- [Bill] The house you live in is powerful medicine, and it can do great things for you and it can do great harm to you.

In this research lab, we're trying to make housing that fits elders.

Just like a shoe that fits a person, we want the fit to be perfect.

- [Narrator] Dr. Bill Thomas has spent a couple of decades exploring ideas for housing that fit older adults.

- [Bill] We started work on designing a new approach to long-term care, literally from the ground up.

Different concept of the building, of the staff, of the elders change everything.

And that concept really became something called The Green House, which is a house where about 10 elders live together.

They have a kitchen and a big wooden table where they share meals.

Everybody has a private room.

- [Narrator] Ave Maria in Memphis, Tennessee has nine Green House homes, designed to provide a meaningful, connected existence for older adults, or elders as they're called in the Green House ecosystem.

97 year old Jerome Salvaggio says living in a Green House is like living in his own home.

- I like my own room and I do what I want to and I don't have to worry about nobody not liking what I do or what they do and things like that.

It's real nice here.

And I like all of the staff and all, they're nice to me.

- [Narrator] Currently there are more than 350 Green House homes in 32 states.

- Research on this subject has shown that it costs about the same to operate a Green House as it does a nursing home, roughly equivalent, but to build a Green House costs 10% more.

So when builders look at this and they say, I can save 10% building the building and people have to share a room, that's the price.

They opt for the cheaper construction, even though the operating costs are about the same.

We have to start creating a long-term care system as if elders mattered, as if they were fully human beings with intense and important needs that can't just be filled with a prescription.