The housing crisis in New Hampshire has a profound impact on adults with developmental disabilities. Many parents of adult sons or daughters with developmental disabilities have little choice but to have them live at home. This can be because of underfunding, availability, adequacy or staffing needs.

Of course, parents won’t leave them homeless, and the government provides them with a stipend for daily living and medical insurance. But for people with developmental disabilities, it’s more complex than just putting a roof over their heads. Most of them need support for daily living and work. Likely, they don’t drive and forging friendships and connecting to their community is a challenge.

My goal has always been for my son, William, to live independently. I wanted to make sure he had support and a stable home after my death. So, when he graduated from ConVal, he moved into a house on Summer Street in Peterborough. I found someone to live with him and someone to support him at work.

He worked for the Peterborough Congregational Church and Edmunds Hardware Store. He participated in the now-defunct Crotched Mountain Adaptive Recreational Program, but that was not enough to fill his day, and he had no social life.

For me, having William live independently was a full-time job. I managed his housing and his daily life, including substituting if someone could not be there to take him to work or cook dinner with him. It was overwhelming for a working mother. This situation was inauthentic and unsustainable. Most of his friends had left the community. I had to pay someone to live with him, to assist him at work and to recreate with him. Therefore, the sense of home and community was disingenuous.

Since William graduated from ConVal in 2008, he has been unhoused five times. When he left Peterborough the second time, I found a diverse community on a farm where families worked and lived together with adults with developmental disabilities. The community was as old as William was, so it seemed sustainable. He moved freely on the campus, shared and valued his work. This was just what I wanted for him—a community providing everything he needed in one place.

But there was a caveat. Medicaid has stipulations for communities to assure that they receive proper care. The farm community did not want to live by government rules, so they told me that William would have to leave once they pulled away from Medicaid. Ten years later, they turned their care to only those whose families could pay privately. And William was unhoused again.

It is typical for individuals with disabilities to be the ones who must leave places where they live. Fortunately for William, he moved in with a family in Peterborough he had lived with before. Also, this family manages Perfect Peace, a residential program in Jaffrey. With so many leaving the farm, they extended the residential program with a day program.

William deserves to live in a stable home where, if the staff changes, they leave instead of him, where he lives with his peers and receives the support he needs, where he can become an active part of the Peterborough community, where circumstances beyond his control can’t take it away from him.

I’m not the only one who wants this for my son. Parents from Peterborough, Francestown and Temple have been struggling to provide the same sense of community in Peterborough for our sons and daughters as we have for ourselves. Some employers and the recreation department helped us along the way, but it is not enough.

So, in January, we gathered to turn this dream into a reality and started an LLC called Our Own House. We are still in our infancy, but we are state-approved, and we have a board. We are looking for a property close to the center of Peterborough to build on, or modify, to meet the housing needs of adults with disabilities. Our Own House would put us in the center of the greater community—within walking distance of downtown Peterborough—rather than on the outskirts.

New Hampshire became the first state to close all its state-run institutions for people with developmental disabilities in 1991, around when our adult sons and daughters were born. We parents have always paved the way for others by defining what education should mean for people with disabilities, by integrating our children, and later adults, into local recreation programs, by facing doctors who didn’t know how to face our children. We will continue to pave the next road by finding a home for our adult children that provides an enduring and enriching residential community where differently abled adults can thrive.

Elizabeth Goodhue serves on the board of the Monadnock Area Transitional Shelter (MATS), which provides transitional housing, support and referral services to people who are experiencing homelessness, to educate the community on issues of homelessness and to advocate for solutions.