Location of service facilities for the elderly

Senior centers provide a variety of supportive services for independent elderly adults. In many metropolitan areas, the elderly population is growing and redistributing from central cities to suburbs, where accessibility to senior centers is limited. Policy analysts need to locate senior centers to best meet changing demands for service. We present alternative hierarchical facility location models for senior centers applied to Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. We find that a model that minimizes consumer disutility and unserved demands is preferred to one that maximizes utility alone, and that the former model is well-behaved in response to changes in structural parameters.