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This article appears in the January 2005 issue of Next American City magazine.
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City roll call
Grandfamilies
An Unsupported Safety Net
Pick them up, love them to pieces, spoil them rotten, and drop them off. For many, this is the joy of grandparenting. But for 2.4 million grandparents in the U.S. who are raising their grandchildren, it’s a day in, day out, full-time job. According to the 2000 census, 4.5 million children (6.3 percent of all children under eighteen) live in grandparent-headed households, a 30 percent increase from the last census. Of these, 69 percent live in urban households headed by a single grandmother with less than a high school education.
From a lack of physical and emotional support to the challenge of getting proper housing, the burden on many grandparents, especially the 19 percent living below the poverty level, is extreme. Parental abandonment, the high incidence of divorce, an increase in the number of never-married mothers (especially teen mothers), parental imprisonment, drug addiction, mental illness, child abuse, and HIV/AIDS have all contributed to this “silent epidemic.”
The United States Office of Personnel Management calls it an “‘epidemic’ because the number of grandparents serving as primary caregivers is growing rapidly; ‘silent’ because it has not yet been recognized by the public service sector of society.” Demographers have coined the term “skipped generation” to define this phenomenon, and the AARP has created the Grandparent Information Center to assist these caregivers.
Saving Kids, Saving Taxes
“We call these grandparents our ‘silent saviors’,” says Debra Melin, Program Director of Youth Outreach Services in Chicago, “because you don’t hear about them and they’re doing such a wonderful service.” A federal task force study found that “if less than 20% of the children living in grandparent-maintained homes outside of the foster care system were to enter the system, it would cost the taxpayers an estimated additional $4.5 billion a year.”
If these grandparents are rescuing a generation of lost kids and saving the government billions of dollars, what is the government doing for them? Debbie Burkart, Vice President of Supportive Housing for National Equity Fund, Inc. (NEF), which funds affordable housing, believes that “grandparents are falling between the cracks. You can’t do a seniors’ building with any resident children. You can’t get the grandparents food stamps because they aren’t legal guardians, and if they become legal guardians they have another set of rules to contend with. We are dealing with the homeless youth of America, and we don’t recognize our greatest resource.”
For example, Tracy Martin*, became the caregiver of her two grandchildren when their mother became too ill to care for them. “DCFS [Illinois Department of Children and Family Services] placed them with me,” she says, “but then insisted we move out of my one-bedroom apartment [in Hyde Park, Chicago,] because there wasn’t enough separate space for my grandson.” Rebecca Johnson’s daughter dropped off each of her seven children at Rebecca’s house in the Southwest Side of Chicago, returning only when she’d given birth to a new one. The new family urgently needed affordable housing: “We were living in a rat-infested slum with no electricity, and within two years she had two more children. We desperately needed a place to live.”
Linette Kinchen is the head of the GRANDFamilies Program of Chicago, a resource and support center for grandparents of the skipped generation, and herself a grandmother raising her own grandchildren. For grandparents in this situation, she says, “housing is our biggest challenge. There just isn’t any intergenerational affordable housing. We’re seeing more and more children dying before their parents, leaving grandchildren with no place to go. They move into their grandparent’s one-bedroom or studio unit in a senior center and are then forced to leave. All of a sudden everyone’s whole world is turned upside down.”
A Bureaucratic Mess
Federal and state programs are partly to blame. Congress created the Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) in 1986 to encourage private developers to rehabilitate and build affordable housing with facilities for either low-income families or the elderly—but not for seniors with families. To get family housing credit, projects must cater to tenants who are “working people with below median incomes who pay the entire rent.”
In addition, these subsidized programs will not fund any additional services for either the seniors or the children that go beyond a standard rental apartment.
The list of similar legislative exceptions is endless. Section 202 of the HUD funding act provides Supportive Housing for the Elderly, but not for the elderly with children. Other Federal programs provide for the homeless, but not homeless families.
Recent legislation has created some possible new opportunities, though they have yet to be implemented. The 1996 Welfare Reform Act added a specific line item to the 2000 census that counted the number of grandparents who were primary caregivers for their grandchildren. The resulting statistics served as ammunition for a number of advocacy groups, including an organization called Generations United that was largely responsible for the passage of the federal LEGACY Act of 2003. To address the critical housing needs of grandparent caregivers, the LEGACY Act creates a $10 million demonstration program to develop intergenerational housing specifically for households headed by an elderly grandparent, provides specialized training to HUD workers on the importance of this demographic, and calls for a national study of the housing needs of grandparent-headed families.
At the moment, the LEGACY Act’s passage is a symbolic victory: funds have yet to be appropriated for the programs authorized in the bill. If current projects are any indication, the burden for relief will rest in the hands of creative organizations backed by forward-thinking city and state governments.
Creative Approaches in the States
The GrandFamilies House in Dorchester, Massachusetts, is currently the only housing project in the country specifically designed for grandparent-headed families. It consists of 26 two-, three-, and four-bedroom apartments. The project is a collaboration between three non-profit organizations—BAC-YOU (Boston Aging Concerns-Young and Old United), the Women’s Institute for Housing and Economic Development, and the Boston YWCA—supported by public funding secured through a complex series of end runs around existing legislation. Similar projects are being discussed in Baltimore, New York, Cleveland, Detroit, Minneapolis, New Haven, Philadelphia, and Phoenix.
Chicago’s Mayor’s Office for People with Disabilities, with funds from an NEA New Public Works Initiative and six city departments, kicked off an architectural competition for prototype housing for grandfamilies in the Roseland community on the city’s far South Side. Winning Boston-based firm Office dA expects to complete the Intergenerational Learning Center, which will include a Senior Satellite Center with two Head Start classrooms, ten dwelling units, and in keeping with Chicago’s recent leadership in the environmental design field, green roofs in late 2005.
Interviews with potential residents conducted at Archeworks, the City of Chicago’s educational partner for this development, highlighted the grandparents’ concern for privacy, security, accessibility, and community. The project borrows ideas from the GrandFamilies House, including spaces for teenage activities and more social services. Add “enough closets to store hand-me-downs, a kitchen with room for a table to supervise the kid’s homework, adequate soundproofing, and a bathroom with double sinks,” says GRANDFamilies’ Kinchen, “and you’ve got a sweet place.”
“We’re looking to create a community, not a temporary landing,” says Dawn Balbus, a student at Archeworks. “The design provides for the children at all ages, and for the grandparents as they grow older. It’ll provide spaces for the teenagers that are separate from the young kids, and it won’t look like an ‘old people’s home.’ Grandparents will have a place to get away from the kids, too, so they can mingle with their age group.”
A series of courtyards between the units will give each house a private outdoor space while walkways and terraces will allow for social interaction. The homes are designed to be bright and sunny with ground level and clerestory windows and overhangs; some will boast exterior porches. Other thoughtful touches include wiring for Internet access, ample closet space, and extra soundproofing. Flexibility within the floor plan will ensure that the units can convert from a single residence to a two-unit configuration, allowing a senior whose grandchildren have left the nest to remain in the complex.
The separate “Satellite Building,” which will serve as the Center’s activity hub, is designed to foster social interaction between the seniors, their grandchildren, and members of the community while maintaining the necessary security and separation in sensitive areas. “We are able to achieve this by introducing an intertwining dual circulation system—a double helical ramp—that connects in only two spots where the physical connections are necessary: in the lobby and the main dining area,” says Monica Ponce de Leon of Office dA. “At the same time, grandparents and kids will be in touch visually and acoustically.”
The facility will include space and programming for Head Start and senior programs, as well as after-school activities for teens and other members of the community. Flexibility will be built-in, so rooms that serve seniors during the day, for instance, can be used by teenagers in the evening. A playground and community garden will rest between the Center and the residences.
The effect this $6 million project has on the lives of the grandparents and their grandchildren will be its most important measurement. Can good architecture, coupled with social initiatives help alleviate the grandparents’ burdens while creating a new generation of responsible and healthy citizens? “Perhaps,” says Balbus. “If the architecture and lack of programming in the ‘projects’ helped to tear down the families, maybe the architecture and thoughtfulness of this facility will help build up their dignity. That would be priceless.”
*Both grandmothers’ names have been changed to protect their privacy.
REFERENCES
American Association of Retired Persons (AARP)
Administration on Aging
Generations United
The Urban Institute
Boston Aging Concerns - Young and Old United, Inc
GRANDFamilies Program of Chicago
Chalfie, Deborah. “Going it Alone: A Closer Look at Grandparents Raising Children.” Washington D.C: AARP, Special Activities Department, Women’s Initiative, 1994.
“Intergenerational Learning and Care Centers: A Report from Generations United to the Commission on Affordable Housing and Health Facility Needs for Seniors in the 21st. Century.” Commission on Affordable Housing and Health Facility Needs, June 2002.
Scarcella, Cynthia Andrews, Jennifer Ehrle, and Rob Green, “Identifying and Addressing the Need of Children in Grandparent Care” New Federalism: National Survey of America’s Families. Aug 2003, No. B-55.
Available at: http://www.urban.org
