Walk-in shower in Pembroke Pines, curbless.

The primary bath those builders drew is the one I'm asked to fix most: a raised tub in a tiled deck next to a stall you can barely turn around in. Pulled together, that footprint makes one large curbless shower with a linear drain at the back wall, a long bench and room for two. A 1990s slab is a known quantity, thick and with the drain where the plans say it is, so a recess is a routine cut rather than an exploration.

• SilverLakes: 5,186 homes opened between 1991 and 1998 on a former limestone mine, under a master association. Pembroke Falls, listings show, was built 1998 to 2004 behind four staffed gates. Chapel Trail sits beside the city's 450-acre nature preserve.
• Towngate's master association has vendors sign an indemnification agreement before working in the community; I sign it and keep going.
• The east side is older: the original 1960 square mile and 1970s annexations, with a sewer-connection program that has finished the city's phases and a county-run phase still underway. On septic, the plumber locates the drain field before a drain moves.

Twenty percent of Pembroke Pines residents are 65 or older, and Century Village is a big part of the reason: more than 7,000 condo units in four-story buildings south of Pines Boulevard, under construction in 1983, where at least one occupant must be over 55 and the Declaration of Condominium sets how alterations happen and what insurance the owner and the association carry. The city's Southwest Focal Point Senior Center became a national prototype for senior services in the 1990s, which tells you how long this city has been thinking about staying put. In a Century Village bathroom the building's slab is never cut, so curbless means a raised bathroom floor, and most owners choose a 2-inch curb instead. The rest is the aging-in-place kit: grab bars in blocking, a tiled bench, a hand-held on a slide bar, a comfort-height toilet, and a threshold a walker rolls over.

• Broward County's Barrier-Free track funds bathroom retrofits and doorway widening up to $60,000 as a forgivable zero-interest loan for qualifying households. I'll write the itemized quote an application needs.
• For a son or daughter arranging this from out of state: I do the visit with your parent and the quote with you, and the association's approval goes on the schedule first.

Pembroke Pines pumps its own water from Biscayne Aquifer wells 90 to 144 feet down, then softens, filters and chlorinates it; the 2025 report found no lead service lines in the system and a lead 90th percentile of 0.6 parts per billion. Softened water is kind to frameless glass and to the slots of a linear drain, so a squeegee is the whole maintenance plan. The city holds a CRS class 5, the best flood rating in Broward, and still requires an elevation certificate to keep it; its repetitive-loss list stands at 12 properties.