Mason Minchen doesn’t speak much. But he communicates volumes.
In the late afternoon light, Minchen sits in the living room spending time with his roommates and taking questions.
Does he want to go on a walk?
He sticks out his right hand, shaking it dismissively. No.
Does he have friends here at the house?
His left hand nods up and down. Yes.
Does he like living here with his roommates?
Both hands nod up and down emphatically as he bounces slightly on the couch. An enthusiastic ‘yes.’
Minchen is diagnosed with nonverbal autism and lives with four others in a San Jose home for adults with developmental and intellectual disabilities run by Life Services Alternatives, or LSA for short. LSA operates homes where disabled adults can live in a community with each other and their neighborhoods. While the region faces a shortfall of services for adults like Minchen, LSA is pushing to open more homes in the Bay Area – including one this spring in Morgan Hill.
“As a parent of a disabled child, you fight your whole life to get them services,” said Steven Minchen, Mason’s father. “We looked at a lot of places and I can tell you it was by far the best. His life is better: he’s happy, he’s safe, he’s secure. That’s what you want your child to have.”
LSA began in the early 2000s, when news spread that the local mental health institution at the time, Agnews Developmental Center, was slated to close. The move left hundreds at the institution in limbo, so a group of parents of disabled adults banded together to create housing for their children.
In 2002, they founded Life Services Alternatives, and with help of some state funds, bought their first homes. Since then, the group has steadily grown and, with the opening of a home this spring, will operate 16 homes serving some 75 adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities throughout the South Bay.
Each home is based on a model of group living that seeks to offer the community members — the term for the residents of the homes — a degree of independence while fostering camaraderie. Community members live at the homes full-time, and generally spend their days at work or at day programs. Together, members will share dinner around a dining room table, volunteer and go out on excursions together, and take part in the neighborhood at large through work and play.
The needs and the level of support vary widely from person to person. Many community members speak fluently or hold jobs in the community, while others may be nonverbal or require intensive medical care. Each has their own set of needs, and sometimes, their own “language,” and building the relationships to properly understand that language can take time.
Back at the house, Luc Emond, one of Minchen’s roommates, communicates his delight in repeated grunts, and Musa Bangura, a caretaker at the house, grunts back. Emond bounces with enthusiasm and grins back at Bangura. Along with his utterances, Emond uses a series of colorful cards that he can point to his needs whether that be juice, or — his personal favorite — veggie straws.
Bangura, who has accompanied Luc and his roommates for three and a half years, is familiar with the nuances in Emond’s utterances. “I just try to do my best. I like helping people,” said Bangura, who speaks almost nonchalantly and prefers to focus on the commonalities between them. “We’re all the same.”
Despite the level of care, many within the organization admit that the work is only a small step in addressing the larger issue of how to care for adults with disabilities. In Santa Clara County, home to some 6,000 disabled adults, three of five adults with disabilities live at home due to a lack of affordable housing. And nationwide, a slim majority of caregivers do not have a future plan for their disabled loved one, which can leave care at the discretion of courts if they die.
“A lot of parents tell us their worst nightmare is that they get old and can no longer care for their children,” said Dana Hooper, CEO of Life Services Alternatives, and the father of an adult with disabilities. “For us, it’s really personal.”
Additionally, the nation faces a shortage of professionals with the expertise to care for adults with developmental disabilities, especially given the level of support and the varied needs of disabled adults.
At the same time, providers like LSA face the housing shortage familiar to those in Silicon Valley. Though the group aims to create homes wherever potential residents may want to live, the state offers the same funding regardless of whether the house is in a market as varied as Campbell or Morgan Hill.
Those hurdles can make it difficult to scale the model across the region and maintain the level of care at the same time.
The Morgan Hill home marks the culmination of years of fundraising, house hunting, remodeling and permitting.
“It’s a huge undertaking … There’s all these little details that you wouldn’t imagine that go into creating a home,” said Sharmean Heffernan, Program Director for LSA.
Often, the homes must be remodeled to fit the needs of the incoming occupants, that means making wheelchair ramps for the entrances, widening doors and hallways to fit wheelchairs and walkers, or adding outdoor swings to offer opportunities to those who need stimulation when they sit. Heffernan said even neighbors from the block came to help with different projects for the new home. “Morgan Hill has welcomed us with open arms.”
Now that the home is ready in Morgan Hill, it will welcome its first newcomers in the following weeks. The community members are selected by a regional state agency then finalized through a “matchmaking” process to help make sure that the future roommates will get along. If all goes well, LSA expects to have five living in the home by April.
Even as they wrap up, the group already has sights on finding a 17th location, starting the steady, deliberate process of growing into another home.
“We’d love to be able to do this 10 times over, because there’s a need, but we focus on the quality. So we do it slowly and we do it thoughtfully, and we do it with the people that we’re supporting in mind,” said Heffernan. “It’s a labor of love.”