In this episode of the Leaders for Inclusive Community podcast, Isaac interviews Brittney Harris, Housing Development Manager at The Kelsey; LaTangela Foster, Housing Director at AIDS Alabama and The Kelsey Disability & Housing Narrative Change Cohort member; and Veronica McGee, longtime resident and advocate in Birmingham. The conversation explores the development of The Kelsey Avondale, The Kelsey’s first co-development outside of California. The participants discuss the community’s features, local partnerships in Birmingham, and ongoing advocacy efforts for disability-forward housing across Alabama.
Learn more about The Kelsey Avondale: https://thekelsey.org/projects/birmingham/
Transcript
Isaac Haney-Owens
Welcome to the Leaders for Intrusive Community podcast.
Welcome, Brittney, LaTangela and Veronica. Thank you for being here. Can each of you introduce yourself and tell me about your role in the Kelsey Birmingham?
Brittney Harris
Thanks Isaac. My name is Brittney Harris and I am a native from Birmingham and I’m excited to share my passion for creative inclusive communities as part of The Kelsey team, as housing development manager. I’ve had the privilege and am having the privilege of working on innovative projects that prioritize accessibility and affordability that ultimately will help revitalize the areas that we’re going into by taking vacant land and repurposing that for affordable housing.
LaTangela Foster
Well, my name is LaTangela Foster. I am the housing director for AIDS Alabama. I’ve been working in housing for over 16 years now. My role in Kelsey Birmingham is as a member of the community advisory group. So just part of the planning, beginning stages for Kelsey Birmingham as a community member, just participating and helping develop the project a little bit more and give feedback from people in the community. So I’m really excited about the development.
Veronica McGee
Hi, my name is Veronica McGee and I live in Birmingham, Alabama. And my husband and I have lived here since 1996 in Birmingham. We have four kids. They’re all adults now and three boys and one daughter. Our son, Kyle, is our middle son and Kyle is soon to be 25. And Kyle is really the reason probably why we are here talking today. So our son Kyle was born with what the medical world calls congenital hydrocephalus, and he also has a rare genetic disease. So he takes up a majority of our lives in many, ways, in a good way. So my role in this current stage in my life has a lot to do with what Kyle and I do together, which is a lot of advocacy and a lot of awareness of how Kyle can do all the same things that many other people that are neurotypical can do. Kyle’s a power chair user and Kyle uses, he also uses alternative communication to communicate. So he has a really, really awesome, crazy life and he keeps me super busy and and it just keeps getting busier and busier with all the cool things he’s doing in our world.
Isaac
Brittney, tell me a little about the work The Kelsey is doing in Birmingham.
Brittney
The Kelsey is dedicated to developing a vibrant, inclusive community in Birmingham, providing affordable housing options. Our project aims to create a supportive environment that empowers residents and enriches the local neighborhood, which is Avondale in this case. Our work in Birmingham is a first of its kind for the area. The Kelsey Avondale will provide more housing options for those with disabilities that allow these individuals to live in independent settings other than how they would have otherwise.
Isaac
So LaTangela, what is the Disability and Housing Narrative Change Cohort? Why did you decide to get involved with it?
LaTangela
The Narrative Change Cohort, I’m struggling with saying cohort, the Narrative Change Cohort is amazing. It is a year long program, including people living with disabilities who have housing stories to share, also leaders in the community and those who may provide services in the community. So I kind of wear two hats in terms of my participation. One, I am a provider of housing services for people with disabilities, but I’m also a person living with a disability with my own housing story. So the point of the cohort is to change the narrative, which the name implies, and to get the word out to the community and at different levels, local, state, federal, about the needs of people living with disabilities searching for housing, and to change the belief systems, change the stigma, change the stereotypes surrounding all of those things. And we’re hoping that by sharing our personal experiences that we can get people to view this situation very differently and approach it very differently through direct action.
Isaac
Yeah. And there needs to be more investment in housing for people with disabilities by all of these different groups of people so that people with disabilities can have more choices of housing to choose from instead of a limited number of choices.
LaTangela
Absolutely. Choice is extremely important and choice prevents segregation. And we know what happens. Oftentimes people with disabilities or people who are marginalized in the community are segregated in the community. And we fight against that as well.
Isaac
Because the community sees them in a very negative way instead of seeing them as being part of the community and being able to be more than what those people think of them.
LaTangela
Yes. Change the narrative, change this image, get rid of the stigma.
Isaac
Can you tell me a little about your housing story and how you became an advocate?
LaTangela
Yes, sure. Like I mentioned earlier, I grew up in Birmingham in a low-income housing project and is actually now considered one of the worst housing projects in Birmingham. But I grew up there with my grandmother and my mother and father and an uncle. And everybody, all the adults in my family struggled financially. We, like I said, we were a low-income family, but also my parents had disabilities. So that added an extra barrier for our success in that community. Lived there my whole life, lived there until I was 18, when we were basically evicted from our housing. And there was no support, no services, and most importantly, no respect.
We were not evicted for being bad tenants. We were not evicted for not paying our rent. We were found ineligible for low-income housing. By the time this happened, the only people left in my family were me and my mother. Everyone else had passed away. So dealing with grief, extreme loss, and then you’re telling two women, one young woman who’s 18 and her mother who was working a low-wage job with a disability, you tell those two women that they are not eligible for affordable housing in the worst housing project in Birmingham. And we were not treated with any dignity or any respect through that process. So thankfully, we, through friends and family, were able to locate another place to live and we did not end up homeless, but that process was very scary and very demeaning.
And I will never forget it. And we ended up moving to another housing project that we were eligible for somehow, but treated with much more respect and dignity and support. And the landlord there was amazing. The property management team there was amazing. And when I got into the housing field, I wanted to be more like that group and not the first group that gave us an eviction notice and gave us two weeks to get out of a home that we had lived in, I had lived there 18 years and my mother had lived there 40 years or more. And it was our home and our community and we were just thrown away ineligible, low-income with a disability. So that is, you know, a short version of my story, but that is what drives me. I do not want anyone to ever feel the way that my mother and I felt or go through that again.
Isaac
And we need more people like you who want people with disabilities to have, to have housing and be stay housed.
Isaac
So, Veronica, tell me a little about your partnership with The Kelsey in Birmingham. How did you start working with The Kelsey?
Veronica
So my journey with The Kelsey was probably started when Kyle and I and his dad started looking at opportunities or options about three years ago. We were looking, thinking about the future. My husband and I were thinking about retirement and Kyle was struggling with just, you know, aging out, as we all know that wonderful terminology, aging out of his life within the school system at 21. And, you know, worried about, again, isolation for Kyle and in a community that Kyle could live in safely and that was rollable and accessible and very social, because Kyle’s a very, very social young man. So I found out about a conference in Maryland, Rockville, Maryland, that an organization called Main Street was hosting. And I reached out to Jillian Copeland and asked a little bit more about it and found out that it was going to be really about, really zeroed in on funding and financing and how do you build a community like the one Kyle wants to live in, which is a multifamily community. Kyle wants to live in a rental community that fits his budget so that he could afford it and that is scalable and has other people living there.
So we did know we wanted it to be a multifamily type community but we didn’t know how would we fund something like that. So I went to the conference and it was a wonderful conference full of family-driven organizations that were really doing what we are doing today. And I met The Kelsey and I met Micaela and I listened to a lot of their conversations, Micaela Connery, the CEO of The Kelsey, and was able to connect and really kind of actually visualize how we could fund and finance a community like Main Street and like The Kelsey in Birmingham. So that’s kind of where it all started and then I just I guess one of the things that really connected me to to The Kelsey was when Micaela and I were describing I was talking to her about Kyle and she was telling me about her cousin Kelsey and we kind of discovered that they seemed like they would have been very good friends and they were very, very shared a lot of common ways in the way they communicated. So that immediately made me have a connection with The Kelsey. And then, so what happened next, the partnership kind of started when I came back to Birmingham and my husband and I raised some capital, a little capital to hire The Kelsey to help us with the first stage of this process, which is the technical assistance process. So that would have been in December of 2022, and Micaela came to Birmingham, Micaela Connery, the CEO, and we just started the process of putting together a group of stakeholders. And we, The Kelsey, loved the communities, loved the people they met, and agreed to take on this project and start the technical assistance in a more concrete way. And so that’s kind of how the partnership started. And it’s just continued to flourish ever since.
Isaac
Brittney, what’s one feature, amenity, or critical element you’re excited to see in the finished housing development in Birmingham?
Brittney
Well, this is an easy one. I think I would definitely say the community spaces. I’m really eager to see our community spaces come to life. Just provided those residents with opportunities for connection, for growth, and even relaxation. I’m really excited to see these areas come to life as they all foster, I think they’ll foster a sense of belonging and community pride amongst our residents, so that has to be my number one community feature that I’m probably the most excited to see.
Isaac
So LaTangela, what’s one feature, amenity or element you’re excited to see in the finished housing development in Birmingham?
LaTangela
I’m excited about two things. One, I’m excited about, with the current plan, there’s going to be a community space. I think that is great to get people engaged and for people to be able to build a community at The Kelsey Birmingham and meet their neighbors and be able to support one another. I think that’s very important. I know in my community, I’m thankful for my neighbors and the people that are around me, so I love that feature of the project. I also love that there’s going to be a concierge there to link people to services in the community. So if you don’t know where to go, you don’t know what you need, there’s somebody on site that you can reach out to who can give you some direction, kind of point you in the right direction to find what you need. So many people don’t know where to start. They’re willing, they know how to advocate for themselves. They just may need someone to just point them in the right direction. So I love that there’s gonna be a person whose job it is to do that on-site.
Isaac
And the service is called the Inclusion Concierge, and there’s going to be two people whose job it is to do that.
LaTangela
Yeah, that’s great. I think that’s a great amenity.
Isaac
We would like to say that our work is created a home for more. For example, we are creating homes for more opportunities for people to thrive.
So, Veronica, what would you like to create home for more of with this development?
Veronica
Well, I have to be honest. When I first started, thinking about a home for more, I was thinking, you know, pretty myopically with in regards to, you know, my son Kyle, and what kind of home he would like to live in. But then, as I started working with The Kelsey and learning about their broader mission, I would say, to answer your question, I’m definitely I’m very passionate about bringing a home for more, as I said earlier, to our more marginalized communities, our Black and brown communities, and our just the whole, just our very extremely low-income communities, and for people with and without disabilities in those, with those populations. And the city of Birmingham definitely, again, represents…That’s a large group that is represented that live and try to live in the city of Birmingham, but don’t have access to equitable, fair housing that is not discriminatory and things like that. So I’ve really expanded my view of learning more about the crisis and the need. So that’s kind of where I am right now. It just kind of happened organically through building our community in the city of Birmingham and learning more about the things and the lack of housing for our more marginalized populations.
Isaac
So Brittney, as someone who has lived in Birmingham and knows the city well, what do you think this project will bring to the city?
Brittney
What I think it would bring is I think it would light a fuse under the residents to start to take action of the issues that they’ve seen for years in the city. Homelessness has been an issue. The lack or quality of affordable housing has been an issue. Dilapidated communities on the West and the East sides of town, actually all the way throughout Birmingham. You know, hearing these issues of constantly being brought up, I think it just sound like a cyclical conversation of just kind of going in circles, and I think them seeing a project like The Kelsey Avondale, which in all intents and purposes is not an easy to implement, seeing a project that some have thought, like, “Hey, that’s maybe that’s too hard to do. It’s too hard to do in Alabama.” So them seeing that project, you know, be developed and residents move in and the, you know, the community is there and, and it’s alive and it’s well, I think it will really put a fire under the city. “The city” as in the local government in the city, as in the folks that actually live there. It’s kind of like, okay, what can we do to affect more change like The Kelsey has come and helped us do here. So that’s really what I’m hoping to see it do Isaac. I really hope to see it kind of fire folks up in the city and in Alabama as a whole. You know, we have this population as far as those in the disability community, and, you know, what can we do to help make their lives a little easier, help make them feel more involved in the community, help make them feel more empowered in the communities, the cities that they live in? And I think this will help to highlight those folks. I think in the past, I think we know this, not just in the state of Alabama, everywhere those with disabilities have kind of had to take a back seat, have been overlooked in so many different instances. So I think seeing this project, which really kind of puts folks with disabilities at the forefront and, you know, giving them something of quality and something that they can be proud of, something that we can be proud of, I think, and I won’t say I hope, I really think that this would encourage other folks to look at this as well. I think it’ll spur policy locally and statewide that would affect the ease of developing an inclusive, affordable housing, whether it’s multifamily, whether it’s single-family neighborhoods, whatever that looks like. I’m just glad that I think this project will help that area at large, just take a closer look at what they can do.
Isaac
So LaTangela, could you explain a little bit more about what you do for work?
LaTangela
Yes. I work for AIDS Alabama. We’re a state AIDS service organization here in Alabama. We’re the largest AIDS service organization in Alabama. And I am the Director of the Housing Department and we operate a statewide housing program. So we manage, we own and manage three section 811 projects. We have a group home for people who are dually diagnosed with HIV and mental illness. We have a substance abuse program. We have a homeless shelter and we have single-family homes throughout the city, in addition to operating two voucher programs and a lot of other assisted housing. So I am responsible for our statewide housing programs. And I’ve been doing it, like I said, for 16 years, and it has really, really grown. We’ve expanded our housing in that time. And we’ve expanded our population. We went from being HIV-specific to now pretty much anyone from a marginalized community. That means immigrants, that means low-income families, people with other disabilities that are not HIV, women with children. We have a youth shelter, so the name implies that it’s all about HIV AIDS, but we do way more than that.
Isaac
And it’s great to see an organization like that doing so much work in the community.
LaTangela
Yeah, it’s a lot. We got a lot going on. But it’s good. It’s good. I’m proud of the work that we’re doing.
Isaac
Yeah, because your organization is doing the hard work, the work that many people don’t want to do, and what needs to be done to put a dent in these issues.
LaTangela
Correct. Yes, particularly the housing issue. We’re finalists right now with the city of Birmingham for another program called Home for All that will also help the unhoused in Birmingham, if the city council approves that.
Isaac
Veronica, tell me a bit about the Section 811 advocacy you are doing in Alabama. Why is this important to build integrated housing?
Veronica
That’s a great question, Isaac, and I’m so glad that you’re giving me the opportunity to talk a little bit about 811 Capital Advance. So, I’m part of a group of inclusive housers. We call ourselves the Inclusive Houser Network. And also, who’s joining me with this advocacy is a large group of co-developers of inclusive housing. So we are all wanting to appeal to the Office of Multifamily Housing at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development in trying to strengthen HUD’s 811 Capital Advance to create more integrated housing. So as a group, we have put together some recommendations of how HUD 811 Capital Advance program can be more affirmative toward integrated housing. And I would love to share a couple of those recommendations that we sent to the Office of Multifamily, if you would allow me to share a few of those. And they are, I’m just gonna read them, because this is exactly what we recommended. Number one would be to incentivize the integration, which can occur by adding additional points and other incentives for integrated projects. We strongly recommend entitled by right to integrated projects. And we strongly recommend implementing mechanisms for supporting and building up the capacity of newer developers and inclusive housers. So in conclusion on this subject, you know, we feel that HUD section 504 obligation and also for HUD as a whole’s responsibility is to ensure that all of its programs, including capital advance, you know, create more housing opportunities and align with community integration mandates like Olmstead and those kind of mandates that we all are benefiting from. Personally, it means a lot to me because $3 million of our funding is coming from the 811 Capital Advance. And HUD loved our project. And it’s just interesting to me who is the advocacy behind trying to include developers of segregated housing. You know, I just find that really interesting that that is even happening because I always found that 811 Capital Advance, what made us so competitive that we were able to get the funding is because 25% of our units were set aside for people with disabilities. So that’s what I don’t understand, which I haven’t had a chance to have a conversation with Allie about it. Again, 3 million dollars is coming directly to Avondale for the building of our project from the 811 Capital Advance.
Isaac
So Brittney, is there anything that we haven’t discussed that you would like to talk about?
Brittney
I think what excites me about this project is that Avondale, I’m very familiar with Avondale. At once, Avondale was a community that was, it had areas that were dilapidated. It had areas that needed to be revitalized and that started to happen. There is a beautiful downtown area there. There is beautiful homes coming in, small home communities. And I, as a Birmingham resident, as a previous Birmingham resident, I love to see that. However, with that happening, those that have been native to that neighborhood couldn’t necessarily afford to live there anymore. So, and we’ve had that question a lot coming into Birmingham. You know, what are we going to do about the perceived gentrification that has been going on, that people have been saying has been going on in the area? And so the fact that our project is specifically an affordable project in like the heart of Avondale, very close to all of those new amenities and, you know, new businesses that are coming in, I’m just kind of really excited to see those new amenities and businesses be available for all types of people, of all different types of backgrounds, income levels, disability, creeds, races. So I’m really excited to see that.
Isaac
And Veronica, is there anything that we haven’t discussed that you would like to talk about?
Veronica
Isaac, I would like to end this podcast today with mentioning one thing that I’m probably so proud of and so excited about is that The Kelsey chose Birmingham, Alabama as the place for their first co-development project outside of California. So we feel that that will show, you know, the South that The Kelsey has the very strong determination to scale up this incredible model that they’re developing.
Isaac
Those are all the questions we have. It’s been great talking with you all. Thank you again for being here and sharing more about The Kelsey Birmingham.
Thank you for listening. If you’d like to learn more about The Kelsey Avondale, visit thekelsey.org/projects.
If you have any questions or would like to support our work in Birmingham, please email hello@thekelsey.org.
If you have a topic you’d like me to explore or a person to interview, email me at Isaac@thekelsey.org. Goodbye!