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New senior housing planned
YOUNGSTOWN
The Youngstown Metropolitan Housing Authority’s newly adopted five-year plan calls for building a new senior-housing development somewhere in Mahoning County outside of Youngstown.
The authority already has three senior-housing complexes in Youngstown and one each in Campbell and Struthers, noted Carmelita Douglas, authority executive director.
“We’ve been approached by people from the remaining suburbs who have a real need because they are getting an aging population, and they need somewhere for them to go that would keep them close to their relatives,” Douglas said.
Possible funding sources for such a development, whose height wouldn’t exceed four floors, would be tax credits for investors or money from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Douglas said.
“Generally, that would probably fit in with the characteristics of the other buildings in the suburbs,” Danielle Mulligan, the authority’s director of planning and development, said of the proposed building’s limited height.
“We find that our seniors like the low-rise buildings. It’s a smaller building. It’s not such a big concentration, and I think those buildings are also easier to maintain,” she said of the proposed 40- to 50-unit complex.
The YMHA’s board of commissioners this week adopted the plan, which also calls for possible establishment of an authority-sponsored senior assisted-living center.
The center would be an intermediate step between an independent apartment and a nursing home, Douglas said.
An assisted-living facility would serve those who need housekeeping, home health-care visits and reminders to take medication, but don’t need to live in a nursing home.
That facility might be established in a current wing or in a new building on the grounds of one of the authority’s current senior-housing complexes, Douglas said.
Rents for assisted living would be federally subsidized, and Medicare or Medicaid likely would pay for the occupants’ health-care services, Mulligan said.
In a partnership with the Youngstown Municipal Court Veterans Court, the authority plans next year to open a home for homeless veterans in a six-unit apartment building the authority bought at 212 Broadway on the city’s North Side.
The veterans court, presided over by Judge Robert P. Milich, would refer veterans to the Broadway home, where they will live in an independent apartment-style setting, with their rents being federally subsidized.
The YMHA will operate the home, where one or two veterans will live in each apartment.
Occupants would have a case manager overseeing services provided to them.
Veterans living in the home would be referred to any services they might need.
Although the project was first announced in 2011, the veterans center’s opening has been delayed by state-mandated historically accurate exterior restoration and by the recent harsh winter, Douglas said.
Federal Neighborhood Stabilization Fund money supplied by the city has paid for the restoration, Douglas said.
The cost of readying the building to open two of the six apartments for occupancy next year will be about $350,000, not counting at least $75,000 in donated construction labor, Mulligan said.
Renovating and opening the four other apartments will cost an additional $200,000, she added.
The veterans home is located not far from the Belmont Avenue VA Outpatient Clinic, St. Elizabeth Youngstown Hospital, Youngstown State University and the city’s downtown, Douglas and Mulligan said.