When ‘Community Living’ Is Just the Old Institution With a New Invoice

A group home is not an institution. That is the promise written into decades of disability policy in Canada and beyond: close the big facilities, move people into ordinary houses on ordinary streets, and life will look ordinary too. Deinstitutionalization was meant to end the era of the asylum and the training centre. So why does so much research keep finding the institution still living inside the house?

The blunt answer is that a building is not a culture. You can change the address and keep the routine. Researchers who study supported accommodation have spent years documenting how a four-bedroom house on a quiet street can run on the same rigid logic as the facility it replaced. They have also documented something harder to look at: the funding behind these services can quietly reward that outcome rather than prevent it.

What the research found inside the houses

The most detailed work on this comes from Australia, where Professor Christine Bigby and colleagues at La Trobe University spent years observing daily life inside group homes for people with intellectual disabilities. Their findings are uncomfortable. In a 2012 study of underperforming and better-performing homes, Bigby, Knox, Beadle-Brown, Clement and Mansell mapped five dimensions of culture, and in the weaker homes the dimensions read like a description of an institution: staff-centred routines, rigid schedules around getting up, meals, and going out, and a posture the researchers summarized as doing for, not doing with.

In those settings, the people who lived there were physically inside a community house, but their days ran on staff convenience. The researchers reported that in underperforming homes, staff regarded residents as not like us. Read that line again. The home belonged, on paper, to the people who lived in it, and the staff culture treated them as a category to be managed. Bigby’s team was careful not to overstate it. Not every home looked like this. Better homes existed, and the difference was culture, not architecture. In the stronger homes, staff understood the job as making the life each person wants it to be, shared responsibility for the quality of support, and stayed open to outside ideas. Same floor plan. Different life.

A second line of their work matters just as much. Inclusion is usually measured by community presence: did the person go out, were they seen at the mall, the pool, the cafe. But presence is not participation. Bigby and Wiesel drew the distinction directly in 2011. Being physically in the community is not the same as belonging to a network of relationships with people who are not paid to be there. Many people’s lives, they found, stayed boxed inside a small social space made of family, paid staff, and the other residents they never chose to live with. You can be out in the world every single day and still be alone in it.

Where the money comes in

This is where the invoice in the title earns its place. Residential disability services across much of the developed world now run on market logic. Funding follows the person in theory, providers compete for contracts, and the brochure language is all choice and individualized support. The intention was good. Personalized funding was meant to break the institution’s grip by putting purchasing power closer to the person.

But a market needs something it can price, count, and bill. Relationships, self-determination, and a genuine sense of home are hard to put on an invoice. A bed filled, a shift covered, a support hour delivered: those are easy. When the funding model pays for presence and coverage instead of the slow, unglamorous work of building someone a real life, the incentives tilt back toward the institutional pattern even inside a perfectly nice house. The provider is not a villain. The provider is responding to what gets funded.

The Canadian picture

Canada lived its own version of this. Large institutions for people with intellectual disabilities closed across the country over several decades. Ontario shut its last provincial institutions, including the Rideau Regional Centre and the Huronia Regional Centre, by 2009. Those closures were a real human rights achievement, won largely by self-advocates and families who refused to accept that this was the best on offer. What replaced the institutions was a patchwork: group homes, supported independent living, and a growing reliance on private and non-profit agencies funded through provincial contracts.

The provincial systems differ, but the structural risk is shared. When agencies are funded per placement, when staffing is stretched thin, when oversight counts occupancy and incident reports rather than whether anyone is living a life they chose, the conditions Bigby’s team documented can settle in quietly. None of this needs bad people. It needs a funding model that buys the wrong thing.

What to watch for, and what to ask

If you live in supported accommodation, or you support someone who does, the research points to concrete questions. They cut past the brochure to the things that actually predict quality.

  • Who decides the daily routine: the people who live here, or the staff schedule? Rigid timing around waking, eating, and going out is a documented marker of institutional culture.
  • Does the person have relationships with anyone who is not paid to be there? Presence in the community is not the same as belonging to it.
  • Does the staff team describe the job as running the house, or as building the life this person wants? The language gives away the culture.
  • Is the home open to outsiders and new ideas, or closed and defensive? Openness was one of the clearest features of the stronger homes.
  • What is the funder actually measuring? If the answer is beds filled and incidents logged, the money is not buying a life.

The point here is not that group homes are secretly institutions and community living was a lie. The point is sharper. Community living delivers on its promise only when the culture inside the house and the money behind it both pull toward self-determination. When they do not, you can get the institution back at a new address, with a fresh invoice stapled to it. The research gives you the markers. Naming them out loud, in your own home or someone else’s, is how you start refusing them.

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