The Township's Secured Address, and Where It Actually Stands
A secured memory care room at Addington Place of Clarkston, on Water Tower Place, is priced at $6,800 a month. Despite the name it sits in Independence Township rather than inside the Village of Clarkston, which the township wraps around, and families searching by village name sometimes miss it entirely or assume it is one of the addresses inside the village boundary.
What sets this building apart locally is proportion: close to half its rooms sit inside the secured neighborhood, which is a far higher share than most communities running two levels, and it changes the character of the place. Dementia care is not a wing appended to an assisted living building here; it is one of two roughly equal halves, with staffing, routine and design weighted accordingly. Pets are accepted, which at the secured level is less common than at any other. For a resident who needs the world to stay small and consistent, that balance tends to read as reassuring rather than institutional. It is also the reason the building feels different from an assisted living community that happens to have a locked corridor at one end.
What Sits Behind the Published Number
The building also runs assisted living, and the distance between that rate and $6,800 is the clearest way to see what the secured setting itself costs. It funds staff awake through the night instead of on call, a closer ratio of caregivers to residents, and a day arranged so that repetition does the work anxiety would otherwise do.
Above the base figure sits the assessment: a nurse establishes how much help meals take, whether a transfer is safe with one person, how consistently the nights pass, and what the hours before dinner demand, and the answer places a resident at a level with a monthly charge attached. Room choice adjusts it again, since sharing a secured room with a companion is priced below holding one alone. Two residents behind the same doors can therefore be paying quite differently from each other.
Inside the Monthly Total
Begin with the secured room, because that is what a family is buying first: a private or companion space inside a locked neighborhood with its own dining and its own outdoor access. Around it the figure carries heat and power, cleaning, personal laundry, food across the day, the daily routine, and staff present and awake at every hour.
The costs that follow the resident rather than the building are billed apart. Continence products are charged at cost, hair appointments are settled with the visiting stylist, and medication stays a pharmacy expense whoever administers each dose. Journeys beyond the community's own transport schedule carry a fee. An arrival fee is due once a room is committed, standing apart from rent, and a family budgeting from $6,800 alone will not have that number in their plan.
Getting Ready in a Township With One Secured Address
Half a building given to secured rooms is a real amount of capacity for a township, so this is not a market where families wait indefinitely. It is one where the specific room, on the right side of the neighborhood and at the right price, comes free on its own schedule.
The bottleneck is almost never the paperwork itself but the sequencing: the community's nurse has to assess before it can quote, and it cannot assess a resident whose physician has not yet documented the diagnosis and the behavior picture. Families who get that documentation moving first find everything after it fast. Discharge planners across northern Oakland County work with this address often enough to start the sequence while a patient is still admitted, which is usually what makes a move on the discharge date possible.