Brentwood Has One Adult Home and Two Nursing Homes. It Has No Assisted Living Residence.

By Long Island Senior Advisor Care Team · October 28, 2026

62,387 residents, 30 adult-home beds

The Census Bureau counted 62,387 people in Brentwood at the 2020 census, which makes it the most populous census-designated place in Suffolk County. It sits inside the Town of Islip, which means a Brentwood family deals with town senior services, county aging services, and state facility licensing — three different desks, as most Long Island families eventually discover.

Now look at what the state's own records say is actually in the hamlet. New York's Department of Health publishes its adult care facility roster and quarterly capacity statistics on health.data.ny.gov. Pull the Brentwood rows and you get exactly one adult care facility: Brentwood Adult Home, at 147 Second Avenue, licensed for 30 residents under certificate 700-F-013, operating since April 1989. The most recent quarterly statistics report its census at 30 — every bed filled.

Brentwood also has two nursing homes, and they are not small. Maria Regina Rehabilitation and Nursing, at 1725 Brentwood Road, is listed at 188 beds under operating certificate 5154329N. Ross Center for Nursing and Rehabilitation, at 839 Suffolk Avenue, is listed at 120 beds under certificate 5154328N. That is 308 skilled nursing beds and 30 adult-home beds, for a hamlet of more than 62,000 people.

There is a small geographic irony in this. The Town of Islip's Caesar Trunzo Senior Center is at 16 Second Avenue, a few blocks from the adult home at 147 Second Avenue. The hamlet's entire residential-care capacity short of a nursing home sits on the same street as its senior center, and it holds thirty beds.

"Adult home" is one license. Assisted living is a separate one layered on top.

Families read "adult home" as a synonym for assisted living, and in New York it is not. The state does not issue one flat assisted-living license. It stacks permissions, and the stack is the single most useful thing to understand before you tour anything on Long Island.

The base layer is the Adult Care Facility license, under 18 NYCRR Parts 487, 488 and 490 — an Adult Home, an Enriched Housing Program, or a Residence for Adults. That license covers room, board, housekeeping, supervision and help with daily activities. It does not by itself require 24-hour on-site monitoring, case management, or an individualized service plan.

On top of that base, an operator may apply for Assisted Living Residence (ALR) licensure under 10 NYCRR Part 1001, which does require those things. On top of ALR, two further certifications are available: Enhanced Assisted Living Residence (EALR), which lets a resident stay as certain physical and medical needs progress, and Special Needs Assisted Living Residence (SNALR), for residents with dementia or other cognitive impairment. There is no Type A / Type B split here the way there is in some other states. There are layers, and a facility either holds a layer or it does not.

Brentwood Adult Home holds the base Adult Home license and, in the state's capacity tables, no ALR beds, no EALR beds, no SNALR beds and no Assisted Living Program beds. That is not a knock on the place. It is a 30-bed, individually owned adult home that has operated in the same spot since the Reagan administration, and its last relicensure-window record shows eight violations across five surveys, two of them clean. It is simply licensed to do less than what most families mean when they say "we're looking at assisted living."

The two nursing homes are not a cheaper or closer version of the same thing either. Nursing homes are licensed under an entirely separate article of the regulations, 10 NYCRR Part 415, with different staffing, different medical oversight and a different payment system. Moving from a Brentwood adult home to a Brentwood nursing home is not a step up a ladder. It is a move between two systems.

Where the layers actually are, measured from Brentwood

Because Brentwood has none of the upper layers, the practical question for a family here is not "which assisted living in Brentwood," it is "how far do we have to go, and for which certification." The state registry answers that precisely. Straight-line distances below are measured from the adult home on Second Avenue; road time on the Expressway or Veterans Memorial Highway will be longer.

Read that table as three different answers to three different problems. If the issue is that your mother can no longer manage the house but is cognitively fine, the nearest ALR beds are under two miles away in Hauppauge. If the issue is dementia, the nearest SNALR beds are in Islandia, Bay Shore and Commack. If the issue is that nobody in the family has $7,110 a month, the nearest Assisted Living Program beds are in Nesconset, Holbrook and Kings Park — and that is a Medicaid program, which is a different conversation entirely.

Across Nassau and Suffolk together the state lists 105 adult care facilities. Sixty-seven of them hold ALR licensure, 58 hold EALR, 53 hold SNALR, and only 13 run an Assisted Living Program. The upper layers are not rare on Long Island. They are just not in Brentwood.

If the diagnosis is dementia, ask for the SNALR certificate by name

Every operator on Long Island markets a "memory care neighborhood." Some of them hold the state certification that backs it and some of them do not, and the brochure will not tell you which. SNALR is a real certification issued by the Department of Health under 10 NYCRR Part 1001, with a specific bed count attached to it. Ask to see it by name, and ask how many of the building's beds carry it.

That bed count matters more than families expect. Artis Senior Living of Commack is certified for SNALR on all 64 of its beds, so the whole building is built around cognitive care. The Arbors at Islandia East has 57 SNALR beds out of 200, which means a specific wing. Netherbay at Bay Shore, which opened in March 2025, has 50 SNALR beds out of 72. Those are three very different buildings, and "we offer memory care" describes all of them equally badly.

The question to ask on a tour is not whether they do memory care. It is: how many of your beds are SNALR-certified, is the unit my mother would move into one of them, and what happens if her needs progress past what the certification covers. Our guide to how New York handles memory care disclosure and certification walks through the paperwork, and verifying a facility license covers how to check any of this yourself on the state's Health Profiles site.

One figure you will not find anywhere, including here: a published median cost for memory care. No national survey prices it as its own category. Any number a sales office quotes you for memory care is that building's number, not a market rate, and it should be compared against written quotes from the other buildings rather than against a benchmark that does not exist.

If the money is the problem, the Assisted Living Program is the thing to ask about

The New York State median for assisted living in a private one-bedroom is $7,110 a month, or $85,320 a year, per the 2025 CareScout Cost of Care Survey. No survey publishes a Nassau, Suffolk or Long Island-specific figure, and local pricing very plausibly runs above the state median given what everything else costs here — but nobody publishes that number, so treat $7,110 as a floor for planning rather than a quote.

For a lot of Brentwood families that number ends the private-pay conversation in one sentence. The program that exists for exactly this situation is the Assisted Living Program (ALP), under 18 NYCRR Part 494. It is Medicaid-funded, and it is for people who are medically eligible for a nursing home but could be safely served in a less medically intensive setting. ALP covers personal care, home health aide services, nursing, therapies, personal emergency response, case management and more.

Two things about ALP trip families up. First, it is not a voucher you take to the facility of your choice — it lives inside specific licensed adult homes and enriched housing programs, and only 13 of Long Island's 105 adult care facilities have ALP beds at all. Second, ALP pays for services; what portion of room and board remains yours is a question for the specific facility, because ALP is embedded in that facility's Medicaid rate rather than handed to you. Ask it in writing before anyone signs.

The nearest ALP beds to Brentwood are at Amber Court of Smithtown in Nesconset (168 ALP beds of 186, 631-768-1000), Sachem Adult Home in Holbrook (35 of 46, 631-588-4554), and St. Johnland Assisted Living in Kings Park (100 of 100, 631-663-4450). Our fuller walkthrough of how the Assisted Living Program works covers eligibility and the application route.

Home care is the default Brentwood answer, and MLTC is the gate

Given 30 adult-home beds in the hamlet and a $7,110 state median next door, most Brentwood families end up where most Long Island families end up: care at home, for longer than they planned.

Run the arithmetic honestly. CareScout's 2025 New York median for a non-medical caregiver is $35 an hour, which at 44 hours a week is $6,673 a month. That is not meaningfully cheaper than the $7,110 assisted living median. Home care wins on cost when the need is 20 or 30 hours a week; it stops winning somewhere in the forties, and families usually notice the crossover a year after they passed it. Our in-home care versus assisted living comparison sets the two side by side.

If Medicaid is in the picture, the gate is Managed Long Term Care (MLTC). Enrollment has been mandatory in both Nassau and Suffolk since the transition that began in 2013, for Medicaid recipients aged 21 and over who need community-based long-term care for more than 120 days and can remain safely at home. Practically, that means a Brentwood parent's home care hours are authorized by a managed care plan, not by the county, once they are past that 120-day line. The MLTC walkthrough explains what changes at that point.

Before Medicaid, there is a middle rung worth asking for by name: EISEP, the Expanded In-home Services for the Elderly Program, which is sliding-scale and not Medicaid. In the Town of Islip, the town's own materials direct EISEP applications to the Suffolk County Office for the Aging at 631-853-8200. The town itself runs the pieces around it — congregate and home-delivered meals, transportation at a suggested $2 donation per trip, housekeeping help, shopping assistance and small residential repairs.

If it is one of the two nursing homes, learn the money rules first

Brentwood is one of the few Long Island hamlets where the nursing home option is literally down the road: 188 beds at Maria Regina, 120 at Ross Center. If that is where this is heading, there are four numbers to know before the first application, all from NYSDOH's GIS 26 MA/03 figures effective January 1, 2026.

A nursing home resident on Medicaid in New York keeps a personal needs allowance of $50 a month. That is the whole discretionary budget — haircuts, phone, clothing. It has sat at $50 since the 1980s, and New York's own aging office notes that 33 other states pay more. Plan for the family to cover the gap, because nobody will raise it in the admission meeting.

If one spouse enters the nursing home and the other stays in the house — the ordinary Brentwood case — spousal impoverishment rules apply. The community spouse resource allowance runs from $74,820 to $162,660, the minimum monthly maintenance needs allowance is $4,066.50 a month, and the home equity limit for coverage is $1,130,000. These update annually, so confirm them with the county or an elder law attorney rather than relying on a figure from last year's conversation. Our spousal impoverishment walkthrough works an example through.

The last one is the Medicaid Estate Recovery Program, which can claim against the estate after death — in New York, through the probate estate. A Brentwood house bought decades ago and carried through two generations is exactly the asset families are surprised to find exposed. Read what New York can actually claim before anyone transfers anything, and get advice before acting on it.

The Brentwood call list, in order

If you are starting from zero this week, this is the sequence that wastes the least time.

Start with Suffolk County Office for the Aging at 631-853-8200, at 100 Veterans Memorial Highway in Hauppauge. It is the county's Area Agency on Aging and its NY Connects point, and it can screen for EISEP, MLTC, ALP and the NHTD waiver in one conversation. Nassau runs a completely separate office at 516-227-8900 — if a relative is on the other side of the county line, that is a different call, not a transfer.

Then the Town of Islip senior citizen office at 631-224-5340 for meals, transportation and the Caesar Trunzo Senior Center on Second Avenue. Town programs are faster to start than anything county or state, and they are often what keeps a parent at home through the months an application takes.

If there is a care problem inside a licensed facility, the Long-Term Care Ombudsman for Suffolk County is run by Family Service League and reachable at 631-470-6755; its office at 1444 Fifth Avenue in Bay Shore is about four miles from Brentwood. The Ombudsman will attend a care conference with you, with the resident's consent, and it does not license or fine anyone. For licensing complaints, that is the Department of Health's Long Island regional office at 631-851-3098. Nassau's Ombudsman region is separate, at 516-466-9718.

If the worry is an older adult living alone in the community rather than in a facility, Suffolk County Adult Protective Services is 631-854-3232; Nassau's is 516-227-8395. Call 911 if anyone is in immediate danger. Our Suffolk County page and the Brentwood guide keep the local listings together, and what senior care costs has the full set of current figures.

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