A rendering of a Home of Our Own, a 40-unit development proposed for New Glarus.
Susan Wallitsch still tears up when she talks about Home of Our Own, a housing project she’s been working to make happen for years.
Wallitsch and Mary Anne Oemichen met when their kids, Frank and Amy, respectively, were little. Both of their children have autism and are mostly nonverbal, so the two moms spent a lot of time talking about their kids’ futures.
They knew there would come a time when they could no longer take care of their children at home and they dreamed of their kids having a safe, comfortable place to transition to. Two decades later, that dream is becoming a reality. The parents have teamed up with the Wisconsin Housing Preservation Corp., an affordable housing provider, to build Home of Our Own; the developers are set to break ground in November.
“We’re on the brink of not only creating a place for our children to live that is going to be a good, wholesome, beautiful, safe place for them, but also it’s not like anything else that exists out there,” Wallitsch says. “I think it’s what our disability communities really, really need.”
Wallitsch says Home of Our Own — a community-based housing development equipped to handle the needs of people with disabilities — is filling a void felt desperately by many differently abled people and their families in Wisconsin. Right now, the main options for adults like her son include moving into a group home or renting an apartment and hiring a caretaker.
Both of those options are expensive, and Wallitsch says living in a regular, integrated apartment can be isolating for people with severe disabilities. That isolation can be dangerous, given adults and children with disabilities are at an increased risk of violence, including sexual abuse.
Home of Our Own plans to address that problem by building community. Its planned New Glarus development will have common spaces not just for residents, but also for staff to work together and get to know each other, including a co-working space for care providers.
The nonprofit is working with architects to design the space so that it’s inclusive, with wide hallways for people who use wheelchairs and soundproof apartments for residents who are sensitive to noise.
Ten of the apartments in the 40-unit development will be set aside for residents with severe disabilities. The rest will be for folks who fall under a certain income threshold, and a few will be market rate.
Oemichen lives in New Glarus with her family, and Wallitsch in Mount Horeb. Both say the need for housing like this is especially great outside the major urban parts of the state.
Mary Wright, president of the Wisconsin Housing Preservation Corp., agrees that the need is great. “If we can work this out to be a successful model, we would like to see a replication of it in other communities in our state,” Wright says.
Parent groups in other parts of the state, including Eau Claire and Marshfield, have reached out to WHPC express a desire for projects like Home of Our Own.
WHPC is planning to pay for $7 million of the $8 million project with a combination of state and federal loans, grants and tax credits. To fill the gap, the developer is putting forward $500,000 of its own funds, and the parents in Home of Our Own are raising the other $500,000. Oemichen and Wallitsch say they met their 2019 goal of raising $300,000 earlier this year and are on track to raise the entire amount. The development is scheduled to open next year in the late summer or fall.
Oemichen and Wallitsch say they and their kids are excited for a new chapter. But Oemichen confesses she’s also a little apprehensive since she’s never lived apart from her daughter.
“It feels pretty surreal really,” she says. “It’s been a long time coming.”
