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Wednesday, September 27, 2000
Here we go again. Someone wants to open a group home for people with disabilities in a residential neighborhood. Neighbors protest that traffic and noise will hurt their property values, and local officials try to stop the project.
Unspoken, at least publicly, is the fear that having people who don't look or act "normal" right in their midst will somehow ruin everybody else's quality of life. But even those who don't see people with disabilities as scary or weird can get up in arms when the issue comes close to home.
The latest such battle is being waged in Baldwin Borough, where a nonprofit organization called the Dr. Gertrude A. Barber Center of Erie is building a 3,000-foot house on Cynthia Drive, a quiet, dead-end street. Its purpose is to house four mentally retarded people who once lived at Western Center in Washington County. Opponents are trying to stop the residence from opening.
Odds are in the group home's favor, largely due to two federal laws, the Fair Housing Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act. But the law is one thing; people's fears are another. I wouldn't presume to tell the folks on Cynthia Drive how to feel, but I would like to introduce them to someone who has lived close to a group home for nine years: Me.
My family and I live three doors from a large, three-story brick Victorian house shared by eight adults with mental retardation and eight staff members who work around the clock in shifts.
The home was already well established by the time we moved onto the street. Neighbors have told me of the ugly, two-year battle over its 1978 opening, but by the time we arrived in 1991, the residence was as much a part of the community as the maple trees, street hockey games and the Good Humor truck.
Having lived on the block for this long, I can report the following things have not happened as a result of the group home.
Looking at this list, it strikes me that if anyone should object to their neighbors, it's the people in the group home rather than the rest of us.
Oh, one other point.
What has happened as a result of the group home is this: The neighborhood has eight long-term members who are totally committed to living there.
One goes to work each day; the others go to a therapeutic activity center. They travel by bus, or Access, or a private van, just like some of the elderly folks on the street.
One fellow has resided in the house for 22 years; most of the others have a 10- to 15-year tenure. All consider it a permanent home, which makes them a more stabilizing presence than the traditional nuclear families who came and went with the job market over the past nine years.
Far from interrupting the flow of life on my urban street, the group home has become a part of it. Given half a chance, the same thing can happen on suburban Cynthia Drive.
Sally Kalson's e-mail is:skalson@post-gazette.com
None of the residents has peeled around the corner on screeching car wheels, threatening children on their bikes. This does happen too often for my taste, but never with anyone connected to the group home. No one has slipped on an icy sidewalk in front of the group home, seeing as how it's always shoveled and salted. However, at least one person, me, has cracked her head on the iceberg that forms in December and lasts until the spring at an owner-occupied house around the corner. No one has spoken disparagingly of the overgrown lawn and hedges at the group home, where everything is always neatly trimmed. I suspect, however, that our house is occasionally -- and deservedly -- the target of such remarks. No loud parties or drunken debaucheries have been thrown there, and no radios blare through its windows. The same cannot be said of the house diagonally across the street from our previous address, all of four blocks away. There's no peeling paint, rotting wood or sagging porch on the group home, one of the best-maintained properties on the street. No property values on the block have fallen since the group home opened in 1978. Quite the opposite has occurred. The house two doors away sold last summer in one week with no advertising. And when our county reassessment finally arrived in the mail -- well, let's just say it was a heart-clutching moment, and we're not appealing.