Hadiyah: I’d like to introduce you to our executive Director since 2007, Dana Hooper. He’s been our Executive Director since 2007 and he’s also been a force in this community. He’s been with LSA for the past 16 years, but his journey hasn’t started there. His journey started many years ago when his son Brent was diagnosed with an intellectual disability. Over the years he’s become more involved in many areas of the ID world. He became a leader in our community working with the government and nonprofits such as Branch Services. He’s also a past board president of Lighthouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired and he’s on the state department of developmental services. He was a past board president of the San Andreas Regional Center, which also let him to his leadership role at Lizet where he can make a difference in the lives of individuals LSA serves. Dana, thanks for being here tonight.
Dana: It’s my pleasure to introduce Jim White. Jim White is one of the driving forces behind Willow Commons — Portela Valley’s first affordable and supported housing project for individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities. It was inspired by his daughter and driven by a commitment to inclusivity. Jim White and his wife Patty spearheaded this project to address critical housing shortages for this vulnerable population. It’s set to open in 2024. Willow Commons will provide 11 multi-family units and two staff units, offering a supportive community environment.With over 25 years of experience in the technology industry, Jim has a distinguished career as a venture capital investor and a former partner at Sutter Hill Ventures. He has a proven track record of guiding successful startups, and is currently a fellow at Stanford distinguished careers Institute through Willow Commons. Through his extensive philanthropic efforts, Jim continues to champion innovation and inclusive solutions for adults with IDD.
Jim: Willow Commons is in construction right now, but the intent is that we will be opening a, what is called an independent apartment community, and it’s essentially individual apartments for about 16 adults. They’ll have extensive community building for programming kitchens for multipurpose and a coffee café. The intent is to create a model that allows for independence and trying to address some of the problems around service provisioning, and the scale and specialization that is needed in these cases.
Jim: Our if you think about the problem for any of the people we care about that have intellectual or developmental delay, as if they want to live independently, they generally need some set of support around them to be successful — not just in their living, but also to be fully engaging in the community whether it’s their jobs or hobbies or education or other things that they are pursuing. People tend to focus on supportive housing, and I say it’s three things: permanent, affordable supporting housing. One of the root problems is how do you cost effectively deliver services. There really is the lack of service offerings for supported living services in the mid- Peninsula. If we didn’t help support getting something like that started, I think Willow Commons would probably struggle to succeed.
Jim: I think there’s a real increasing problem facing the country, but most acutely in Northern California – in the Golden Gate Regional Center and the San Andreas Regional Center – the general numbers seem to be getting to 75% or higher of adults that are living in their families home. In many of these cases – that isn’t by first choice, but by default. It’s very difficult to find an affordable unit. There’s many people that can’t get service provisioning that they need even though they have a budget unit economics on community licensed care facilities and group homes has been under a lot of pressure and is in many cases — if they didn’t get to some scale like LSA — are in difficulty… and a number o have closed. While the demand is going up in our area, the supply is either flat or in some cases even going down in some areas. The challenge is, how do you change that trajectory and as people age, it’s a concern for any parent or sibling and so I think it’s trying to figure out how you can help on that.
Jim: I have lived out here since the early 80s. I’m married to a wonderful woman named Patty White. We have four children — our youngest who’s 25 is Amy. She was born with down syndrome and she’s doing great. She went through the local Portola Valley school system from kindergarten through 8th grade. We have a lot of extended family back on the East Coast. When we would go back in the summers to visit family, we got connected with some of the different service providers to keep up with her reading and other skills. We really got pushed to look at a program or school on the east coast in Massachusetts called Riverview. It’s one of the oldest schools to help with people who have different types of learning or developmental challenges. There’s actually not many people there with Down syndrome — I’d say 2% of the 200 students. We actually got convinced to put her in a summer program and that led us to do a bit of an assessment. In the middle of 8th grade, we really were convinced that for her, the best thing was to go to school there for high school. She was becoming very socially isolated even though our school district had been pretty supportive and we had a very good experience up until then. She’s a pretty social gal. The reason why I talk about Riverview is that they would start a “Family Transition Weekend” once a year in the winter time. They would bring in people who had finished the program and would talk about the transition from school systems out into being in the real world. People come from all over the country to go to the school and you see housing and work programs and service organizations from around the country which let us do a little research. We came back and really looked at what our options were here on the Peninsula and we saw a gap between what some of the people would point to, some of the more interesting innovative programs. We’ve seen several other areas called an ‘independent apartment community,’ which we thought would be a very interesting thing to try to have here in the area… more importantly, be able to show the unit economics of how that might actually be something that helps address some of the root problems here of quality service delivery, and other things that I think are challenging — affordability. We felt we could do an existence proof here and then the question is could that lead to other policy changes that might lead to a more scalable set up opportunities and solutions.
Jim: I’d reached out to Dana, and he took my call and we talked a lot. He would share his fundamental models and we would drill down on that. We really did a lot of research. Once you kind of have a determination — you have got to decide what you are trying to design and who is it for…how many people and why? Once you have that, then you can start to think about locations. Location can be a long discussion. I think that you do not need to be by a transit-rich area. I think in the next 5-10 years, there’s going to be a lot of different transit opportunities with autonomous driving and other business models that come out of that. We decided to first do this project in Portola Valley, where there would be no bus service or train service. But if you look at it, it actually hits most of the things that you really need. There’s a lot of employment that are all within walking distance. There’s lots of core services from groceries, doctors, haircut, you name it. There’s a lot of entertainment — if you like the outdoors. You have to decide what it is and where it is and then it gets into how you’re going to finance it and how you get it entitled. Any place where there’s single family housing, we can share our template but there’s a really straightforward, legal way to get what’s called a ministerial approval for a multi family permanent supportive housing — which it doesn’t have to go through a subjective process. Cities and counties really need these types of units and they are starting to have funding that really wasn’t around in the past couple of years.
Jim: Willow Commons is an independent apartment community. There is a landlord business that’s leasing these units and they lease them at somewhere around $1500-$2000 a month that will include all utilities. They’ll include some services but not the supportive services and not the vocational services or behavioral services and not the services that you really think of when you think of your individual plan with the regional center and the budget associated with that. That’s independent— you make your own service decisions and how you do that. Most of these independent communities end up exclusively using one service provider or very high percentage 80 or 90% because there’s such obvious leverage to having service providers working a number of these different clients in the same physical environment.
Jim: I think the vocational side of this is just an interesting story. We went and talked to all the major employees out there — the Woodside Priory School, the Sequoia adult retirement assisted care, the Portola Valley School District, Alpine Hills, Swimming Tennis Club, and Robert’s Market. We went and talked with all of them and they all have a common problem — they really struggle having a loyal, local workforce. We have two homes being run nearby and what it is called a cul-de-sac. We’ve got about eight live-in residential folks there in the Thistle house and we have about 15 to 20 day programming. What we’ve been able to do is create job specialists – we’ve created a trial program where any of the folks involved with our strategic employment partners will spend 2 to 8 weeks working in a variety of roles and they find a mutual fit and where the skills and interest match. We really coach that up. We really help managers and residents get really clear and honest feedback. We’re being asked for more employers… It has really turned out to be a great thing and it’s a great fit for our residence. There’s not a really good coffee shop in Portola Valley. There’s a lot of cyclists and runners and hikers and we think there’s an opportunity there. Those that like that type of job environment, we have the ability to create job opportunities that run an effective nonprofit within the Willow Commons apartment building. There is that 800 ft.² small café with a big outdoor patio that we think is going to be one of the community hangout areas. We think it’s partly how you make both people comfortable being around this environment and welcomed in the environment.
Dana: I’d certainly love to support that coffee shop.
Jim: There’s a lot of great new laws that have been created over the past 3-5 years. There’s not a lot of precedent on how people have leveraged those — so we used AB2162, California Supportive Housing law. It was originally started for homelessness but people with intellectual or developmental delays are viewed as part of a targeted population that is covered under the Supportive Housing law. That opens up a lot of avenues of how you can do these projects. I think we ended up having four lawyers working with us that bring different levels of expertise — from land entitlement, whether you’re using density bonus law or supportive housing law. I was talking to one today– we’re having some issues with one of the state agencies even though the town has approved something. It is well-spent money to find the right specialists around this, where there’s all these unique rules, setting rules, and you need clear reviews of your documents and your lease agreements and your house rules. It’s conflicting and complex real systems that don’t always even align and have conflicting requirements.
Dana: You have talked about scalability because it is a bigger problem — wouldn’t it be nice to scale some of these solutions.
Jim: You have to find a few families that are willing to be partners with you on this. It’s a hard journey to do on your own and it’s a ton of work. There are some groups that are trying to provide advice and trying to do this in a more replicated way, especially bigger projects that use the state federal funding through what’s called low income tax credit… Kelsey Eden House, Mid Penn housing are worth talking to… those folks about projects coming up and how you could help them with ‘set aside’ projects. There are bigger projects that are looking for advantages that might come with set aside projects. If you want to work on more affordable projects then you would need more projects with charitable support or find some capital. At the end of the day, it still requires a lot of capital to make one of these projects go. Even though that’s expensive, the challenge is that these services outweigh the total dollar cost that will be spent on any of these projects over a 20, 30, 40 year period.
Dana: We often say it’s a housing crisis, but a house without services is not a solution.
Jim: Innovation in this permanent affordable supportive housing is really ripe. The rule was you didn’t want to have congregate living… trying to avoid the mistake of decades ago when there was institutionalization. There are some advantages to having some scale, and the real objective was to have people really fully integrated and then community. Setting rule clarification is very clear now. Branch services and what we’ve been doing with the Thistle house we have been innovating around using the self-determination program to deliver a higher level of service — being slightly different about the type of people you hire and how you run that. It’s not perfect and it’s got its own pluses and minuses, but I would say the big differences we’ve been able to see in the two years that it has been running, is that virtually zero turnover — which is extremely low. We’re also able to invest pretty heavily in the training and development — given you’re not going to lose this person in six or 12 months. There’s a need and a win-win with towns and counties right now — I think the projects that we can bring forward are really attractive for a bunch of reasons that help to satisfy requirements that they need to do. Therefore, you can get a lot of leverage and support — that was hard five years ago.
Hadiyah: Thank you for the amazing conversation.
Jim: I am worried about the regional centers being forthright about the issue of — you know, as people age, their choice — when their parents begin to not be able to care for their adult children – there is a bigger crisis there that we are really seeing. I’d love to see more data transparency, where people are living, how many people are doing that by choice versus they have no other choice. I think we need more services broadly and we need more service innovation and more ability for people to really have a career around this. I think from working with the community colleges and training, and how we make that financially and skill wise — I think it is a really important thing that we’re starting to talk about.
Hadiyah: What I’m hearing you say is advocacy – advocacy for data transparency at the regional level. The reality of the ID population aging and what are the real costs behind that.
Jim: The real crisis is that people have no choice on where to live and the aging parents can’t take care of their adult children.
Hadiyah: I do really want to touch on our viewpoint from an LSA standpoint on the crisis that’s forming with people aging in place.
Dana: A lot of what Jim said absolutely resonates with what I’ve seen. I am a parent, I do talk to a lot of parents – most parents want to keep their kids home and safe and they do that until they can’t. I think a lot of parents come to realize whether it’s through placing their child in Willow Commons or in a LSA home, they find out that they actually thrive when they’re out of the family home. It’s not just the eventuality, but it’s also the in between and what it means potentially to the life of the family, both inside and outside of the family home. It’s an unsatisfied demand and it’s hard to quantify. If you went from 75% living at home to 50% living at home, it would be a huge swing and you would immediately find massive shortages not only of the physical houses but also the support services. As we have learned those are just as difficult a problem and I think Jim nailed it on the head and you can make a career path and you can pay respectable wages for professional and expected services that will be provided by those individuals. You find yourself competing with the wrong kind of options when people are looking to make those kinds of employment decisions.
Hadiyah: We try to focus on messages of hope but then there’s also the bigger issue which is what is the problem, what is the size of the problem. I appreciate hearing both Jim and Dana just talk about the problem as well as what some might call opportunities for solutions.
Jim: Willow Commons is an independent apartment community and the admissions process will be run by an admissions team and it will be well documented. You need to be a client of the regional center and that’s the definition that you are eligible to be in the Supportive Housing. The admissions process has a set of house rules that you need to meet. If you need ILS or SLS, you need to show that you actually have that in your IPP and that you have budget and access so that you can successfully live there. You have a lease agreement, you pay a lease, and you have a monthly rent. The objective of the rent is to keep it as low as possible. It is deed restricted for 55 years at low income housing, but because our area median incomes are so high — that’s actually quite high. The rents could be $2,000 a month. You have to really make sure you are recovering your costs — so that it’s sustainable on a long-term basis. If your son or daughter requires ILS, they just need to have that in their plan and budget. That’s part of the reasons we helped encourage the Branch Services, that’s primarily focused on SLS and other services, to begin to help scale that up — so that when people begin moving in there, they’ll be one provider that we know is around to provide those services.
Hadiyah: A lot of people want to know what it is that you’re doing to get your staff to stay. There has been relatively no turnover.
Jim: You could compare a Thistle house and an LSA house that has four residents in our case… you might have a few more in LSA homes — each one of those residents that have decided to rent a room in that house… it’s a shared living environment but it’s independent leases — just like in Willow Commons, each of them are making an independent decision on an SLS provider. Because we are leveraging the self-determination program and SLS budgeting, we’re able to pay a higher rate than the reimbursement rates are in a community licensed care home. The physical houses are the same but we are running a different business model that allows a higher rate to be paid. Each person effectively is probably getting a slightly less set of hours on paper, but you’re getting some shared services that make up for that. LSA is one of the best operators out there. They have been able to leverage both staffing, training and back-office across that. There’s a reason why Dana was asked to be on the board at Branch.
Dana: Leverage is first and foremost one of the things that we are able to bring. We can essentially take advantage of our scale, without diminishing the quality of the program. When I first joined LSA and I started to learn what a licensed Residential Care Home was and what the 500 pounds of paper that represented the regulations — I thought to myself, there’s got to be some way to simplify this. All I could do was figure out how to make this a great place to live and work. Individuals work in a work environment that’s a home and they get a chance to develop relationships with the people that they’re supporting. I think that’s a very positive motivator and it’s part of the reason why we experience low turnover. When we first started and we opened up five additional homes, we had to hire 90 people in 90 days. I came up with one criteria in the interview — is this someone who is an inherently caring individual and will they get satisfaction out of caring for someone else. And if you can figure that out — you are a big way down this path. You have to create a good environment, be able to run the business in a very efficient way, and be able to manage as much of the money you’re receiving in rates to wages and benefits. It’s people that make the program.
Hadiyah: As an office employee, it is certainly true of all of my coworkers. We all have one thing in mind — which is a caring and compassionate heart… and it’s genuine, not just for those who we serve but those we work with.
Dana: I used to say to myself when I get up and go to work — my only job today is to make sure that I am making our people successful.
Jim: Parents, it’s up to the resident. There’s no requirements, it’s really an independent apartment and that’s their choice. In the Thistle house, the parents have been pretty involved — they do some community dinners and a whole variety of things and that’s been great.
Jim: Willow Commons is really not doing services — there will be a property manager. Branch Services does have an Executive Director. The woman running that, Brenda, is a really great leader and a huge advocate for adults with intellectual and developmental delays. She’ll be super involved.
Learn more about how LSA provides services for individuals with IDD
