Ex-foster youth at risk for homelessness find safety with newly opened Pando Aspen Grove

When Praise Ferguson moved into her new one-bedroom apartment at Pando Aspen Grove in June, she had to take it all in. 

The unit was fully furnished. It came with a bed, sheets, quilts, towels and a shower. The living room already had a sofa and television while the kitchen was equipped with a microwave, cookware, utensils, a stove, plates, glasses and refrigerator. There also was a bathroom that was so large Ferguson thought it looked like it could be in a movie.

Yet, it was all hers. 

"Y'all are giving me this opportunity to move in and get on my feet? It's scary," she said. "People really took the time out of their day to build these apartments for people like me."

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The 20-year-old Ferguson is one of nine tenants living in the newly-open Pando Aspen Grove of Community Heights, a housing complex serving young adults who’ve transitioned out of Indiana’s child welfare and foster care system and are at risk of homelessness. 

Addressing gaps in care 

Lutheran Child & Family Services and its partners, including Indianapolis-based TWG Development, celebrated the grand opening of the small apartment complex with a ribbon cutting and discussion on homelessness on Wednesday. 

The community opened just days after a study was released that showed the number of people experiencing homelessness and living unsheltered in Indianapolis has reached a 10-year high. The Coalition for Homelessness Intervention and Prevention and the Indiana University Public Policy Institute released the homeless census that found 1,928 people experiencing homelessness. 

Lutheran Child & Family Services hopes that Pando Aspen Grove at Community Heights will help address gaps in the continuum of care for foster youth, creating a safety net that will keep them off the streets. 

At the corner of East 16th Street and North Lesley Avenue on the city's east side, the modular three-story multifamily complex has 30 one-bedroom apartments, about 550-square-foot in size.

The development is owned by Lutheran Child & Family Services, which went through a three-year process to finance and develop the site with local real estate company TWG Development. The housing complex was financed through the 4% Low-Income Housing Tax Credit and $9.2 million provided by the state.

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Pando Aspen Grove of Community Heights serves young adults ages 18 to 24. Sven Schumacher, Lutheran Child & Family Services executive director, said the goal of building the complex was to address housing instability for young adults transitioning out of foster care. 

Lutheran Child & Family Services got the idea to create permanent housing for young adults who grew up in foster care after operating a group home called Trinity House for 15 years. The nonprofit strives to teach young adults daily life skills. It also emphasizes education and works to ensure that each young adult has at least a high school diploma or equivalent. 

Young adults can voluntarily access foster care programs until they are 21 years old. But, Schumacher, a social worker, said they don't always that. 

"We have sometimes found that these young people as soon as they turn 18, they say, 'Oh, we want to do our own thing. We don't want to listen to social workers anymore,'" he said. "Some of them had to listen to social workers — in what we call the system — for all their lives."

Young adults have left Trinity House hopeful yet ill-prepared, Schumacher said. Some go off to college but find themselves without a place to stay when dorms close during holidays or semester breaks. 

Others may seek to return to their biological families but find that those circumstances may not work out. Whatever the reasons, the organization found that young adults who leave often call asking to return. But, Schumacher said that's often impossible because they are out of the system. 

"It's such a difficult thing to be out there as a foster youth that doesn't have a family to really make it up and as this is how sadly so many foster youth are ending up homeless," he said. 

'It's scary'

When Ferguson first got the call from TWG onsite project manager Catinya Brown that an apartment was available for her, she thought it was a scam.

“I was kind of scared. I just went with it,” she said. “Even after I went there, I still thought it was a scam.”

Ferguson recalled going through an apartment approval process months earlier through an outreach program, but she wasn't sure who contacted Brown. Besides, other than a car, Ferguson had never had anything of her own, but now she was being told she could live in a brand new apartment.  

Still, Ferguson went through the qualification process. It took some time for Ferguson to believe that what was happening to her was real.

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She considers Pando Aspen Grove a gateway for young people without resources or family to improve their livelihoods. 

"I'm cherishing it and I'm trying to get use to it," she said. "I'm trying to understand that this is a good setup for me to get my actual life together."

To live at Pando Aspen Grove at Community Heights, people interested in housing resources go through a structured coordinate entry process. Individuals can call Youth Link and meet with employees who assess their situation and enter them into a system that scores their needs.

Finding community 

When Lutheran Child & Family Services was seeking ways to offer continued care for young adults in foster care, it learned that the Indiana Housing and Community Development Authority had expressed interest in similar programs.

The agency had turned its focus toward housing projects that aimed to provide former foster youth stability while they developed life skills before moving on to somewhere else, Schumacher said. 

Lutheran Child & Family Services entered the Indiana Housing and Community Development Authority's training institute, competing with others for direct funding, federal tax credits and housing authority grants. During that process, the nonprofit worked with TWG and Community Health to craft a plan for Pando Aspen Grove at Community Heights. 

Construction started earlier this year. The complex is the first modular multifamily complex in the state. 

What's in a name?

The development takes its name from a more than 10-acre grove of interconnected aspen trees within Utah's Fishlake National Forest. Schumacher said the name is a metaphor for people needing to connect with each other via a community.

"What we often find out is that these young people have very little — what we call social capital. They may know a lot of people because they are out on the street, but are these people who help you become the person who want to be? Probably not," he said. 

At its basis, Pando Aspen Grove at Community Heights takes care of one critical element in the hierarchy of needs — housing. Once people are housed, wraparound services are provided to address the social, economic and behavioral needs of tenants. 

All programming is voluntary. Tenants can move in and stay to themselves, or they can participate in programs that teach them to manage their money, pay bills, cook and learn skills for independent living. 

They have access to free laundry and a food pantry if needed. Like any other complex, residents sign a lease. Apartments rent for $781. Indianapolis Housing Authority pays $731 for residents if they have no income.

All residents, regardless of income, are responsible for paying $50 each month toward their rent. Lutheran Child & Family Service has money in its budget to subsidize the remaining rent, but the nonprofit does it from a care standpoint while encouraging residents to seek employment.

"We have to get to all the other things," he said. "That's kind of the specific challenge."

Adjusting to a new environment

It is by design that the apartments at Pando Aspen Grove of Community Heights were built with the tenants' needs in mind.

Schumacher said Lutheran Child & Family Service and its partners didn't want residents to feel lonely in their new home. They could also serve more people with smaller units. 

"Some of these kids have lived couch surfing with other students so they have known that type of lifestyle. All of a sudden you're in your own apartment and sitting here like whoa!" he said. "This is why we didn't want them to big."

They also tried to be mindful that tenants might not have many personal items. 

A life in transition

The earliest age Ferguson can remember living as a foster child is 14 years old. She struggles to talk about the circumstances regarding her relationship with her mother and how she entered Indiana's foster care system. 

Ferguson spent her teenage years living in several homes and with different families.  

"It's hard for everybody because at the time you've got to adapt to a whole different lifestyle with different people," she said. "You don't know how many times you're gonna have to do that because you're not actually their kid. You don't actually belong to these people."

Ferguson aged out of foster care without stable housing and support. She was studying graphic design and living in a residence hall at Vincennes University when the coronavirus pandemic struck, forcing the college to send students like Ferguson home to take classes remotely.

But, she didn't have anywhere to go.

"When COVID hit and they kicked us all out, they just placed us with people," she said. "That wasn't working out because these are college kids coming into like homes of people that got younger kids."

Unable to return to her biological family, Ferguson instead stayed with friends. Sometimes she slept in her car. For a while, Ferguson also stayed with her boyfriend, but she withheld all the details about her living situation from him. 

"I really didn't want to make him a part of that. He really never knew anything so when I said I'm going home I'm just going back to whoever I was staying with at the time," she said. 

Finding support

In addition to being fully furnished, the facility offers a small compute lab, free Wi-Fi and laundry facilities on each floor, a community food pantry stocked with toiletries and nonperishable food. Bikes also are available to borrow. 

Water, sewage and trash service are free. There are community activities. 

Barbara Walters, Lutheran Child & Family Services director of strategy and innovation, said residents who choose to enroll in supportive services will receive a Chromebook so they can access job and school websites as well as health care and other personal information. 

Residents can live at Pando Aspen Grove until they are ready to move on. Walters said the complex does not admit anyone over 24 years old but it also doesn't kick tenants out once they've reached that age.

"They eventually might want to do other things with their lives and that's fine," she said. "They are welcome to do that, but they do not get aged out of this facility so they can say here as long as they are feeling this is the right choice for them."

Contact IndyStar reporter Alexandria Burris at aburris@gannett.com or call 317-617-2690. Follow her on Twitter: @allyburris.'