On their own, together

Housing gives disabled own space, ‘family’

By Theresa Goffredo

Herald Writer

MARYSVILLE — Leslie Venables had a hard time containing her excitement. She hadn’t seen her friends in awhile and the visit didn’t seem long enough. She hugged and kissed her friends when it was time to say goodbye.

This heartwarming gathering occurred last week near a freshly cleared plot of dirt off State Avenue along 84th Street where a home with an innovative design for this group of friends is being built. A place where these friends won’t have to be apart from each other for lengthy periods. A place where they won’t have to say goodbye, just good morning and good night.

Marysville Quilceda Meadows will be a 19-unit apartment complex comprised of two and one-bedroom units, all on the ground level. The tenants, who are all disabled, will live in a campus-like setting that blends the opportunity for independent living with the joy of belonging to a family.

Proponents of the project see Marysville Quilceda Meadows standing like a symbol of how society has come full-circle in its attitude toward the disabled. No longer are the disabled warehoused in institutions. But also, no longer are they forced to live scattered throughout a city, said Leslie’s mother, Hazel Venables.

"We’ve thought we want them to assimilate into society, but they want to be together," Hazel Venables said.

Josef Miklautsch agrees that the Meadows will provide "a gratifying environment."

"They need each other. They live off each other. They need a family atmosphere and that campus will give them a family environment they wouldn’t have otherwise," Miklautsch said.

Venables and Miklautsch are members of the Quilceda Residential Services board of directors. Board members and other volunteers formed a grass-roots effort in 1997 to find other housing for Marysville’s disabled population.

Quilceda Residential Services has run Quilceda House for the disabled in Marysville since 1979. But today many of Quilceda tenants are getting old, and board members knew they would have to live on one floor.

Now four years later, Quilceda board volunteers managed to get a combination of state, federal and county funds to build the $1.9 million Marysville Quilceda Meadows project.

The project’s architect, James Williams, calls the Meadows "a little village."

"We wanted them to be gathered together, where they would feel more secure that way," Williams said.

To help with that independent yet secure environment, Williams added certain touches to the project. He designed the outside of each unit to look different so the tenants would come to identify their home by its distinctions. And Williams included a bathroom in each unit to reduce the chance of tenants becoming upset because they would be forced to wait for a shared bathroom.

Snohomish County grants analyst Chris Jowell was impressed that the Quilceda board members were able to win a federal award from Housing and Urban Development for the bulk of the project’s funding — about $1.2 million — after competing nationally for the money.

"And that was a great thing because those were funds that wouldn’t have otherwise come here without their application," said Jowell.

At least 13 tenants from Quilceda House have applied to live at the Meadows campus, expected to be ready for occupancy by July. The campus will include an enclosed gazebo, built by funds raised by the Marysville Rotary Club, and will have an on-site manager. Tenants will be charged rent on a sliding scale, depending on their income.

Some of the Meadows’ tenants hold jobs. And though the pay is minimal, the job, much like their home, provides a sense of worth, Hazel Venables said.

Venables, who is in her 80s, said the plight of the disabled closely parallels the plight of the aging.

"Maybe I want to be with people like myself, and I want to be near community resources, and these folks are entitled to the same kinds of things," Venables said.

"Our society once warehoused these people and then we said that’s not right and we downsized those institutions," Venables continued. "And then we swung to the other side, that they need to be living just like the rest of society. And now with a little common sense, we can see that the answer is somewhere in the middle."

You can call Herald Writer Theresa Goffredo at 425-339-3097 or send e-mail to goffredo@heraldnet.com.

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