Fishtown and Northern Liberties Don't Have a 'Memory Care Facility' — Here's What They Have Instead

By Philly Senior Advisor Care Team — Licensing & Memory Care Team · August 17, 2026

Why a Google search for "memory care Fishtown" is misleading before you even click a result

Type "memory care facility Fishtown" or "memory care Northern Liberties" into a search bar and the results imply there's a distinct category of building with its own state license, the way a nursing home or a hospital has one. Pennsylvania does not license memory care as its own thing. There is no "memory care license" issued by the Department of Human Services, no separate inspection track, no dedicated citation category on a state report. What exists instead is a Personal Care Home license under 55 Pa. Code Chapter 2600 or an Assisted Living Residence license under Chapter 2800, and within either of those, a provider can choose to operate a dementia-specific unit that meets the state's dementia-care disclosure requirements. The building calling itself "memory care" on its website is a marketing label sitting on top of one of those two licenses — not a third license type.

That distinction matters most in a neighborhood like Fishtown or Northern Liberties precisely because the housing stock skews toward smaller, older, sometimes converted rowhouse-scale properties rather than the large suburban campuses that dominate memory care marketing in Bucks or Chester County. A ten-to-twenty-bed Personal Care Home operating out of a converted twin in Fishtown can legally serve residents with dementia and can call its second floor "memory care" in its brochure, and that can be a genuinely appropriate, well-run placement — but it is not automatically held to a different or higher regulatory standard than a fifty-bed PCH in Roxborough just because of the word choice on its sign.

What the dementia-care disclosure statement actually has to say

Under both Chapter 2600 and Chapter 2800, a facility that markets, advertises, or otherwise represents itself as providing specialized care for residents with dementia or Alzheimer's disease has to produce a written disclosure statement and give it to a prospective resident or their representative before admission. That statement is supposed to spell out, in plain terms, the facility's staffing ratios and staff dementia-training hours, its philosophy of care, the physical environment features specific to dementia (secured egress, wander-management design, whether units are locked or use delayed-egress alarms), its approach to activities programming for residents with cognitive impairment, and how it handles a resident whose care needs progress beyond what the unit is set up to manage.

The single most useful thing a Fishtown or Northern Liberties family can do before touring is ask the facility, by name, for its dementia-care disclosure statement in writing — not a verbal summary from a sales-oriented admissions coordinator, the actual document. A facility that can't produce one promptly, or that gets vague when you ask what's in it, is telling you something about how seriously it treats a requirement that already exists. This is a free, five-minute filter that works before you've spent a Saturday touring three buildings and before any deposit is on the table.

The specific things to check that a neighborhood memory care unit won't volunteer

Confirm which license the building actually holds — Personal Care Home or Assisted Living Residence — because the two have different rules for how long a resident can stay as their needs increase. An Assisted Living Residence under Chapter 2800 is built around a philosophy of aging in place and has somewhat more flexibility to keep a resident through a wider range of physical decline. A Personal Care Home under Chapter 2600 has tighter limits and is more likely to require a resident to transfer to a nursing home once care needs cross a certain threshold, even if the family has already come to think of the PCH as "home." For a Fishtown or Northern Liberties family choosing between two similarly priced options, this single fact can matter more than the interior finishes.

Ask directly what the secured-egress setup actually is: a coded keypad, a delayed-egress door alarm, or a fully locked unit, and what happens during a fire drill or an actual emergency — Philadelphia's rowhouse-scale buildings sometimes repurpose upper floors that weren't originally designed with dementia-specific egress in mind, and a workaround solution (a chair alarm, a staff member permanently posted at a stairwell) is not the same as a building designed for it. Also ask for the facility's dementia-specific staff training hours by name — Pennsylvania's dementia-care disclosure rule requires the facility to state its training approach, but "our staff is trained" is not an answer; the number of hours and whether it's a one-time orientation or ongoing annual training is.

What memory care actually costs near Fishtown and Northern Liberties in 2026, and why it's not one number

Across Greater Philadelphia in 2026, memory care within a Personal Care Home or Assisted Living Residence typically runs $6,200 to $8,600 a month, and Philadelphia's river wards — Fishtown, Northern Liberties, Kensington-adjacent, Port Richmond — tend to land in the middle of that range rather than at either extreme. They're not priced like the Main Line suburbs (Bryn Mawr, Wayne, Villanova), where memory care commonly runs toward the top of or above that band, but they're also not priced like North or Northeast Philadelphia, where costs frequently sit below it. Smaller converted-rowhouse operations can sometimes undercut larger campuses on the base rate, but they're also more likely to bill care-level increases as separate add-on tiers rather than bundling them, so the quoted "starting at" figure and the actual monthly bill six months in can diverge more than families expect.

Community HealthChoices, Pennsylvania's Medicaid managed-care program for long-term services and supports, can cover the personal-care-services portion of a dementia unit stay for residents who qualify financially and functionally, but it does not pay room and board — that distinction doesn't change because a unit is labeled memory care instead of standard assisted living. A family weighing a Fishtown facility against a suburban one should ask each for a full written breakdown of base rate, care-level tiers, and what a CHC authorization would and wouldn't cover, rather than comparing the marketing number on each website.

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