Bloomberg CityLab Ι Nov. 22, 2022
When the Ruth Ellis Center, a Detroit nonprofit that helps support LGBTQ youth, began a foster care program 10 years ago, they kept it very quiet; no press release, not even a sign on the door.
“We were so afraid of how the community would react,” says Mark Erwin, Ruth Ellis’s co-executive director.
Now things are different. In October, the nonprofit held a ribbon-cutting ceremony for their new permanent supportive housing and services facility for LGBTQ young people. Hundreds of visitors and community members were joined by a parade of local and national politicians. “We’ve learned over the years that it’s important that we put it out there,” says Erwin. “We’re not afraid.”
Designed by the Chicago architecture firm LBBA, the 46,000-square-foot Ruth Ellis Clairmount Center does not keep a low profile. One wall features a four-story mural by Ijania Cortez of its namesake: Ruth Ellis, a Black lesbian born in 1899, never closeted, who opened her home and life to young gay and lesbian people. “It says that we’re here, we’re proud of who we are, and we have every right to be a part of this community,” Erwin says.
Intended to provide health services as well as affordable housing, the entire building is designed to subtly mediate visibility with safety. Behind its exuberant façade, a series of security and privacy features work to protect the building’s residents from outside threats.
Those threats are not abstract. The Nov. 20 mass shooting at a nightclub in Colorado Springs, Colorado, was only the most recent illustration of a national rise in violence, harassment and hateful rhetoric targeting LGBTQ Americans. Since November 2021, 47 transgender people were killed in the US, according to new reportfrom the National Center for Transgender Equality, and the number of homicides of transgender people doubled from 2017 to 2021. A recent UCLA study found that LGBTQ people are nearly four times as likely to be victims of rape and assault. According to the Trevor Project, a nonprofit that provides crisis support services, more than a quarter of LGBTQ youth have experienced homelessness.
“Many of our LGBTQ community are at a higher rate of homelessness, exposing them to violence,” says Michigan Representative Rashida Tlaib, who secured $1 million in federal funding for the Clairmount Center and was on hand for its opening. “[If] you live [at the Clairmount Center], you get the services you need, and the love that you need, and the public health access that you need.”
Similar facilities and organizations exist in other US cities. In New York City, for example, the Ali Forney Center provides temporary housing and safety-net services for LGBTQ youth at several sites. Founded in 1969, the Los Angeles LGBT Center also operates multiple locations across the LA metro, including a new campus designed by Leong Leong and Killefer Flammang Architectsthat opened in 2019. But the Clairmount Center is unique in terms of the dense colocation of its supportive services and the permanent nature of its youth-focused housing program, according to Erwin.
There are 43 studio and one-bedroom apartments, subsidized by tax credits, for people making no more than 30% of the area median income. The $18 million building was developed by nonprofit affordable housing developer Full Circle Communities. To qualify for housing at the Clairmount Center, residents have to have a documented history of homelessness and be diagnosed with a cognitive or physical disability.
The wide spectrum of public-to-private spaces in the building acknowledges the importance of “families of choice” — organic formations of close-knit community members who regard each other as family, often after rejection from biological relatives. At the Clairmount Center, “You have the ability to be on your own, or you can be in the mix,” says LBBA’s Jack Schroeder. “They’re not hiding away, but there is a security threat.”
The most oblivious security feature here is the secure key fob door that leads to the upstairs residences, just a few steps past the main front door, allowing residents to immediately bypass the myriad public functions on the ground floor. But the amount of openness and transparency in the building has been actively negotiated since Schroeder’s early designs for it. Initially, a second-floor internal window looking out into the double-height town hall atrium and through another set of windows on the façade was designed with a partially opaque film to obscure residents as they walk by from outside the building. But as construction was underway, residents wanted to leave it transparent. “Folks have moved in and kind of like the connection,” he says.
Likewise, residents had originally asked that a fence on a second-floor roof deck be eight feet tall and largely opaque — but once they could get out onto the space, they asked for a shorter barricade.
This opening-up process has meant inviting the wider neighborhood into the Ruth Ellis community and into the Clairmount Center itself. Located five miles northwest of downtown Detroit, the building is nestled onto a quiet residential street off Woodward Avenue, the main axial boulevard that bisects the city. It’s across the street from a community art center and a grocery store, surrounded by a collection of handsome if faded brick and wood frame houses.
During meetings with community groups about the development of the new center, neighbors said what they wanted most was a pharmacy to replace one that had recently closed; soon, this will be part of the facility’s health and wellness center. There’s also an open invitation for these groups in to host their own meetings at the building’s 2,500-square-foot town hall. (In addition to potential church group meetings, the space will also host balls — fashion shows where community members design their own clothes and strut a runway — and other creative performances of LGBTQ identity.)
Erwin says these kinds of invitations and the space needed to accommodate them are themselves security measures. “This space can be anything that it needs to be, but we want it to open, not just to the residents, but to the residents of the neighborhood,” he says. “We started building those relationships years ago, so that [residents] didn’t feel isolated in this neighborhood. That becomes part of the safety features, because we have neighbors that are looking out for the young people here.”
The building’s architectural details and materials are likewise neighborly and pulled from the surrounding building stock. Its western half uses red brick familiar to the area, and its eastern half begins with gray brick at the ground level and finishes with slightly more exuberant aluminum panels in the upper stories, all punctuated by the Ruth Ellis mural on the northeast façade.
The building’s supportive services are also meant to invite the wider community in. This includes the ground-floor commercial-grade café and kitchen, which will be used for basic culinary instruction for young adults likely moving into their first apartment, as well as for culinary entrepreneurship programs featuring local food businesses as mentors.
In addition to the first-floor town hall, there’s a medical clinic run by Henry Ford Health that will offer physical and behavioral health services. For Henry Ford Health Program Manager Dana Park, the housing upstairs and the health clinic below aren’t really separate programs, because “housing is such a tremendous determinant of health,” she says. “The biggest thing to understand is the historical stigma, barriers and discrimination that LGBTQ [people have] faced in accessing healthcare.” In-person and telehealth options emphasize anonymity and discretion; each resident is offered a TytoCare device, which allows patients to perform medical self-exams remotely via smartphone.
Here, providing a modicum of choice most people take for granted, especially for this population of recently homeless people, is a top priority. “We’ve done everything to be able to draw the curtains or not,” says Schroeder. “It’s just being aware that everybody should be able to live their life as privately or publicly as they want.”
The building’s private spaces — the upper residential floors — feature the kinds of amenities seen in any new market-rate apartment building, including couch-equipped lounges, a communal kitchen, a fitness room, an art studio, and an outdoor terrace and green roof. But their details have been shaped by the needs of future residents. In order to help the Clairmount Center’s designers create spaces that their entire community would feel safe and comfortable in, Ruth Ellis leadership asked some of their most vulnerable community members — trans women of color — take on the role of lead client.
These women, pulled from the broader community and potential residents, led focus groups and used their own experiences as a yardstick. “If it was a space that trans women of color wanted to be in and felt safe in, then we know that it was likely to be a space that was affirming and accepting of LGBTQ young people in general,” says Erwin. The café, art therapy space, and health and wellness center all came directly from these focus groups.
These are the kinds of conversations that those who design buildings rarely have. The architectural field has long focused on rich people’s priorities — museums, mansions, skyscrapers — and developed endless formal variations to reflect those wealthy patrons’ values. But asking a homeless trans woman, “What makes you feel safe?” and building accordingly can save lives as well as demonstrate the value of design for people who need it far more than most.
One new resident, 22-year-old Kuybi, was homeless for almost two years until he moved into the Clairmount Center. (He asked CityLab not to use his legal name, he says, because of the heightened stigma that LGBTQ people of color face.) A little more than a year ago, he started coming to the Ruth Ellis Center for food, clothes and medical services. “It wasn’t like they were a one-trick-pony,” he says. “They were very hands-on and very thorough.”
The living conditions he’s in now are far better than what he’d experienced in the past, but that didn’t make the transition easy. “Where I come from, it’s been a change,” he says. “The first couple nights I couldn’t sleep because I couldn’t quite believe it. I was pacing back and forth like, ‘Wow.’ Lately it’s been home sweet home. I have a place I can always come to.”
The communal spaces, he says, have made it easy to meet his new neighbors. And simply having a safe and secure home he feels comfortable in has given him a sense of the future he didn’t used to have. “We used to worry about today and today only, and maybe tomorrow,” says Kuybi. “Once we got here, we know we’re good for the month. What can we [look] forward [to] in the future? You take a step at a time.”
With its exuberant visual presence and careful security protocols, the Clairmount Center serves as a physical manifestation of the current conflict over LGBTQ rights and visibility. And it opens its doors at a time when sexual and gender identity issues have been pushed to center stage in US politics: More than 300 anti-LGBTQ bills have been introduced in 2022, according to the Human Rights Campaign, in Michigan and elsewhere, including legislation that perpetuates dangerous and false anti-gay stereotypes and bans gender-affirming care for minors. Other proposed laws point toward a world where LGBTQ people are all but banned from the public sphere.
There might be little new about this front in the culture war, least of all its deployment in order to distract people from receiving the kinds of basic material interventions that places like the Ruth Ellis Center deliver. Erwin hopes the Clairmount Center can help address two parts of this struggle: The building can provide a model of unified housing and health and wellness services for LGBTQ people, and a venue to break down caricatures of them.
“When you allow people to see and experience who we are, and you develop these relationships and develop that trust, that’s when the change happens,” he says. “It’s no longer this political rhetoric which is forming people’s opinions about this specific community. We’re showing them that this is our community and you’re part of it, just as we are.”