Remember your first apartment? Suddenly you had privacy. Every picture on the wall reflected your personality. There was freedom – maybe you didn’t make your bed for a week. There was comfort – your favorite chair in the corner. And there was safety.

Our homes are more than where we sleep, eat and hang our clothes, they are the base from which we move out into the world, and the sanctuary to which we return to gather ourselves together again.

For people with a disability, moving out can be complicated. But parents usually die before their children, and so whether it’s planned or not, the time to move out eventually comes. Finances often limit housing options for people with disabilities, but there are some creative possibilities worth exploring.

For many people, experiences in group homes and care facilities have been mixed. Rules and procedures can eliminate spontaneity and freedom. Staff turnover may be high, creating confusion and vulnerability. Too often the people who work there, rather than the people who live there, shape the personality of the place, and it gets treated more as a workplace than as a home.

For others, a group living situation provides stability and companionship. L’Arche communities are known for their focus on relationships. A good recipe for a group home in which people flourish is one where staff turnover is low, the residents are friends, and the walls often ring with laughter.

The presence of laughter in any home situation can be an informal test of quality of life. People with disabilities need a place where they can be safe and comfortable, but also a place where they can live. In the book, A Good Life For You and Your Relative with a Disability, Al Etmanski, writes of the cumulative living that makes a house a home: the “sweat and laughter, bruises and tears, rug stains and cobwebs, flowers and slammed doors, failures and promises, kisses and fingerprints.”

A home is for living with all the grace and space that each of us requires. One young woman suffered terribly when she moved into a group situation where the rules conflicted with her outgoing personality. She lost her cat and her beloved plants and in a short time lost her joy in living.

Control over home life is important for well being. Home ownership turned out to be the answer for the young woman who had been in the group home. Her parents were able to find a small older house not far from where they live. Re-mortgaging the family home made the financing possible. Extensive interviews resulted in good support staff, and their daughter now lives with her best friend, two cats, an active social calendar and much joy.

A Good Life details other options such as co-housing, housing equity cooperatives, land trusts, long-term leases, and renting. The book talks about some of the creative financial approaches that have been used to make buying a house possible, as well as how to structure ownership to protect home owners from unscrupulous advances.

The intimate space of home has a profound effect on each of us. Beyond safety and comfort, having control over our home life means creating a place where we can flourish.