Ruggles

Affordable

Assisted

Living

Boston,       Massachusetts

Introduction

The Developers New Communities Services New Atlantic Development Committee to End Elder Homelessness

The Resident

The Member

Audio Tour

The Numbers

New Communities Services

Pamela Shea is president of New Communities Services, a developer of Ruggles Affordable Assisted Living Community.

New Communities Services' primary purpose is to do low-income housing for people with special needs, particularly for elderly people. Our goal is to try and keep them in the community instead of having them institutionalized. We do that by running housing programs and adult-day-health programs.

A room at Ruggles Affordable Assisted Living.

The primary purpose of doing Ruggles Assisted Living was to try and provide a continuum of care for low-income elderly. But that was also the biggest problem, because there really wasn't a way to pay for it adequately. This is the first assisted living project [in the city] that we know of that is 100 percent subsidized.

We got into this because we noticed that the clients we were serving had gaps in their services. There was no assisted housing for them.

We've worked with both New Atlantic Development Corporation and the Committee to End Elder Homelessness (CEEH) on a number of other projects. When we all sat down to do the planning, the biggest problem wasn't deciding what we wanted to do, but how we could pay for it — not in the development phase, which used to be the problem, but in the operating phase. And that's still where we're having the greatest problem. It's been really tough.

Ruggles Affordable Assisted Living is the first of its kind, so there really isn't any established program for it. The subsidized payment system for the residents is really complicated. We have some McKinney money for Section 8 and some of the residents have Section 8 certificates.

The service part of the package involves a number of things, including Group Adult Foster Care. It's really hard for us to serve all the residents we'd like to serve because the program only pays for those who fit into a narrow slot.

Another problem is that the residents don't get to keep very much money. Some people are really reluctant to choose a program where the amount of money they have control over is small.

An Evolving Model
But the Ruggles program is brand new, and I think over time the funding mechanism will change. It's taken a long time to rent it up, partially because of the funding mechanism and also because the community, the service agencies, and the residents don't understand what it is.

We're getting a lot more people from nursing homes than we expected. It's a different population than we thought we were going to get. They're much frailer than we expected, so some people don't stay for long; the move-out rate is much higher than we expected. We've had seven people move out since October because some of them were very old and very frail.

Two people who live in Ruggles Assisted Living actually went to school in that building and wanted to move back to the neighborhood.

We have a number of formerly homeless people there, which is also hard. Maybe 15 percent of the units were going to be furnished by a church in the town of Weston. But almost everyone who came to us came with nothing. So that tells you a lot about who we're serving. People don't even have a bed.

When we realized who we were going to be serving we also realized that CEEH did more work with the homeless than New Communities Services. We talked to them about managing the building, and they said they would be interested in managing it if they had an ownership role in it. I was very happy to give them half of the development. They're doing a really good job. It has been good working with them.

An Important Program
But the program is wonderful and works for the most difficult people even better than we thought it would. But it's the first of its kind, and the model needs tweaking; the financial-management structure eventually has to change. There has to be a better way to do this. If Medicaid wants to keep people in the community, then they're going to have to figure out a payment mechanism that can do that.

Right now, CEEH and New Communities are losing money on this building, and we're both nonprofits. Nobody wants to make a profit, but nobody is going to do these developments unless they can at least break even. We're taking a really careful look at how it works and what we need.

The idea is replicable and wonderful, but how do you pay for this idea? This development is saving [the government] a fortune, so it makes sense. It's cheaper and better, but we just have to figure out exactly how to do it.