Affordable, accessible apartments designed just for people with MS make life easier for them.
by Matt Alderton
The year was 2006 and Susan Stellmacher was loving life. Although she’d had a rough go of things a few years before — she’d divorced, lost her job and was having multiple sclerosis flare-ups again after years of remission — things were finally looking up. In good health once more, the 51-year-old Minnesotan had moved back to her home state from Maryland, had a job she loved recruiting donors for a local blood bank, drove a zippy Chrysler PT Cruiser and lived independently in a beautiful apartment with a wood-burning fireplace that she adored.
Then came an MS relapse so bad that it literally knocked her down.
“I awakened one morning, and it felt like somebody had stabbed my left eye with a knife,” recalls Stellmacher, now 65. “When I went to stand up and get out of bed, I fell on the floor. After that, I eventually ended up in a wheelchair.”
After her physical fall came an existential one: Because she could no longer drive or work, Stellmacher had to give up her car, her job and, ultimately, her apartment, which because of her new permanent disability was no longer affordable or practical.
“When I got sick, I couldn’t afford the rent anymore,” Stellmacher says. “Plus, it wasn’t a safe environment for me at all. My bathroom, for example, had a combination shower/bathtub, so you had to step over the tub to get into the shower. There were no grab bars. So if you lost your balance, guess what?”
Although she still recalls with sadness everything she lost back then, Stellmacher also beams with joy at what she gained soon thereafter: a new two-bedroom apartment at Kingsley Commons, one of the nation’s first apartment buildings designed to provide independent living exclusively for people with MS. Located in Minneapolis, it offers 25 accessible, affordable apartments with wheelchair-friendly features like roll-under countertops, roll-in showers with folding seats and safety bars, wide doors and low cabinets, just to name a few.
“It has served me well and will always continue to do so — whether I’m walking or not,” says Stellmacher, who moved into Kingsley Commons when it opened in 2007 and has recently begun walking again after years of using a wheelchair.
For people such as Stellmacher, communities like Kingsley Commons are unicorns: as magical as they are rare. As their numbers slowly grow, however, they’re proving that people with MS can live as independently as they can happily. All they need is a safe place to do it.
Building independenceKingsley Commons was developed jointly by nonprofit housing developer CommonBond Communities and local partner the Powderhorn Community Council, who teamed up to build the $2.9 million project using a combination of public and private funds.
Although not everyone celebrated it — critics decried Kingsley Commons for segregating people with disabilities and said developers should build blended residences instead—many people who got wind of the concept loved it. Among them: Ken Regan, vice president of Regan Development Corp., an Ardsley, New York-based developer of affordable housing. After being diagnosed with MS himself in 2003, he began researching the MS community and discovered what he believed was a major housing gap.
“There are a lot of people out there who have physical and cognitive disabilities that arise out of their MS, but they’re not so disabled that they need to be in a nursing home,” Regan says. “I had the idea to create specialized housing for those people to enable them to thrive in a more independent setting.”
Regan visited Kingsley Commons for inspiration and research, and subsequently has built six communities in New Jersey and Connecticut that are reserved either wholly or in part for people with MS.
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