'Freeing people who are trapped in nursing homes'

TIM KINNIRY, 35, who has lived with cerebral palsy since birth and has always depended on a wheelchair to make his way in the world, has one lifelong dream.

"I want to be an Average Joe," he said.

Kinniry's three brothers - one with a milder form of CP; two of them able-bodied - all have jobs, families, unrestricted lives. So did his late sister, Dawn Marie, who is still very much a part of Kinniry's thoughts.

"I want everything that comes along with being a person," Kinniry said, sitting in his power wheelchair in his one-bedroom South Philly apartment and looking at photos of his siblings and their families - the only art he has chosen to hang on his walls. "Once I get an idea in my head, you can't talk me out of it."

Kinniry's pursuit of an Average Joe existence once left him so depressed that he attempted suicide.

But he's 10 years past that now and has been living his dream since January, when he moved out of the Inglis House nursing home and into the Marine Club Condominiums, on Broad Street and Washington Avenue, a mainstream residential community with 293 apartments, an in-house health club and private gardens.

Kinniry is living in one of 11 condos owned by Liberty Housing Development Corp. - a nonprofit that is using $5 million in federal and city funding to buy apartments in "able-bodied" residential developments, retrofit them for handicapped accessibility and move physically disabled people like Kinniry from nursing homes to independent living.

Kinniry contributes a percentage of his low income toward housing expenses.

Liberty's chief executive officer, Bruce Connus, said the mainstreaming concept differs dramatically from the traditional use of federal funds to place the physically disabled in nursing homes. So much so, he said, that Liberty's 16 independent-living apartments and the 41 scheduled for development this year put Philadelphia in the national forefront of "freeing people who are trapped in nursing homes."

"Liberty Housing has over 100 people on our [waiting] list who are now trapped in a nursing home because of the lack of accessible affordable housing in Philadelphia," Connus said.

"When we were showing [newly available] units to people who had been in nursing homes for one to 20 years, people who were going from not being able to make any decisions to having total control over their lives, we would see tears in their eyes," he said. "And it was hard not to tear up myself."