RAD in YPSILANTI Building Strong Foundations for Families

Deborah Strong Housing consists of 112 homes across Ypsilanti which were converted from public housing using the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD’s) Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD) program, which preserves them in perpetuity as affordable housing under HUD’s Section 8 program.

Through these conversions, YHC developed a plan to provide new, additional family support services to improve residents’ quality of life. As a pilot partner of the Strong Families Fund, a pay-for-performance effort to finance service coordination in affordable housing properties, YHC is helping build lives and reduce multi-generational dependencies on subsidized housing.

YHC’s efforts to provide affordable housing date back to World War II and the Second Great Migration, which saw Black Americans moving from the rural south to northern industrial cities. In Ypsilanti, 40 miles due west of Detroit, Black Americans during the war could find ample jobs assembling bombers but could not find a place to live. Housing was in short supply for everyone, but Black workers and their families also had to contend with segregation and redlining practices that would not allow them to rent or buy homes in certain areas. With workers commuting an hour or longer every day to support the war effort, the federal government stepped in to build 100 units of segregated “war housing” in Ypsilanti for Black workers in the Willow Run Bomber Plant and their families.

After World War II, these were converted to public housing as Parkridge Apartments, which YHC and the town of Ypsilanti continued to sustain along with other properties. But by the 21st century, the homes had become outdated, and the YHC lacked the resources to maintain its properties.

Darlene Scott, a lifelong friend, remembers, “Children were really her passion. And that was it. That was absolutely it. She knew that there had to be a better way for us to run public housing, that it wasn't working, and we were living in, you know, the effects of it. I mean, and this,” Darlene said, gesturing to the community around her, “is as different as night and day. You know, I can't believe how this has changed things. So, yeah, we need to toot her horn because she was […] leading the charge.”

Deborah Strong, Paul Schreiber, and their YHC colleagues had a vision for the future of housing in Ypsilanti and what it could do for families in crisis. Yet their housing stock had become outdated, and they lacked the resources to maintain them. They could have cut their losses and sold off their properties. Instead, they hired new leadership that would ultimately lead them to RAD conversions that provided the necessary resources to rebuild.

In 2013, the Board of Commissioners conducted a search and hired a new executive director and CEO, Zac Fosler, a Michigan native who was then at an Ohio housing authority. “Zac was a godsend,” said Renée Smith, who was then Chairperson. “He and I are both visionary and he’s creative. But he was an administrator, very transparent, very engaging, and never missed a beat, never missed a deadline. So, therefore, we weren't in trouble anymore; we were just moving forward. I thought, ‘Let him go. Reach for the stars’ is what I wanted him to do. I was like, ‘okay, we've done one RAD.’ I said, ‘Let's go do another one. Let's do them all.’ And that's what we did. At that point, everything we touched was one RAD project after RAD project to the point where we totally converted our whole entire [housing] stock.”

With the housing in place, the YHC and their collaborators could focus on how the family empowerment program would work with the residents. Smith remembers, “Deborah Strong was the originator of an initiative called Families First, which is kind of like a wrap-around model where you provide outreach and bring very important people to the table around families.”

The model today, she says, has become “like ‘Families First’ on steroids, with more money and more boots on the ground. You know, you have an individualized plan that has health, education, even exposing the residents to the arts and different things like that. It's pretty incredible, and it's the key to breaking cycles of generational poverty.” All these elements together, she says, create a program that “gets proactive and gets ahead of the game, so [the families are] not in crisis, bringing in every family member, even the two-year-old. We're going to make sure he gets in preschool and that he is in a playgroup and just has all the cultural skills. It’s a hand up, not a handout.”

Under Strong’s leadership, the YHC established community and university partnerships to develop a comprehensive Family Empowerment Program (FEP) that seeks to help families become more self-sufficient in employment, education, health, and wellness, engaging residents through multiple services that come together as one.

With funding from the Kresge and Robert Wood Johnson Foundations as part of the Strong Families Fund, and with support from Eastern Michigan University and other implementing partners, the FEP has developed a social services program whose goal is to improve the education, health, and economic outcomes for more than 900 individuals currently living in YHC communities. The FEP is designed to be flexible enough to address the needs of vulnerable individuals — housing, nutrition, childcare, transportation, access to health and dental care — all using the tools of self-empowerment and self-reliance, with the support and coaching of the FEP staff. This flexible program ensures that programming and available services meet the needs of the individual, and it does so by creating deep connections in the wider community and establishing relevant goals for participants. The FEP is helping the residents achieve success by assisting them professionally, improving education, financial literacy, and other measures that are designed to help families work their way to self-sufficiency. It is meeting and exceeding RAD’s requirement for family services and setting a high bar for supportive housing.

Tabitha Boone, another resident and former commissioner, remembers the communication from the YHC when the process was beginning: “They would hold a meeting and the residents were able to come to the meeting and they were able to let us know which families were going to be moved, which area was going to be moved first, how the transition would go. So, it went well. It was a pretty smooth transition.”

In her new home, “I was so overjoyed, like, look at this, we’ve got central air, we’ve got dishwashers, washers, and dryers in our own unit instead of having to go to a laundromat or go to a family house. [...] I love it.” But the most positive thing? “Well, you know, I feel like we fit in better in the community, in the residential area.” Assisted housing "doesn't stick out so much as a sore thumb. And I've always taken pride in my yard, things like that, flowers, and just different things. But that word, ‘pride,’ you know ... I think lifts you up a little bit." As she says in the below "RAD Story" video, the benefits of the work that's gone into Deborah Strong Housing reach well beyond the families who live in it.

But she still remembers the anxieties residents felt before the changes took place. “That's why I love Zac so much, because he sat down with a lot of us residents to calm our nerves to get us ready for the move. He told us that we didn't have to worry [...] and he kept every promise as well.”