After experience with assisted living and then nursing home for a friend, we will never agree to either.
Assisted living decides when you need nursing home. Nursing home puts you on hospice.
My Mother was in assisted living for 10 years. The care was so so. She often fell and off to the hospital she would go despite being perfectly fine. Last hospitalization she had the facility refused to take her back until she was mobile. She wasn’t mobile when she left and was reaching her 100th birthday.
We put her in a local nursing home and the care she got there was fantastic. The staff was simply wonderful. She died one month after turning 100.
My impression was the assisted living facility was all about the money. The cost every month was exorbitant. When she left seven years ago the fee was $14,000 a month!
It gets worse.
My father-in-law was in several nursing homes (with dementia/Alzheimers).
The nursing home would create an "emergency" and call an ambulance to transport him to the local hospital ER. They would call us after he had left the facility and inform us.
And then, lo and behold, they would refuse to take him back when the ER released him. It's called "dumping" and was a known and common nursing home practice.