The Palmelle Directory · operator-confirmed pet policy
Nobody publishes whether your mother can bring her dog.
No state collects it. No federal dataset holds it. So we email facilities one at a time and print exactly what they tell us, including the silence.
Operator-confirmed · never a marketing badge · never a guess
Ask Google whether assisted living facilities allow pets and you will get a confident answer, eight sources deep. Read what it concedes and the useful part disappears.
"Policies vary widely by specific location and community."
That sentence is the answer admitting it cannot help you. You are not choosing between assisted living in the abstract and no assisted living. You are choosing between three buildings within driving distance of your sister, and you need to know whether a specific one of them will take a specific 45-pound dog.
Why the data does not exist
This is not an oversight anyone is hiding. It is a gap in the public record. No state publishes facility pet policy. It is not in any licensing database. It is not a federal reporting requirement, so it is not in CMS Care Compare either. There is no dataset to scrape, no file to download, no API.
Which means every "pet friendly" badge you have seen on a listing site came from one of two places: the facility's own marketing copy, or a checkbox somebody ticked years ago. Neither can tell you the weight limit, whether cats count, whether there is a deposit, or whether the policy changed when the building changed owners.
The information exists. It lives in the head of a person who works at the building.
| Facility | Pets |
|---|
Asking, one at a time
We collect it the only way it can be collected: by emailing facilities and recording what they say. The answer is stored against the specific building, with the operator's own wording attached where they volunteer it. One live listing reads small pets only, no more than 40 pounds.
That sentence is worth more than a badge. A family with a beagle now knows. A family with a labrador also knows, which is the harder and more useful half.
Counted from the live directory as this page loaded. It is a small number and there is no point dressing it up. It is also more confirmed pet policies than existed anywhere in public before, and it grows every week the outreach runs.
The directory carries a Takes pets filter, and it returns only the buildings whose operator has confirmed. That is a short list on purpose. A facility missing from it has not refused anything, it has not answered.
What "not answered" means
Every facility page shows the pet line. Most of them currently read: Pets: not answered yet. No state publishes this. We ask operators directly.
That is a deliberate choice, and it is the part that matters most. The easy version of this would treat silence as a no, or quietly omit the field until it looked impressive. Both would be lies about a real business's public listing. A facility that has not replied to an email has not told you anything, and saying otherwise could cost it a resident.
So the page says what is true: we asked, they have not answered, here is where that stands. A page that shows the shape of what is missing is doing more for a family than a page that shows nothing.
The rest of the record
The pet line sits on a page that already carries everything the federal and state record holds about that building.
- CMS rates it 2 out of 5 stars overall, and 2 for the health inspection that drives it.
- Sedative and sleep-medication use runs 2.3 times the national median.
- Unplanned weight loss runs above the national rate, which is usually a feeding-assistance problem.
- Clarity Score 5.8, first scored August 2026, rescored monthly.
Not paid for or edited by the facility. · See the full listing
114,976 facilities. Every number printed the same way for every one of them, good or bad.
The plain version
A dog is not a small consideration. For a lot of older adults it is the last daily obligation they have. The reason to get up, the reason to walk to the corner, the only other heartbeat in the house.
Families discover the policy problem late, usually after they have emotionally settled on a building, and the answer arrives as a shrug from someone at a front desk.
Neil D'Monte wrote about the other half of this for Perch: the cold, hard math of keeping a dog through a move, which is the decision families are usually making when they go looking for the policy.
Thirty-two answers is not a database. It is the beginning of one that has never existed, built the slow way, because somebody actually asked.
Look up a specific building.
Inspections, deficiencies, fines, staffing and the pet line, printed the same way for every facility in the country.
Operate a building? Reply to our email and we will publish your policy in your words.