Rush Homes makes life easier for disabled homeowners

By Cynthia Pegram

Published: April 20, 2008

By Cynthia T. Pegram

(434) 385-5541

MADISON HEIGHTS — Tim Heflin and his sister Patty Kay can breathe a little easier now.

The mortgages that were turning on them like a cash-eating dragon are gone, yet the siblings can continue to live in their soon-to-be refurbished three-bedroom home on Wildwood Drive.

But this time it will be as renters. The owner and landlord is Rush Homes, a local nonprofit agency that works to increase available housing to people with disabilities.

“It was a long process,” said Allison Wingfield, Rush Homes executive director.

It came to be as part of Rush Homes’ major project under way in Madison Heights — the Wildwood house and a fourplex apartment on Mays Street.

In April 2007, Heflin was just about at wit’s end. He’d bought the home more than a year earlier when he had a housemate to share expenses and whose contribution helped get approval for the loan to buy the house.

But circumstances changed and the housemate left the area. The resulting financial gap could not be closed, even with a second mortgage and Heflin’s steady job. He works at Wal-Mart as a greeter, and also as a cashier. Patty Kay participates in a day program with a local agency.

Heflin found himself making two mortgage payments every month — a total of nearly $1,300.

He had no choice but to put the house on the market in hopes of paying off the debt. It went on as handicap accessible, and the ad caught Rush Homes’ interest. But so did Heflin’s plight — depriving one handicapped person to help another wasn’t a Rush Homes goal.

So the agency staff tried to answer the question, “Would it be possible to purchase the home?”

It would be a big debt for the small agency, yet Rush Homes finally worked it out.

Two weeks ago, Heflin and Patty Kay moved into temporary quarters — a two-bedroom fully accessible apartment owned by Rush Homes, where they will remain as their home is spruced up and made completely accessible as promised to the many organizations that allocated grants or gifts. The goal is to be back at home by June.

Rent for the two of them will be about $500 a month, and of course, that includes the rest of the family, Patty Kay’s two cats and little white dog.

Ask Heflin how he feels about the missing load of debt and he gives a smile and a big sigh that can only mean relief.

“This is going to be so much better,” he said.

Rush Homes board member George Rowe, a contractor, is volunteering his skills to oversee the Wildwood and Mays Street project.

Rush Homes already put a new roof on the Wildwood House. The biggest problem now is the sole bathroom, which is small and narrow and “is not workable for someone in a wheelchair,” said Wingfield.

A roll-in shower is being put in as part of the renovation.

The typical ranch-style home is easier to work with than a two-story home, “but anything already built and not accessible is difficult to retrofit,” said Wingfield.

Doorways, bathrooms, small kitchens, stairs, and basement laundry rooms are all factors in older homes.

“It’s much easier to build access if you build new, but we love to go back and improve housing stock that’s existing,” Wingfield said.

Accessible housing is hard to find for people with physical disabilities, and also for people who live on Social Security supplemental income — about $650 a month.

Rush Homes has a waiting list of 75 people, and an average wait of five years.

Shea Hollifield, deputy director of the division of housing for the Virginia Department of Housing and Community Development, said affordable housing for disabled persons “is one of the largest housing gaps in the state — affordable housing itself is a huge issue. Accessible housing for persons of disability is even more difficult.”

Between 2000 and 2005, she said, housing costs in Virginia increased 80 percent, and incomes increased 15 percent.

About 30 percent of a person’s income is reasonable to spend on housing, she said, and when you look at SSI, 30 percent “doesn’t get you a lot of housing.”

Hollifield said that only a few organizations in the state work to provide affordable housing for people with disabilities, and that Rush Homes is one of them.

“It is a huge need; we’re grateful for the partners we have,” Hollifield said.

Rush closed its waiting list for a while, but has now re-opened it, in part, to document the kinds of housing needs that exist.

Wingfield hears accounts of disabled people who live in housing they can’t adapt — always taking a sponge bath because the shower won’t accommodate a wheelchair. Or having to wait inside the house until a family member or friend arrives to help because they can’t navigate the steps to get outside. She told of one young woman with a progressive condition who had to live in a nursing home but who was desperate for accessible housing so she could be with her children while she could.

“It’s heart-breaking to tell someone they have a five-year wait,” said Wingfield.

Currently, Rush Homes has 18 homes and apartments, and of those five are under renovation, including Wildwood, which was purchased for about $120,000. The 226 Mays Street property was $105,000.

The Mays fourplex looks like large house on the outside, said Wingfield.

When renovated, two of the four units will be totally wheelchair accessible, with roll-under sinks and modified kitchens, wheelchair friendly flooring, roll-in shower — even wheelchair parking in the back.

Not having to pay a contractor for the project will save Rush Homes a good chunk of money.

Volunteers help in many other ways with the other homes Rush owns. For example, real estate agents involved in the sale did not accept commissions.

Church groups or business groups volunteer or adopt a house to help paint, or do plantings or trimming, or clean up at homes where people with disabilities can’t do those usual homeowner chores.

“That helps us tremendously,” she said.

Rush Homes evolved from the ideas of a group of parents of children with disabilities. The organization, founded just 12 years ago, is named for one of the parents, the late Mabel Rush. For more information call (434) 455-2120.