The Model

A small village of homes, around a common heart.

1000 Villagers is a residential community where adults with developmental disabilities and their aging parents live side by side. Each family has a home, and two to three adult children live together in adjacent homes. This lets staff be shared and makes daily socialization easier. The homes gather around a central commons, on a rural site that is walkable, sensory-considered, and open to its surrounding hamlet.

The site

We are flexible on the site. A working pilot could begin in Earlville, NY, and the community can grow across one or more nearby sites as families join. We are deliberately starting small.

Illustrated concept map of 1000 Villagers, Phase 1: separate houses for each family, a shared home for the adult residents at the center, a clubhouse with a gym, indoor walking track and art studio, a community garden, covered walkways, parking with EV chargers, and a creek along one edge. — A concept map of Phase 1: each family has its own home, the adult residents share a central home, and everything wraps around a clubhouse, gardens, and covered walkways. Illustrative, not yet built.

Sample dimensions

We are still working with our architects, but our reference range, drawn from peer communities like SpeciallyAble, is:

Parent home: approximately 1,500 to 2,200 sq ft. One or two bedrooms, full kitchen, living, accessible bath, designed for aging in place.
Shared adult home: approximately 1,400 to 1,800 sq ft for two to three residents. Private suites, a common living room and kitchen, a dedicated sensory-considered support space, and an accessible bath.
Lot: approximately 6,000 to 7,500 sq ft per home site, with gardens between the homes.

The Commons

At the center of the village is the Commons, a building larger than a home but still at domestic scale. It houses medical and therapeutic services, a shared dining and gathering room, programming and quiet spaces, and small offices for community staff. The Commons is what makes the village a community rather than a row of houses.

What surrounds the homes

Walkable paths. Every home connects to the Commons by a footpath. The village is small enough that no one needs a vehicle to participate.
Gardens and an orchard. Working land, vegetables, herbs, fruit trees, where residents who want to participate can.
A pond and woods. The site is shaped by its natural features rather than carved against them.
A single entry drive. Visible from the road. Not gated. Open to the wider community.

Out in the community

The village is a home base, not a world unto itself. Residents are out in the surrounding community as a matter of routine: the library, the parks, local shops and errands, museums and events, and the everyday life of the hamlet around us. Each adult chooses their own activities and providers, keeps their own schedule, and holds their own residency agreement, with real privacy and control over their own home and daily life. The point of living here is not to withdraw from the community; it is to take part in it, with the support to do that well.

Sharing a home also means agreeing how to live in it. Before anyone moves in, each household will work out its own ground rules together, the residents, their families, and the people who support them, and we say more about how that will work in the FAQ.

How we grow

We will not arrive at the full vision overnight. We are planning in three stages, a small pilot, a founding village, and replication.

Three panels showing scale progression: Pilot of 3 families and 6 residents in Earlville NY; Founding village of 10 to 12 families and about 24 residents; and Replication of the documented model across multiple partner sites. — Pilot → Founding village → Replication. Our name signals the longer aim.

How it works financially

The community is funded through three streams, Medicaid (OPWDD) waiver services for the adult children, philanthropy for what public funding will not cover, and modest earned revenue from respite. A guiding rule runs underneath: the funding follows the person, not the building, so our homes stay family-controlled rather than becoming state-certified facilities. A small family of entities keeps housing, care, and the community's endowment cleanly separate. Public funding pays only for the adult children's services; the parents' homes, and any care they arrange for themselves, are entirely private and sit on the other side of a firm wall from those public dollars. Capital is assembled from affordable-housing tax credits and public housing programs. The full picture, including the budget framework and the entity structure, lives on its own page.

See The Math →

What we are not

We are not a group home. We are not a nursing facility. We are not a typical co-housing development. Our homes are not state-certified institutions, they stay family-controlled, with each resident holding their own tenancy and each adult child's supports self-directed by the people who know them best. We borrow from each model we have studied, but the combination of developmental disabilities, co-resident parents, family-controlled homes, and lifespan security is, to our knowledge and to the knowledge of the autism professionals we have consulted, distinctive.

For a clearer picture of why we chose this combination, read our guiding principles.