November 15, 2001 | Read Time: 8 minutes
MacArthur winner improves lives by providing housing
When Rosanne Haggerty was growing up in West Hartford, Conn., her mother and father,
both schoolteachers, taught her to welcome those who were bereft of family and friends. On holidays, poor people from a nearby residential hotel dined at the family table, surrounded by Ms. Haggerty, her seven younger siblings, and her parents.
“Our holidays were wacky,” Ms. Haggerty says with a fond smile. But, she adds, her parents’ message was clear: Those who have a home and family have a responsibility to embrace those who do not.
Now 41, Ms. Haggerty has turned that lesson into the cornerstone of Common Ground Community, a nonprofit organization she founded 11 years ago that offers permanent housing and numerous social services to formerly homeless and other low-income people in New York. Her work includes renovating ornate, historic buildings and transforming them into comfortable one-room apartments for Common Ground’s tenants.
For her work, Ms. Haggerty was among 23 people to win this year’s esteemed MacArthur Fellows awards. The $500,000 prizes, given by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, in Chicago, are commonly known as “genius grants” in recognition of the innovative work of their recipients.
The award highlights Ms. Haggerty’s ability to accomplish on a large scale goals that include providing residents with permanent homes, employment opportunities, counseling, and social connections, and improving neighborhoods through the resuscitation of formerly derelict buildings. She also continues to envision new ways of housing various segments of the homeless population, including youths and those who require medical care.
Her approach mirrors the philosophy of inclusivity and compassion that her parents instilled in her.
“What do we need to have lives that are full and functional?” she says. “A stable place to live, friends, access to health care, support when we need it, income and jobs, and a sense of security.”
Real-Estate Finance
While Ms. Haggerty’s work in behalf of the homeless is driven in large measure by empathy, she also has shaped the complex worlds of New York finance and real estate to her goals.
Common Ground now employs 157 people and manages more than 1,200 apartments in three buildings, two of which are listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The charity is renovating two additional buildings to house homeless and other low-income residents, and it has plans to develop a third.
Common Ground’s fiscal 2002 budget is $16-million, with 60 percent of it stemming from tenants, who must pay a portion of their income in rent to Common Ground, and from commercial enterprises that lease space in the ground floors of the charity’s buildings, as well as three Ben & Jerry’s ice cream outlets the charity owns and operates. Other money comes from governments, foundations, corporations, and individuals.
“If you look back at what she did, it’s really extraordinary,” says Francis W. Hatch, chairman of the John Merck Fund, in Boston, one of the charity’s supporters. “She did it because people believed in her, and she has this wonderful, low-key way of presenting her case and doing it in a very convincing way.”
‘Your Past Disappears’
To encourage socializing and further deepen the support network among residents, Common Ground staff members arrange meals, holiday parties, and classes on yoga, art, and other subjects. Many of the functions take place in the buildings’ grand common spaces, including a rooftop garden.
“What our formerly homeless tenants crave is an experience of normalcy,” says Ms. Haggerty. “You move into our buildings, and your past disappears. We know who you are and are available to help you.”
The all-encompassing approach has a comparatively low price for the city government, she says. It costs the city about $10,000 a year for each resident to live at the Times Square, the group’s flagship building, she says, compared to $18,250 at a city shelter, according to the city’s Department of Homeless Services.
Starting Out
Ms. Haggerty never set out to become an expert in sheltering the homeless. After her studies at Amherst College, she worked at Covenant House, a shelter for teenagers in New York, intending the experience to be a short break before law school. But she felt frustrated that the help Covenant House sought to provide, including housing and health care, did not seem to stick, because teenagers left the shelter after 30 days.
Seeking to help create permanent homes for those in need, Ms. Haggerty joined the housing office at Catholic Charities of Brooklyn & Queens, a charity that helps to house the mentally ill, among other programs. After spending several years there, Ms. Haggerty read about the squalid condition of the Times Square, a building that had deteriorated from an elegant residence into a crime-ridden welfare hotel. She stopped by and, she says, was “appalled” by the “riot in the lobby,” with children running unsupervised and stacks of garbage everywhere.
The visit sparked her vision for Common Ground. After fruitlessly trying to convince established charities to adopt her plan, she approached the building’s owner and said, “Hi, I’m Rosanne Haggerty, and I’ve got this idea, but I don’t have an organization.”
About six months later, she formed Common Ground and received a $28.8-million low-interest loan from the city to buy and renovate the Times Square building. Four companies, including the Dime Savings Bank of New York and J.P. Morgan, an investment company, poured another $22-million into the project by using low-income housing and historic-rehabilitation tax credits, which offset their federal tax liabilities with their investment in the Times Square building. The Vincent Astor Foundation, a fund in New York that has since been liquidated, gave $31,200 to pay for elegant lobby furnishings.
Over time, Ms. Haggerty has built Common Ground to run as a business, albeit a merciful one.
Prospective tenants of the charity’s three buildings must either earn less than a set amount — it is $25,000 annually for the Times Square — at the time they apply, or have special qualifications, such as a history of homelessness, mental-health problems, or AIDS.
Once tenants unpack their bags, few decide to leave. The turnover rate for the Times Square is about 4 percent, and the eviction rate is about 1 percent — which is why Ms. Haggerty constantly hunts for new locations. She also is exploring a program to help residents with steady employment to buy homes, as a way of freeing up more rooms.
Ms. Haggerty says she has mixed feelings about the low turnover rate. While she is glad that residents feel comfortable in their apartments, she says she could reach additional homeless people if more tenants decided to move. Still, Ms. Haggerty does not encourage residents to leave. Common Ground’s chief priority is to give people a stable home environment, she says.
“Once people know they have that kind of tenure and security, they can relax and focus on other things, such as literacy and building a network of friends,” she says.
Ms. Haggerty measures the group’s success by how few tenants return to the streets and how many gain job promotions, become healthier, or no longer need government aid. The number of tenants on public assistance at the Times Square decreased from 85 to 26 since the building, which houses 652, was fully occupied in 1994, according to Common Ground.
The apartments are only part of Ms. Haggerty’s plan to help keep people from returning to the streets. In 1993 Common Ground formed a partnership with a social-service charity in New York to offer tenants on-site mental-health counseling and medical services, as well as job training.
Preparing for Growth
In other ways, too, Ms. Haggerty, with the help of a management consultant, has structured the organization for future growth. This year, Common Ground hired its first director of communications, as well as its first chief operating officer.
The latter position will free her to develop three additional residential programs that Common Ground is starting: one for hard-to-reach homeless people, including those who have been rejected from other programs; another for homeless people who need medical care; and one that helps young people who are leaving foster care.
While the MacArthur award will give Ms. Haggerty, who earns $127,750 as executive director of Common Ground, some freedom to work on her master’s degree in architecture, planning, and historic preservation, she says her commitment to helping homeless people will not wane. Already, she says, she has been thinking beyond the award’s monetary aspect to how it might help her play a larger role in attacking homelessness. She hopes to learn strategies from groups elsewhere, and also to help other groups duplicate Common Ground’s success.
“What contributions can I or this organization make?” she says, adding that the MacArthur award has put Common Ground under the spotlight. “This is really throwing down the gauntlet to think bigger.”
History: Common Ground was created by Rosanne Haggerty in 1990 to transform the Times Square, a historic but derelict former hotel in New York, into efficiency apartments for low-income and formerly homeless people as well as AIDS patients and people with histories of mental illness. In addition to the Times Square, the group has converted another historic property into apartments. Two more buildings are being renovated, and another is in the planning stage.
Purpose: Common Ground seeks to provide an affordable place to live that offers permanent housing and social services. In addition to providing classes and organizing holiday gatherings that increase residents’ social connections to one another, the group works with the Center for Urban Community Services, a charity in New York that offers on-site mental-health counseling and medical services plus job training.
Finances: Sixty percent of Common Ground’s $16-million budget for fiscal 2002 comes from tenants, commercial enterprises that lease space in the charity’s buildings, and three Ben & Jerry’s ice cream outlets that the charity owns and operates. The rest comes from government, foundation, and corporate grants, and individuals.
Key officials: Rosanne Haggerty, executive director; Peter Ezersky, chairman of the board of directors.
Address: 14 E. 28th Street, New York, N.Y. 10016; (212) 471-0866; http://www.commonground.org
