welcome to access for all i'm paul nagel your guest host for tonight i'm the executive director of stonewall community development corporation and i have with me our founder and board president tom smith stonewall community about the corporation is dedicated to creating l g b t friendly senior housing and related to health and mental health services in new york city i'm going to ask tom to talk about the genesis of the project and why this activist group got together and started working on this issue i've been an activist for about thirty years many of my friends are ten or more years older and many of them worked almost full time for out to be t writes back p the gay rights bill here in the city hiv protests of the eighty's domestic partnership in the ninety's many of the other issues that have been part of our community for the past thirty years and many of my friends had very little money but they managed to just to survive but of course as you get older the less you make the less you can live on and they were having problems maintaining their apartment i'm also a long time visiting nurse i've been in many homes probably a few one thousand over the years and it when you go into someone who's out to bt into their home most of them go back into the closet because they never know how you are going to accept them or how the aid is going to is going to help them but who's going to accept them they will hide their photos mementos they will put away their pienaar griffey their books etc the high heels and yes and they will try to hide these things and i don't blame them in some ways because the aids particularly don't have to be take hold for sensitivity and i've had many complaints where people are asked you know they're very nice a bit please have them not come back  because they told me that if i only could birded to their religion that god would make them well again and i can't tell you how many times i've heard that over over the years if you look also at the existing senior housing go fund many most of the senior houses don't have an ego to beauty people yeah i actually want to jump in here i mean beyond that we work with a group called  sage which is services and advocacy for gay lesbian transgender bisexual elders and they really pioneered this discussion it's the discussions only been happening less than ten years i think really and they  commissioned a study by the equal rights center in two thousand and thirteen and it was in ten cities and they did the old redlining call they had investigators call real estate agents pretend to be an elderly straight couple and then pretend to be an elderly gay couple and adversely differential information is is the term that they use in these studies the gay couples were given adversely differential information forty eight percent of the time in this study and those is only four years ago so the discrimination is real it's documented the other situation that we see a lot is if there is a gay person in a senior environment and someone starts to pick on the bully them it's always the gay person that gets removed from the environment rather than the bully so just as when people had to you know not be found out or lose their jobs back in the fifty's and sixty's if you had an adversary in the office all they had to do was out you were start the rumors and you would be removed it's the same dynamic so what tom's talking about with our cohort of folks and  there's a little bit older than us who went through all of the civil rights gains and then ironically and personally going back into the closet because they're afraid that the elder services sector it's going to mistreat them that's exactly right we know from national studies that gave people who are especially in this cohort are much less likely to have children and children are eighty percent of caregivers for elderly we also know that gay people  are more likely to live in poverty and that seems counterintuitive and to run against the popular narrative that single gay folks have a lot of despair disposable income but again you're talking about these five decades of discrimination where there was no job security there there's very high mental health issues there's very high health issues so there really was no information on new york city and there really isn't any information on how many gay folks there are in new york city so we formed three years ago when we decided that we wanted to be evidence based and look for innovative solutions so we spent two years working with a group called strength in numbers consulting group  because york is one of the last cities to come online and major cities come online in terms of having l g b t friendly senior housing there are projects in los angeles and chicago philadelphia san diego just brought on line there i think ten or twelve now around the country so we did research to look at ones that had succeeded and also ones that had failed then we had they did fourteen key informant interviews with policymakers in new york city about what the specific obstacles are in the new york city landscape for affordable housing for senior housing and also to ask these policy people if we were to do a city wide survey what kind of data would be important for them or would speak to them then we took all of that information we actually spent five or six months crafting forty questions survey we launched it last spring it was live for two and a half months we needed to get five hundred respondents to make it valid scientifically and we actually had nine hundred and sixty the data yes from all five boroughs the data is very rich we still had more white men than anyone else so as horrifying as some of the statistics we're going to share with you are if when we increased our outreach and we did get enough people of color and trans folks to be able to do subsets and comparisons but twenty five percent people of color if we can raise that number as we collect information then  we know from the comparisons that we did from this ready survey that the statistics will be even more dire and stark for instance in new york city  women gay women are twice as likely as straight women to live in poverty trans women are four times as likely to live in poverty as their straight counterparts we found in we did out a question on substandard  housing and almost a rd of the survey had lived in substandard housing as defined by h p d housing preservation of on a city agency but when you look at the people of color cohort and the trans cohort the percentages are much much higher and so we believe that as stark as the information is now when we can collect more information we are committed to collecting information at every with every step that we take so all of our programming has data capture they had at least one major health issue lot of people think though that's all a chevy would it's not actually a little less than eighteen percent of those who answered had h quarter of those surveyed had some type of mental health issues of course vast majority being major depression and being on anti side you know antidepressants and so forth but still that's much higher than the average population when you aggregate cardiac it should be diabetes hypertension etc you'll see that the lifespan will be lowered by a minimum of ten years on average so the only way that we find this out is by actually getting people to self identify and then count themselves into the service we should note that the current federal administration is working in the o direction within three weeks of taking office they actually removed l g b t as a category from the senior needs assessment that they do every year the national senior needs assessment which is how they decide what programs are performing well where there are policy gaps they also remove people from the national disability survey assessment which means that the people with aids are and some of the other disabilities that are pretty chronic in the community are not going to be counted  and they are removing the question from the census if in fact the census happens at all so while we are busy trying to create the case and the numbers here in new york city at the federal leve they are busy erasing them so we thought it was really important to do this survey and to keep collecting field data with everything that we do it was actually a full twenty five percent of the survey had a psychiatric diagnosis so it's we're not only looking at building the case for this group of people as having suffered discrimination  there needs to be some sort of balancing efforts to make sure that they have access to services that everybody else has access to we're also looking at ways to be able to have people age in place a long term goal is to have everyone be able to age in place it's one thing to create senior housing it's another thing that you can actually create services that hope people stay out of the hospital stay hopefully stay place until eventually they die hopefully of old age not of anything else that's preventable right so there are some other interesting facts from the survey that we should we should cover seventy two percent of the survey had a four year college degree or higher which is not so high there were only five percent that had only high school point eight percent that had not high school the rest had a college but not a four year degree but seventy two percent had a four year degree or higher and yet more than fifty percent of the sample was under fifty percent area median income am i which is how they measure the income for affordable housing applications so fifty percent am i is very low income so we have highly educated cohort of people who are very under resourced and that comports with some research that have been done especially by lee badgett the williams institute who have been predicting this that decades of discrimination would result in clear we're not talking about building housing only for l g b t folks we're talking about making sure that the housing that we're building is eligibility competent and welcoming and i think you know probably we want to get at least fifty percent folks in if we have to tip the social scales in that direction because you can do cultural competency competency training but every time someone leaves the next person has to be trained every time there's new policies people that it has to be reinterpreted for people  if you can also be just creating the social situations through the mix of folks that you're putting in the house the other thing that's really interesting is is in terms of mixed models of mixed income models this has a real chance of succeeding because you have people on the low end and the high end of the income scale with commensurate academic achievement they have already said that they want to be in a community that's welcoming to bt and then there's also studies we really need a more recent study now because i think the last one was ten years ago that look at the way the gay community actually supports itself because of what it's been through so all of those factors together make the idea the potential for this kind of housing to work really well in the united states something like forty seven percent of the population of senior population lives only on social security do and the average social security check is one thousand three hundred dollars a month now obviously it's above the amount of money for medicaid which is approximately eight hundred dollars a month but you know how can one live in new york city without some type of affordable housing if your income is one thousand three hundred dollars or less and there is the the big crux of the big need for housing to be built for our community particularly because we have a lot of seniors who are retiring into poverty right  we should be clear to you it's this affordable senior housing crisis is about everyone in two thousand and ten the projections were released by the city for population grew both and because the baby boomers are aging in that cohort is growing so from two thousand and ten to two thousand and forty that study said that the senior population would grow by forty percent it's like from one dollar to one million five dollars folks and that's not you know new people moving to the cities as people who are in the city becoming older adults and seniors and they're in neighborhoods that are going to be really contested for their property values there's going to be a lot of people getting displaced and landlords looking to displace people whenever they can so part of what we're looking at to our strategies to help people be prepared to stay where they are or if they are going to have to apply for affordable housing to have all of their documentation and everything ready so that they can they can in fact make a successful application the application actually needs a lot of personal documents you know your social security your letter of your letter of income from social security and many other many other documents if you're in a domestic partnership or marriage relationship  marriage license if you're not a citizen than a green card cetera so that a lot more documents that need to be put together than one might my think also if they are not if you're not retired then you have to  project your income and if you don't have w to stand projecting your income for an affordable housing application is really hard if you've been off the books or if you've been doing one thousand and ninety nine work generally it's very hard for you to more that you're going to have the same amount of time ninety nine employment the next year because it's contract to contract so there's a lot of issues again where this community which has so many people in the service industry is an entertainment industry are ill prepared to make those applications the rents are right now for most affordable housing is based upon the area's income so for example if you are living in manhattan and you're in midtown you know look at the luxury apartments that are being built now and so forth so that raises the average income for that area so many times when you see those buildings going up they also bring up the minimal amount of money that the senior would have to make a lot of seen use actually make far below the minimum so if  market rate because a lot of them had lived in their apartments on average far longer than the general population but the subsidies that they had were usually tied to the property not to them you know rent control personally seen where seniors will go into the hospital and the landlords try to evict them while they're in the hospital especially if they have you know out of the building for a few weeks it's really you know disgusting the way that these landlords have become so aggressive in trying to get somebody who's paying five hundred dollars a month for their one bedroom but that where they can get four thousand if they're in a great location right the development of our organization  say they're actually in post production they're going to fold in visual that will give you the u r l where you can go i'll give it to you now it's stonewall c d c dot org and if you go there you can actually download the full twenty eight page survey results and also we made a six page document called takeaways which is our interpretation of the data and how we think it's going to inform our work moving forward so you can actually download a copy of the report add to this website w w w that's stonewall c d c dot org they're also at that website is a six page document called takeaways and you can see it it's on the they're both have links from the home page information the way that our our takeaways document does part of what we're doing now is collecting a stable of partners development partners architects we're expanding our board with we're just bringing on an architect and a major developer and part of our goal is to be thought leaders in this area and to create replicable solutions so that they're not just for the l g b t community but they are solutions for the senior housing crisis in general and part of the problem the nut that we're going to try and crack is the programming you know how do you deliver mental health services and health services on the site and to people in the surrounding community and we're talking about trying to help people age and place there is a system in the city called north naturally occurring retirement communities  and the city funds community based organizations to go into these norks and provide services for the seniors and it's based on a concentration in the number of seniors within a square footage area if you will so what our discussion of the city has been is is because these folks folks are afraid they can be located in these norks but not accessing the services so part of what we're looking at is how could services radiate out from a building into the surrounding neighborhood and how could that result in efficiencies of delivery more continuity for people's are seeing the same people each day but there is some policy problems at the state level in terms of the way reimbursements are made that make that less doable outside the building and then within the building so part of what we're doing as we  create this stables of developers and architects and service providers and community based organizations and health care providers is to have ongoing discussions about where there might be  in the policy that you can bend the rules a little bit or if we need to change the rules a little bit i mean ultimately i would like to see our efforts result in folks being classified as a suspect class for the fair housing act which would mean that we it's a knowledge that we've been suffering discrimination and so where it would allow us to build more targeted towards solving those problems of discrimination causes right now folks can bring a fair housing act complaint and lesser sexual abuse also involved so we are discriminated against  again but we're not able to address the discrimination because of discrimination at within the fair housing act one of the aspects of speaking with providers is that we want to make sure that anyone who's going to provide services or enter into the buildings are culturally sensitive and competent and so you know no one wants the man to come into their home to repair something and to be offended because they saw two men together or two women together or ever so we want to make sure that those type of things aren't going to happen and we're speaking with individual organizations to make sure that their staff are culturally competent and i mean there's there are other approaches that we are taking there is one that we really aren't able to talk about right now but if you go to our web site and sign up at w w w dot stonewall c d c dot org you can join our mailing list and be kept abreast of these programs as they're developed  are working on a program right now for free workshops for folks to teach them how to get their documents ready for a successful affordable housing application and also to teach them how to be prepared for medicaid applications  you've been watching access for all with our your guest host and guests from stonewall community development corp tom thank you very much for creating this month pleasure and it's really exciting to watch it grow day by day and to keep in touch with us and find out how it's going go to w w w dot stonewall c d c dot org and sign up for the mailing list of hope you will and thank you very much for watching