Three Triangle-area housing pilots offer NC blueprints for adults with disabilities

By Taylor Knopf

When John Pendzich, 27, moved out of a group home for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities and into his studio apartment in downtown Raleigh, his life opened up.

He got a job bagging groceries at Harris Teeter. There’s a YMCA around the corner where he likes to work out. He enjoys daily walks through the neighborhood around Hillsborough Street; he sometimes stops at Char Grill for a burger or at Morgan Street Food Hall. 

Pendzich said he likes living at Grosvenor Gardens apartment complex because he has the freedom to go out whenever he wants. When he lived in the group home, he said, he had to ask for permission anytime he wanted to go out for a walk or cup of coffee.

He’s decorated his apartment with a collection of intricate LEGO creations and a train poster in the center of the room. Pendzich’s small kitchen is equipped with everything he needs to cook some of his favorite meals, including salmon and pasta.

He said he also prefers his own space, while the group home felt crammed. 

But Pendzich isn’t totally on his own. Grosvenor Gardens is a 58-unit affordable housing complex with 10 apartments designated for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. These 10 units are one of three pilot housing projects started in recent years by the nonprofit HOPE North Carolina, which stands for Housing Options for People with Exceptionalities. 

HOPE NC is redesigning what supportive housing can look like for people with disabilities. Each pilot community looks a little different, but each has a community facilitator who checks in with residents regularly and supports them with whatever they need — from help navigating maintenance issues, creating and managing a budget, finding employment, or helping them develop interpersonal relationships. Many of the residents also have special Medicaid waivers, such as the Innovations Waiver or 1915(i) waiver, that provide community-based services to support their lives in the community.

The goal of the HOPE NC pilot housing programs is to demonstrate the different ways people with disabilities can live independently while also receiving support through services and their peers. For many adults with disabilities, the default options have been to live in congregate settings or in their childhood homes; neither offers much chance to be independent. 

“Let’s create some other innovative options and then try to get the higher-ups in the state and the people who do have the purse strings to see how it can work — and how it can be so much better,” said Laura Wells, executive director of HOPE NC. “Then maybe the funding and the policy changes will follow.”

Creating a model

HOPE NC’s three pilot communities look different because they were built through different partnerships. The variety is intentional.

Housing isn’t “one-size-fits-all,” Wells said. “It’s really the choices you make along the way, the steps along the way, and the partnerships.” The hope is that other groups across the state can replicate the model.

Grosvenor Gardens, where Pendzich lives, is a historic apartment complex in downtown Raleigh that the housing nonprofit CASA bought a few years ago. Alliance Health, the regional organization that manages Medicaid services for people with mental health and developmental disabilities, invested in renovations in exchange for CASA setting aside 10 units for adults with disabilities, Wells explained. Alliance also secured housing vouchers through a local housing authority and partnered with HOPE NC to provide on-site supportive services. 

The first residents moved in in 2024 and are supported by HOPE NC’s community facilitator. 

Alecia Hicks is community facilitator for the Grosvenor Gardens residents, and in addition to checking in with each individually, she organizes weekly events and outings. HOPE NC built a pavilion behind the apartment complex where the residents gather for seasonal activities such as pumpkin painting. They walk together to nearby coffee shops or to the YMCA for group fitness classes. Occasionally, Hicks arranges transportation for field trips to places like the Durham Museum of Life and Science. Each pilot community has its own facilitator to support the residents. 

HOPE NC’s first pilot community is in downtown Durham at North Street Neighborhood, an intentional community of people living with and without disabilities that was started by its own residents about 12 years ago. Over time people moved out, changed jobs or had children, and the original intentions of the founders shifted, Wells explained. Residents with disabilities who didn’t have a family member helping manage their day-to-day activities began falling through the cracks. 

In early 2024, HOPE NC partnered with the homeowners at North Street to bring in its community facilitator model. “That was our first foray into doing what we had envisioned,” Wells said.

The latest project

HOPE NC’s newest project goes a step further. The organization held a ribbon cutting event Oct. 13 at Weavers Grove, a group of homes in a mixed-income neighborhood in Chapel Hill that are being developed by Habitat for Humanity of Orange County. 

HOPE NC purchased four two-bedroom homes from Habitat to rent to adults with disabilities. Eight residents will be moving in over the coming weeks — many living independently for the first time. They’ll get rental assistance from Orange County to keep their housing costs from rising above 30 percent of their income. The housing initiative is also supported by Alliance Health, N.C. Housing Finance Agency and the Town of Chapel Hill. 

Wells said these four homes are just the first phase planned for Weavers Grove, which has neighborhood walking trails and free public transit nearby. There also are plans to build a community center with a coffee shop. The goal is for HOPE NC to own and rent out 11 homes in Weavers Grove, and the group has already received nearly 50 applications. 

“We have a North Carolina Inclusive Housing Coalition, where we meet with other groups of people who are trying to do it in other parts of the state, because our goal is we want to encourage it to happen and to support other groups doing it,” Wells said.

She said the nonprofit is finishing a step-by-step guide and can offer technical assistance to organizations that want to build something similar, noting that urban locations and rural settings will need different plans. 

Navigating limited resources

Advocates and families of people with disabilities say that supportive housing options are severely lacking in North Carolina. It can be particularly difficult for people with multiple issues, such as a severe mental illness and a physical or developmental disability, to find housing options to support all of their needs. 

Meanwhile, the ability to live in the community — in the least restrictive environment — is the legal precedent set by the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act and later reinforced by the Supreme Court’s 1999 Olmstead decision. The disability community has watched nervously as the U.S. Department of Justice has changed its interpretation of what it means for people with disabilities to live in the community under the Trump administration. 

State officials have acknowledged the gap between that legal standard and what’s available. Kelly Crosbie, director of mental health at the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services, said during an August virtual meeting held by the North Carolina Council on Developmental Disabilities that sometimes the state has helped people leave institutions only to move them into “an institution in the community,” such as an adult care or group home.

“We can’t fool ourselves and say, ‘Well, that’s not an institution,’” Crosbie said. “Of course it is.”

She said some options that are billed as community housing are still essentially institutions with little choice, little individualization and few opportunities for friendships or outings. Crosbie said the problem comes down to resources. 

“There are things we want to do, but they’re going to take at this point a lot more years than we want to do them,” she said. “But we know that we’ve got to have better housing.”

In the meantime, Crosbie said the department has built a housing resource page that lists available housing, services, relevant rules and laws, and financial programs. DHHS also released a strategic housing plan in 2023 that outlines its goals for adding housing options for people with disabilities. 

“I know that it’s a patchwork system,” she said. “It’s very hard and confusing, but it helps us to ascertain what exists and to come up with a plan that could be a lot better than all that.”

Wells said HOPE NC pilot communities exist partly because of how the state has spent its money. 

“The problem is that if you funnel all your money into one solution, which is kind of what we’ve seen in North Carolina,” Wells said, the result is few alternatives to congregate living.

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