Dozens of elderly residents will lose their homes when a 124-year-old San Francisco nursing facility closes this spring, officials announced Wednesday.
St. Anne’s Home on Lake Street will close April 8 due to staffing shortages and rising operational costs, according to the Little Sisters of the Poor, who run the facility. St. Anne’s Home has provided care to the elderly poor, regardless of race, religion, or national origin, since 1901, the group said.
“Many factors have obliged us to move forward with this decision. It has only come after a lengthy period of prayer, much consultation, and much study,” Mother Julie Horseman, provincial superior of the Little Sisters, said in a statement.
The closure means 59 elderly residents with limited financial resources must find new places to live.
At a meeting at the facility Wednesday afternoon, resident Donna Barnette, 67, said she had learned of the closure plan that morning.
“It felt like somebody had just kicked me in the stomach,” she said. Barnette, the facility’s youngest and newest resident, moved in five weeks ago and said she hoped to spend the rest of her life at St. Anne’s. She said she had just completed her change-of-address forms when she heard the news.
The Little Sisters plan to redirect funds toward upgrading and reconstructing other facilities across the United States.
“Any money that is made on the sale of this property is going back into the mission,” Horseman said Wednesday, adding that St. Anne’s was just the latest in a series of skilled facility closures. “We see the same thing, to varying degrees, across the country.”
St. Anne’s Home was founded in March 1901, when 10 Little Sisters established temporary residence on Howard Street. The facility moved to the current Lake Street location in 1904, funded by businessman Edward Joseph LeBreton. After being declared unsafe in 1977, the home was rebuilt with support from community benefactors, reopening two years later.
The home provides pastoral care, medical services, physical therapy, and social activities for residents. Two “begging sisters” maintain the tradition of collecting daily donations from local markets and businesses to support operations.
Administrators are working with staff and residents and their families to manage the transition, the Little Sisters’ statement said. The Archdiocese of San Francisco did not immediately respond to a request for comment.