Pilar Carvajal grew up in Sydney, Australia, in a collective-focused culture she describes as focused on "the we," a mindset focused less on caring for people in silos but rather integrating them into a community of others in need. That belief became personal when her father was diagnosed with Parkinson's at 50. Her family worked in senior living, yet struggled to navigate services for him.
That paradigm would serve as an inspiration for her later in her professional career.
Carvajal's mother had served as Florida's secretary of Aging and Adult Services and helped write the state's Medicaid waiver for senior housing. The family business used that waiver to license public housing buildings as assisted living facilities, serving thousands of low-income seniors.
But Carvajal kept noticing something odd. Middle-income seniors were moving into public housing because they earned too much for the Medicaid waiver yet too little for anything else. That observation led her to found Innovation Senior Living, a Florida owner-operator focused entirely on the middle-income senior.
At the Senior Living Innovation Forum, Carvajal – also the CEO of the company – made the case that the industry needs to rethink what it builds, and whether it needs to build at all.
"I don't believe we have a senior housing shortage," Carvajal said. "I believe we have an affordability crisis."
Most older adults sit in the middle. They are too wealthy for Medicaid but can't afford communities that run $5,000 to $10,000 a month. They are teachers, firefighters and small business owners, people who did everything right. When a unit costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to build, she said, the product ends up designed for the top tier. That isn't anyone's fault. It's structural, and the same model will keep producing the same result.
More than 90% of older adults say they want to age at home, and most will, whether the industry designs for it or not. What they fear most, Carvajal said, isn't aging. It's losing their autonomy. Meanwhile, senior living keeps optimizing for occupancy, units and square footage.
The old model is to build it, staff it, fill it and hope the margins hold. Carvajal's alternative is to activate existing spaces, deliver services there, build partnerships and scale access. Three forces make this possible now:
Carvajal's answer is the Longevity Day Club, a membership-based hub that helps older adults stay in their homes longer. It is explicitly not adult day care. It is proactive rather than reactive, social and cognitive rather than clinical, and modern rather than institutional. The feel is closer to boutique hospitality than to healthcare. Members are greeted by name, join conversations and take part in brain health and wellness programming. Behind the scenes, staff handle care navigation and future planning, so families get peace of mind.
For operators, she argued, the model expands the market, creates recurring revenue and opens a front door years before someone needs a higher level of care. "This model doesn't compete with senior living," she said. "It feeds it."
Her closing statement was that the winners of the next era won't be the organizations that built the most, but the ones that served the best.