Assisted living, in general, is phenomenally expensive. It sounds like the mother lived in Sacramento, but they're renting out her house, so I'm sure that's a welcome revenue stream.

How is it even possible for him to cover that?

Could be that his mom had some money saved up or had some pension $ that could be put towards it. Not sure if insurance would help cover housing costs?

yeah its just the kind of thing to wipe out a lifetime of saving