Preserving Senior Housing in a Changing City: Innovative Efforts of an Interprofessional Coalition

Background

Despite Detroit’s image of being under-populated with large amounts of vacant land and abandoned, blighted homes and buildings, rapid growth and revitalization has been spurred by an influx of people with higher incomes in the city’s urban core. This growth has resulted in a shortage of multi-unit apartment housing, causing increased rental rates through the conversion of low-income housing into market-rate housing. Additionally, the 2007–2008 mortgage foreclosure crisis caused many seniors who had predatory loans to lose their homes. Seniors who moved from employment to Social Security and could not afford the expenses of a single home often lost their homes to tax foreclosure. The foreclosure crisis created a shortage of rental housing and caused rental prices to escalate. This, coupled with the conversion, or potential conversion, of apartment buildings serving low-income senior citizens in Detroit into market-rate housing, has created a human service crisis for seniors living in the downtown and midtown areas of Detroit. City planners had anticipated this concern and had created plans to address vulnerable seniors and their housing needs in previous administrations (City of Detroit Senior Housing Preservation Strategy, 2001). While these plans were set aside for various reasons, with a new mayor and new investment in the city the possibilities for addressing these previously-acknowledged concerns reemerge. In fact, the current city administration has expressed support for the coalition’s vision and challenged it to play an active role in advising the city in preserving low-income housing. As a post-bankrupt Detroit pursues revitalization, the needs of seniors living in low-income housing must be addressed. Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan recently highlighted the need for action on senior housing in his 2017 State of the City address, stating, “There is no point in being mayor of this city if you can’t stand up for people who are otherwise being pushed around…It’s not just enough to preserve the affordable housing we have, because as rents rise in this city, we’re going to have a need for affordable housing everywhere. We need to act. We’ve made a commitment as an administration that it doesn’t matter what part of town you’re in, we’re going to be committed to affordable housing” (Duggan, 2017).

Detroit is not the only city with a scarcity of housing for low-income seniors. The number of senior renters in the United States is anticipated to go from 5.8 million to 12.2. million in the next two decades (Bipartisan Policy Center Senior Health and Housing Task Force, 2016). The task force also notes that 1.8 million seniors experience rent burden labeled as severe, meaning they pay more than 50 percent of their income for housing. As is the case with most urban areas, Detroit has a high concentration of subsidized low-income senior housing. There is insufficient support at the local, state, or federal level to finance new housing for low-income seniors in Detroit who may be displaced and will be compelled to relocate. The current focus of new development is for affordable housing, which does not address the issue of housing for low-income seniors since affordable housing will be priced at a rate that is unaffordable for seniors with incomes below 20% of the Area Median Income (AMI). Thus, there is a shortage of low-income senior housing in Detroit and seniors incur waiting lists as the population of seniors steadily increases. The scarcity of low-income senior housing in Detroit has been featured in local newspapers, and was just featured in the Wall Street Journal in March 2017 in an article titled, “Detroit’s Resurgence Brings New Housing Concerns” (Kusisto, 2017).

Linking Housing and Health

Given the prevalence of diabetes, hypertension, and cardiovascular disease of older Detroiters that exceeds national and statewide prevalence, and the inadequate transportation in the city (outlined in the “Dying Before their Time” report by the Detroit Area Agency on Aging and Authority Health’s Population Health 2016 report (Kallenbach, and Smitherman, 2012; Authority Health, 2017)), we are concerned about how relocation affects the already vulnerable health status of those living in Detroit. Scholars have found displacement has negative effects on health and causes stress and loss of social networks (Regional Public Health, 2011), in addition to the health impacts of construction work that is often part of this process (Pratt, 2008). Other scholars have found that gentrification is a neighborhood stressor with great importance to residents and particularly important when examining health disparities (Shmool et al., 2015).

By preventing unnecessary displacement through housing preservation strategies, we hope to avert physical and mental health decline in already vulnerable seniors. For those who are displaced and particularly impacted through the loss of their social and health care networks, we hope to avoid decline by assessing their needs and creating an environment where those needs are coordinated with area providers and their well-being is ensured. For many low-income seniors, there is great importance to live near access to transportation, medical center, and walkable shopping, activities and places of worship.

A Coalition Forms

In November 2013, Senior Housing Preservation-Detroit (SHP-D) was created to advocate on behalf of seniors to preserve existing low-income apartments, to educate community leaders regarding the issues of displacement, and to promote the inclusion of low-income seniors in the vision for Detroit’s redevelopment. This coalition formed as a direct result of seniors being displaced when their building’s United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) contract expired and the property was subsequently converted to market rate prices, displacing over 100 seniors. The coalition maintains a database of HUD buildings and their contract expirations, and estimates that over 2,000 seniors in over a dozen apartment buildings in downtown and midtown alone are at risk of being displaced from their homes and communities over the next decade.

Since its formation, SHP-D has convened meetings with Detroit’s HUD office, the Michigan State Housing Development Authority, and with the mayor’s office to raise awareness of the need to preserve existing residential structures, or existing HUD vouchers, as the most viable tactic for ensuring the stability of the existing senior residential population in the downtown and midtown areas, and the need to ensure older adults who have to involuntarily relocate experience a moving process as successful and low-risk as possible, including addressing the need to assess their personal and community resources and their physical, mental, and spiritual health needs. Meetings have also been held with elected officials (e.g., U.S. Senator Stabenow’s office) and municipal staff.

Members of the coalition obtained a ChangeAGEnt grant, Relocation Amidst Revitalization: Recreating Social Worlds for Older Adults, from the John A. Hartford Foundation to interview older adults (n = 44) who were displaced in downtown Detroit as a way to enhance our capacity to communicate with policy makers about the impact of redevelopment on seniors. Our research team included community partners: a parish nurse from St. Aloysius Parish, a tenant organizer from the United Community Housing Coalition, and social work and nursing students from five local universities. This project transcended disciplinary and professional boundaries.

In this project, partners collaborated with the grant submission, designed research questions, trained interviewees on interview and participant observation methods, analyzed data, and presented to multiple audiences. Several members of the coalition published an article recounting the work of SHP-D in the journal, Traumatology, titled, “Senior housing at a crossroads: A case study of a university/community partnership in Detroit, Michigan” (Perry, Wintermute, et al., 2015). The article includes a relocation assessment tool for seniors, developed by the coalition, which can be used by other communities facing similar challenges. Given the dearth of research on relocation experiences of older adults from diverse socioeconomic and racial and ethnic backgrounds (see Perry, Andersen, and Kaplan, 2014 for review of relocation literature), the coalition’s work through the ChangeAGEnts grant has contributed to the relocation literature in gerontology by documenting experiences of underserved Detroiters, a majority of whom are African Americans.

This work has been shared locally (Authority Health [Perry, 2016a], Michigan Center for African American Aging Research Summer Training Workshop [Perry, 2016b], Wayne State University Humanities Center [Perry, 2016c], Mah and Perry, 2016) and statewide (Michigan Association of Planning [Perry, 2016d], Council of Michigan Foundations, Financial Institutions Community Development Conference [Perry, 2016e]). Nationally, this work has been shared with academic audiences such as the Annual Meetings of the Urban Affairs Association (Perry and Petrusak, 2017), Society for Social Work and Research (Perry, Carsten, and Rorai, 2017a), and the Gerontological Society of America (GSA; (Perry, 2017; Perry & Mah, 2017)). Many of these talks have been co-presented between academics, students, and community partners because of the emphasis on a community-based participatory research framework (please see reference list for these talks). This project is one of three selected case studies in Accelerating change: How Change AGEnts acquired tools to become effective advocates for practice and policy change, featured at the 2016 GSA Annual Scientific Meeting (John A. Hartford Foundation Change AGEnts Initiative, 2016) on the GSA website, and at the GSA 2016 Policy Institute.

Notably, few qualitative studies investigate direct gentrification-induced displacement in any depth due to a major methodological challenge; namely, that it is very difficult to locate people who have been displaced because “by definition, displaced residents have disappeared from the very places where researchers or census-takers go to look for them” (Newman & Wyly, 2006, p 27). Our coalition’s first project offering the tenant perspective also heeds Slater’s (2011, p 580) call for more work “that seeks to document displacement (in any or all of its forms) from below, in the sobering terms of those who experience it.” We were only able to do this work because of the deep relationships coalition members have with the seniors being displaced. In our coalition’s project to understand “perspectives from below,” we were most interested in potential post-traumatic stress disorder from their relocation experiences, whether their health care providers (doctors, pharmacists) had changed, and how their social networks including family and friends had changed. Davidson (2009) writes, “put simply, displacement understood purely as spatial dislocation tell us very little about why it matters. We miss the very space/place tensions (Taylor, 1999) that make space a social product (Lefebvre, 1991).

The coalition also recently produced a short documentary video, “Holding down the fort: Seniors’ perspectives on belonging in a changing Detroit” which premiered in May 2016. This film’s co-producers, Dennis Archaumbault and Claudia Sanford, worked tirelessly with filmmaker Kate Levy (who also has produced an instrumental documentary on the Flint Water Crisis). Through the ChangeAGEnts Communications workshop, two key members of the coalition, Dennis Archaumbault and Lynn Alexander, developed a dissemination plan for the video. The purpose of the documentary is to provide an overview of the issue through the comments and visuals of those who are, or have been, directly affected by dislocation.

Future Plans

Many pressing social problems that communities face involve cooperation by different stakeholders. Developing and maintaining a coalition of organizations brought together around an issue entails both challenges and successes. Now, in its fourth year, the coalition has been successful in advocating for their issue and produced multimedia forms of advocacy. Overall, its members exhibit high trust of each other and a common purpose. However, at times, membership and participation in the coalition has been uncertain and unsteady. This is mostly due to members’ other responsibilities that limit their participation in the coalition. The organizational structure of the coalition is evolving, with a current plan to have rotating chairs serving about six to nine months. The coalition has four committees: preservation, communication, research, and advocacy. The latter was renamed recently from relocation committee, which focused on the needs of seniors being displaced and was responsible for developing the relocation assessment tool mentioned above. The coalition has also begun to advocate for improved housing quality, in addition to preserving housing. Questions remain about decision-making authority within the coalition, as most of the decisions have involved key members, often the committee chairs. As the coalition continues, the coalition members will work on clear lines of decision making authority. Lastly, the coalition originally formed to focus on the midtown and downtown districts for a contiguous area in the city’s core, where senior housing is in jeopardy. In the May 2017 meeting, the coalition members voted to expand the coalition’s geographical scope to include the larger Woodward corridor. Dr. Perry stated at the meeting that given the changes in the city, including the new light rail (Qline), it would be hard to justify maintaining the original geographic scope of the coalition’s work.

The coalition realizes that its growth and development is largely contingent on the availability of staff support. A grant from Detroit Initiatives Support Corporation will underwrite the cost of interns, allowing the coalition to submit larger foundation grants. If able to expand, the coalition’s work will help the city integrate its senior housing needs into larger plans for low-income housing preservation across the lifespan and explore ways to both preserve and create housing (through financing and other mechanisms). On September 19, 2017, Detroit’s City Council passed two ordinances related to affordable housing concerns: 1) An Inclusionary Housing Ordinance which establishes a Housing Trust Fund and includes a requirements of affordable units for projects receiving discounted city-owned land and/or a certain amount of public subsidies and 2) a Notification Ordinance. According to the Detroit Free Press, “The two ordinances—one requiring 20% affordable units and the other putting a notification ordinance in place to protect seniors and low income residents from being unexpectedly displaced—were brought forth by Councilwoman Mary Sheffield, who said the vote was three years in the making, and an effort to push back against gentrification that’s been seen elsewhere in the country.” (Stafford, 2017). The coalition could help develop a senior housing preservation plan, aligned with the city’s multi-age and multi-neighborhood preservation strategy.

The excitement generated by young professionals filling midtown and downtown Detroit streets presents a real risk of two Detroits emerging: one that is affluent and young, living in the urban core, and the other that is impoverished and largely old, living in the neighborhoods or beyond the city limits. Mayor Mike Duggan also recognizes the potential concern. Setting a vision for the city, he stated, “We are not having a city where one section of the city is only available to the wealthy, and the other sections are left for others. We are going to have a city where anybody can live everywhere.” (Duggan, 2017). The SHP-D coalition is a voice of inclusion, with “One Detroit for all” serving as its slogan. Advocating for the inclusion of seniors in the vision of the emerging Detroit is essential to providing a voice of inclusion for all.

By preventing unnecessary displacement through housing preservation strategies, we hope to avert physical and mental health decline of already vulnerable seniors in Detroit and when those who are displaced particularly through the loss of the social and health care networks, we hope to avoid decline by assessing their needs and creating an environment where their needs are coordinated with area providers and their wellbeing ensured.

Our coalition’s first project offering the tenant perspective also heeds Slater’s (2011:580) call for more work “that seeks to document displacement (in any or all of its forms) from below, in the sobering terms of those who experience it.”