Turtle Shell

One of the things I said that I would write about in my blog is obtaining services. As I have mentioned before, Travis was placed on the waiting list at Foothills Gateway in Larimer County for the State of Colorado Developmental Disability (DD) waiver. At the time we lived in a different county. It would be necessary to move Travis to the county he would be receiving services. He was placed on the waiting list in August of 2011, when he was eighteen years old.

Travis was assigned a case manager from Foothills Gateway. While he was on the waiting list he was able to receive psychiatric care and therapy. His case manager got him going on receiving those services. She provided me with the paperwork that needed to be completed in order for Travis to maintain his available services and position on the waiting list. She also told me about the Housing Choice Voucher Program.

She indicated that it would be important to get Travis on the waiting list for the housing voucher as soon as it opened up. Basically once the waiting list gets down to a workable number, the list will reopen to add new names. When it does reopen to add names it gets filled and closes pretty quickly. The length of time is not a given, a certain number of names are added and it closes. His case manager was not able to give any more specifics. The case managers don’t have any idea when it will reopen and for how long.

Travis was in luck. His case manager called to let us know that the waiting list had reopened. I immediately went in to complete the paperwork to get his name on the list.

The Housing Choice Voucher Program (formerly Section 8) provides rental assistance to income-eligible tenants by subsidizing a portion of their monthly rent and utilities and paying it directly to their landlords. The assistance provided is the difference between what the tenant pays toward rent (generally 30%-40% of the household’s gross income) and the cost of the rent.

Once you have been accepted into the Housing Choice Voucher Program, you must remain in good standing. That requires being a considerate neighbor, paying your rent on time, reporting any changes in the members of your household or your income to your residential coordinator and ensuring that your unit passes an annual inspection.

The housing voucher waiting list that Travis was on was for individuals with intellectual/developmental disabilities through Foothills Gateway, Larimer County’s Community Center Board (CCB). There is a separate list for other interested individuals directly through the county. I believe that the concept works the same way. An individual can only add their name when the list is open.

Our understanding in Travis’s case was that once your name was placed on the list it would be at least a couple of years before your name made it’s way to the top. It just depended on how many of the individuals above you on the list still needed the voucher. Sometimes individuals found alternative housing or could not be reached. Or no longer qualified for some reason.

And it was also dependent on the government funding available. The Housing Choice Voucher Program is a federal program. The amount of federal funds budgeted to this program can change from year to year.

Because we had no idea how long that process would take, we made plans to get Travis set up in his own place when he was twenty years old. He had just finished a year of transition services through our local school district.

The cost of living in Larimer County is pretty high. The vacancy rate is low. Our goal was to find him a place close to the services he was currently receiving, and the additional services that he would be receiving in the future.

Tracy and I decided that the most economical way to provide Travis a place to live was to purchase a mobile home. Travis and I drove through various mobile home parks in the vicinity and toured some homes. When we were driving through the park that we ended up choosing a home in, Travis turned to me and told me, “I feel way less anxious here”. (His words.) I looked back at him and told him, “Me too”!

The park office handed us a sheet of the available homes that they had to sell. Every home on their list was considerably over budget. Part of the reason was that the office was collecting a commission on those sales. I asked the park manager if there were any homes for sale by owner. She told me that she did not know, that I would need to drive around and look myself. Which I did.

We found a home with a for sale sign in the window. The contact number was to a commercial business that manufactured and sold mobile homes. A salesperson from the business came out and showed us the home. It was also over our budget. But then the salesperson shared that his business had set up a discounted lot rent rate with the park for three years. At the time the park had vacancies. The mobile home company had taken this home in as a trade-in. The park negotiated a deal with this company to place and sell the home in the park. Knowing that the person who bought it was unlikely to move it.

I’m all about the numbers. I calculated the difference in the park lot rental rate and the discounted rate and multiplied it by 36 months. That is how I sold Tracy on buying this home. The savings in rent was just about the same amount that the mobile home was over budget. The home was used, built in 1996. But it was the nicest home for the money that we looked at.

Travis had been on the housing voucher waiting list for a couple of years when he received a letter in January of 2015 to let him know he was approaching the top of the list. By this time he had been living on his own with a great deal of support from us for a year and a half.

Later that same month he received a “Waiting List Offer Letter” and was scheduled for an orientation to explain the program and give information regarding finding a unit. We were required to bring a great deal of paperwork, and complete more while we were at the orientation. Because we are Travis’s legal guardians it was important for me to attend the orientation with him. I explained the process to him, although he still doesn’t understand it fully, even today. And I signed the paperwork for him.

The residential coordinator seemed surprised when I asked her how hard would it be for Travis to find a vacancy that accepted the voucher. She told me she thought he would continue to live in the mobile home. I did not know at the time that staying there was an option. She explained to me that we would become Travis’s landlords and the voucher amount would be paid to us. We would be responsible to pay his park lot rent and utilities from that amount. She said that she had several parents that bought homes and rented to their kids with developmental disabilities on her caseload.

A person with a disability is allowed reasonable accommodations when necessary, to ensure an equal opportunity to participate in or benefit from Division of Housing (DOH) programs. Permitting participants to rent from a relative is an allowed reasonable accommodation.

She told us the amount that the voucher would pay each month and said that as the landlords we had to agree to that amount. Which we did, of course. We had been paying his lot rent and utilities pretty much on our own. Travis paid a small amount of rent to us from his SSI, but it only made a small dent in his monthly rental expenses. The voucher helps Travis to be more independent from us financially.

During this time we found a home in Larimer County for us as well. We were ready to downsize. Our house sold much faster than we expected. Which ended up working out ok because it allowed us to ease Travis into living on his own. We stored our belongings in the shop of the new home we bought and moved in with Travis for about six weeks. The family we purchased our new home from needed the additional time to get moved out.

We were able to furnish Travis’s new home with the extra furniture we no longer needed since we were downsizing. We spent the six weeks that we lived with him getting Travis set up in his new home. Which lucky for him fell in the middle of summer. I’m not sure we would have bought the air conditioning unit to add to his home if we weren’t living in the heat too! We did not have air conditioning in our old home, or even in the home we have now for that matter. But let me tell you, a mobile home with out any shade can get quite hot!

Travis will be 27 in July. It is going on seven years that he will have been living at the mobile home. One day, out of the blue, Travis called his home his turtle shell. I immediately understood what he meant, that his home was his safe place, his shield that protected him from the outside forces. I wasn’t sure if he had come up with that on his own, or had heard it in a book. Maybe a book that was read to him as a child? Maybe watching Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? In any case, I liked the analogy.

I know it is important that we are his landlord. But I wish we didn’t have to be. Because it is a lot. Being his parents, his legal guardians, his landlord. It’s all consuming. Parenting. Guardianing. (My made-up word.) Landlording. (Another made-up word.)

It’s hard to have a conversation that does not somehow involve Travis.

Being a landlord is not much fun. But for your child? Even less fun. With a developmental disability? Is it possible to be even less fun?

Travis needs support with the daily upkeep. He does have a housecleaner that comes once per week to do his laundry and some cleaning. And he has a live-in aide to help with decision making and locking up the house at night. She also helps to keep Travis from being exploited.

Having a live-in aide is another reasonable accommodation with DOH. DOH will pay at a two bedroom rate and allow us to offer the aide free rent and utilities in exchange for the care. We believe the accommodation is necessary for safety issues. Travis is unable at this time to determine safe boundaries for himself and his home. He opens his home to strangers that he believes are friends.

But the bulk of caring for another household falls on me and Tracy. I mow the yard. Because if I don’t the park’s maintenance team will come mow it. And charge way more than the job is worth, because they don’t want to do it either. I have offered to pay Travis to do it. He always means to get to it. But he never does. I know what some of you are thinking. If he were my son….

Until you have raised a child with a intellectual/developmental disability on the autism spectrum, and with a chronic mental illness you simply cannot say it would be different. In the end it is easier for me to do it. And shovel the snow. Because I could spend a good part of the day arguing about it with him until he has a meltdown or I can do it. So that afterwards we can maybe spend some conflict free time together. Have lunch. Run his errands.

Keeping up with regular maintenance issues is one thing. Like constantly replacing the batteries in smoke and carbon monoxide alarms because Travis needed the battery for something else. And yes, we have bought the ten year life alarms. But Travis unplugs them because they are sensitive and go off when he is smoking.

The heartbreaking part is constantly fixing things that he has broken on purpose. Travis has come a long way in his anger management. He no longer hits, spits, kicks and pinches like when he was younger. Now he punches objects. Like walls. His car. It’s hard to say he does this on purpose. Because in the moment he just does it. And then feels bad later. And we fix it. Because with the voucher program we have an annual inspection. And his home needs to be in good repair.

There is not another landlord on the planet that would put up with it, no matter the cause. Another landlord would evict him. Eviction from your unit results in immediate termination of your housing assistance.

So Travis continues with his therapy. They work on his anger management. Our hope is that he learns to be better able to cope in this world. We will not be able to be his landlords forever.

Unless I find the fountain of youth.

“The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.” - Maya Angelou