Special Needs Group Home Slated For Douglaston

DOUGLASTON, QUEENS -- A new group home for adults with developmental disabilities is set to take over a former church along a main roadway in Douglaston.

Services For the Underserved (SUS), a citywide nonprofit organization, got Community Board 11's stamp of approval to create the adult group home inside a roughly 3,000-square-foot structure at 244-04 Northern Boulevard. Board members voted overwhelmingly in favor of the group home at their monthly meeting Monday night.

The Douglaston building, slated to house eight developmentally disabled adults, is on the grounds of St. Anastasia Church, which previously used it as an annex. The residents, all in their 40s and 50s, will move over to the new space from another group home in Queens that SUS has been renting from the archdiocese, said Doris Figueroa, the nonprofit's senior vice president of developmental disabilities services.

The new building, though smaller than the last, would be more accessible to residents with handicaps, Figueroa told Patch.

"The old facility wasn’t accessible at all - very small doors, small bathrooms, very narrow hallways," Figueroa said. "It's a big facility with many floors, but we don’t use all the floors."

The nonprofit would renovate the new space into a two-floor facility whose entire first floor would be handicap accessible, she said. The first floor would include a living room, dining room, a kitchen, two ADA-compliant bathrooms, a medication room and a laundry room. The second floor would feature four more bedrooms, two full bathrooms, a medication room, a laundry room, a sitting area, an office space and a recreation room with a balcony.

Each resident in the group home receives round-the-clock supervision from a staff member assigned to them, Figueroa said. They also make daily trips to a rehabilitation center where they learn basic everyday tasks like taking care of their rooms, personal care and hygiene, cooking and cleaning to help them become more independence, she said.

Various departments within the organization, along with the New York Office for People With Developmental Disabilities, will regularly conduct routine inspections of the group home, Figueroa said.

The new space in Douglaston would also allow residents to stay close to family members, Figueroa said.

'Their families are from Queens, so we try not to take them out of the community if there’s not a need to," she said.

The renovation would cost the organization roughly $450,000 and will take roughly a year to complete, said Steven Myricks, director of facilities administration and real estate management for SUS. The next step for the nonprofit is to finish negotiating the lease and get a property approval from the state, Myricks told Patch.

"Then we can start with the remodel of the site," he said. "It will take a good 6 months after that to rehab it to make the first floor totally accessible."

This would be the nonprofit's first Douglaston facility, joining several similar housing operations in other Queens neighborhoods, Brooklyn and the Bronx. SUS will rent the building from St. Anastasia for $3,600 per month in a 20-year lease with the church, said Stephen Pivawer, co-chairman of the community board's Group Home/Community Facilities Committee.

Pivawer told Patch that while he welcomed the group home, he felt "slighted" that executives from the nonprofit didn't show up at the meeting to address the board directly, which he and other members had specifically asked for in a prior committee meeting.

He had hoped to hear more information from the nonprofit on the plan's financial aspects, specifically the salaries of nonprofit executives and staff members.

"I want the money going to the residents, that's my concern," Pivawer said. "We're the taxpayers and basically 99 percent of the funding is coming from the state. I want there to be full transparency."

Lead image via Google Maps.