Creating a Platform for Change
Community Access has been leading the charge for safe, affordable housing and employment opportunities for individuals with psychiatric disabilities for over 35 years. We are dedicated to helping vulnerable New Yorkers make the transition from homelessness, institutionalization and incarceration to independent living.
Created in 1974, during the height of "deinstitutionalization," when thousands of psychiatric patients were discharged from state hospitals, founder, Fred Hartmann, had a vision of creating safe and supportive homes for these men and women. He understood that the alternatives for people with mental illness were often the streets, homeless shelters, squalid single room occupancies or prisons.
Hartman and a group of clinicians, family members and supporters pooled their money and efforts to rent and renovate a few apartments in lower Manhattan. Recognizing that the integration, and not marginalization, of individuals with mental illness into society, was essential to recovery, the founders assisted our first residents reconnect with the community, find work and rebuild social ties.
By 1977, Community Access had purchased its first two buildings, consisting of 44 apartments for single people with psychiatric disabilities and low-income families. These early efforts became the prototype for one of the nation's first integrated housing programs-a model that has been replicated across the country: blending mental health consumers and working families from the neighborhood in the same buildings. This model has also been a powerful instrument in reducing the stigma associated with mental illness.
Today, Community Access owns and manages 13 buildings and leases 60 scattered-site apartments, with over 800 units of permanent and transitional supportive housing in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx.
Just as our founders did 35 years ago, Community Access continues to identify and implement humane and durable solutions to the unmet needs and challenges faced by mental health recipients.
