By Denise D. Resnik, Founder & President/CEO, First Place AZ and Desiree Kameka Galloway, Director, Autism Housing Network
At 6:45 each morning, Marcus checks the transit app, grabs his packed lunch and catches the #51 bus to work from his parents’ home. He’s been following this routine since high school—setting alarms, managing his meds, tracking appointments, establishing the rhythm of adult life. His family started looking for housing options when he was 15. They were told to start early and plan ahead to build independence. They were diligent in preparing him to leave the nest.
Marcus, who has autism, is now 26. Housing leads chased for over a decade have turned up waitlists, group homes and options with a level of dependence he has outgrown. After years of preparation, they face a quiet cruelty: a system that encourages people to be ready for futures it can’t deliver.
Preparing for an unprepared marketplace
Marcus’s family did everything by the book—and more. They got a head start on the housing search when he was 15. They hired a transition consultant, attended workshops and built networks with other families. They researched programs in three states, toured settings that felt more like facilities than homes and filled out applications for places with 10-year waitlists. If a family this organized, resourceful and supposedly ahead of the curve is still hitting dead ends, what happens to families juggling multiple jobs, language barriers or their own health crises?
Marcus represents the leading edge of what advocates call the “inclusion generation”: young adults who grew up with better early intervention, stronger educational supports and higher expectations than any generation before them. They learned to navigate public transportation, manage complex schedules and advocate for workplace accommodations. They practiced independence in supported settings, built confidence through success and grasped that preparation leads to possibility.
They’re ready—but the housing market and system of adult support services isn’t.
Lack of choice and loss of skills
The math is grim. Roughly 120,000 autistic young adults exit the school system each year— a total of 1.2 million over the next decade, many with skills adults with autism and/or intellectual/developmental disabilities from their parents’ generation never had the chance to develop. But when these young adults look for housing or jobs, they find only options frozen in time—systems built around outdated assumptions about capability and designed as one size fits all instead of choices tailored to unique needs.
Too often, the only available option is whatever group home or adult foster care bed becomes available when someone moves away, reverts to family support or dies. That’s not a “choice.” For Marcus, it means risking that his carefully built independence skills will fade while he waits for housing designed around needs and limitations defined by others.
Anticipating the “what ifs” and focusing on solutions
What if Marcus’s story could be different? What if families could describe what they need—not just housing but the specific supports, community connections and design features that match their situation—and communities could respond with precision instead of guesswork? And what if innovative partnerships could make possible the combination of the signature strengths of three key sectors: private enterprise, public systems and nonprofit community organizations supported by charitable investors?
For the past five years, advocates, families, policymakers, housing developers and private foundations focused on various returns on their investments have been anticipating those “what ifs,” creating detailed frameworks to help communities understand actual demand, design options that match real lives—and the importance of moving faster from good intentions to open doors.
The question isn’t whether adults like Marcus are ready for independence. It’s whether we’re ready to build the range of choices he and his family have been preparing for all along.
After doing everything right, Marcus is still waiting.
First Place Global and Madison House Autism Foundation just released the much anticipated third edition of A Place in the World® (APITW): Fueling Housing and Community Options for Adults with Autism and Other Neurodiversities. The updated 2020 report includes new research and maps a path forward for communities ready to shorten those interminable waitlists and close that persistent gap. By working together, we can reshape what home can mean for the inclusion generation.