Finding an Apartment
Now that we had a section 8 voucher, and the funds to support Dave’s independence, it was time to find a place of is own and move in. As with each step in our journey, securing his apartment resulted from a combination of persistence and luck.
Finding an apartment wasn’t as easy as it seemed at first. Landlords can be reluctant to rent to tenants with section 8 vouchers for a variety of reasons. In fact we found only two possible choices in our town.
Luckily, Dave had a friend from school who was living in an apartment complex that did accept the vouchers. He really wanted to live near his friend, and I liked the idea as well. As a bonus, this apartment was within walking distance of a grocery store. This seemed perfect for us.
We looked at an unfurnished one-bedroom apartment, which wasn’t the nicest place you can imagine, but certainly adequate for his needs. And the condition didn’t matter to Dave. Unfortunately, we were told several days later that it was no longer available. I remember pleading with the sales person by phone as I was driving, explaining our situation and how important this location was to us. A day or so later, luck struck again. They had just evicted a woman, I think because of a noisy dog. A felt badly that she had lost her home, but her misfortune became our opportunity. Dave took the apartment.
He was very happy to live near his friend, but that turned into a fiasco that sometimes involved the police. As of this writing, Dave does not consider this person his friend anymore. I’ll share those stories in another post.
Signing the Forms
We went to visit the lovely people at the local Housing Authority to sign the paperwork. There is lots of paperwork! They needed his signature on income statements, his permission to contact various organizations, and many other forms I can’t remember. And he has to sign these forms every year! But the staff were very kind and helpful. After that meeting, Dave was set to move in on August 1st, 2008.
Moving In
Furnishing the apartment, unfortunately, was easy. Dave’s grandmother passed away in June 2008. Her furniture became his. He got a bookcase, a card table, a dresser, and a desk. We added the bed and his father donated a kitchen table and end tables. Dave was gratified to have his grandmother’s furniture because he felt very close to her.
As move-in day approached, Dave was excited, but nervous about living on his own. My spouse and I expected that it would take some time for him to be comfortable there. We promised to stay with him for as long as he needed us. We packed clothing for 2 weeks, brought an airbed from home to sleep on, and settled in with him for the duration.
The morning after his first night, he came out of the bedroom and announced bluntly, “You can go home now.”
He has not come home willingly since that day. Sometimes he comes home if we all need to get to the airport the next day. Once, when the electricity went out, he stayed a night with us. Other than that, he only comes home when I needed to discipline him for something, like not wearing his CPAP. It turns out that threatening to bring him home overnight is one of the best ways to get him to comply with important tasks when other strategies don’t work. That tells you all you need to know about how important a place of his own is!
Dave didn’t sleep in the bedroom very long. Soon after moving in he began to sleep in the living room on a futon, though he never put it into the bed position. I tried, in vain, to get him to use the bedroom, to no avail. Eventually I decided that where he slept was not the most important thing in his life – we had other issues to focus on. So I bought him a single bed for his living room. Years later I found out he had seen a spider in the bedroom and that was the reason he didn’t want to sleep there! Dave likes to do google research on spiders and can tell you a lot about them, but he doesn’t like them in his space. The bedroom has become his “office” and we don’t dare call it something else!
In the early days, working out staffing for supporting Dave was a significant challenge and continued to be for a number of years. I’ll save that for the next post.