Last summer I went to Belgium with the hope of figuring out what they were doing right. The Belgian town of Geel is famous for its adult foster care program, ensuring that people with intellectual disability and/or mental illness are given care and community support. Instead, I learned a lot about fairy tales, Catholicism, penal colonies, and just how eager we are to see what we want to see.
As I spent months trying to make sense of the bizarre tales and nonsensical clues, I was talking about Geel to everyone. Besides providing me with insightful leads, sharing my quandaries with people led me to pay new attention to things I’d previously taken for granted as just the way they are.
I found it baffling when journalists gushed about how accepting the residents of Geel are. There were always disabled people around me growing up in New Jersey. Most of the kids with disabilities were “mainstreamed,” attending classes with us with in-class support. It was easy to get the impression that everyone was on ritalin or prozac. Lots of kids had IEPs and plenty of us were pulled out of class for support. The disabled kids in my neighborhood who weren’t mainstreamed were both older than me and nonverbal, so they were background characters like anyone who wasn’t a playmate. The banality of disabilities in my childhood made it seem strange when people made such a fuss about how the residents of Geel allowed the mad and intellectually disabled to live among them. My Jersey Shore town wasn’t an especially accommodating place and yet we did not cast the disabled adrift into the ocean.
In my neighborhood in Toronto today, there’s much anxious hand wringing about what to do about people with mental health issues. My neighbors object to certain problematic behaviors – mostly aggression and improperly disposed of used needles – while defending their right to camp in the parks.
There is a general agreement that the problem isn’t them, it’s the lack of appropriate housing and support. There is one person I cross the street to avoid, who marches up and down Church Street shouting at people. It isn’t a free-for-all, as anyone who behaves in sexually inappropriate ways seems to vanish from the streets. It’s petty crime, drug use, and aggression without actual assault that’s unofficially tolerated by the authorities.
Toronto is more accepting than Geel. The people who make me uncomfortable wouldn’t have been welcome in Geel in the 1990s, since anyone who wasn’t considered docile was kept in closed institutions. Early reports made much of how people removed from dungeons often became docile and agreeable when sent to Geel. Anyone who wasn’t transformed in this way after a few weeks was returned to their shackles. Maybe the neighbor who paces and shouts all day would behave very differently if they had housing, the support of a foster family, and a social worker connecting them to opportunities based on their needs and interests.
I couldn’t think of a place where there is no neurodiversity. Where, exactly, would people like this be run out of town? And why?
The only answer that came to mind was Salem during the hysteria of the witch trials. It was only after I came back to the US to visit my parents that I realized I was overlooking the answers.
Discovering that I grew up in a town famous for having boarders
When I saw my dad, things I knew about my hometown in New Jersey were cast in a new light.
I knew that our cluster of seaside resort towns went downhill when commercial air travel became affordable. People from New York and Philadelphia started spending their vacations in Florida or California, rather than on the Jersey Shore. The race riots in Asbury Park in 1970 were a final nail in the coffin on tourism for Ocean Grove. The grand old Victorian hotels – and many large homes renting rooms to tourists by the week – transitioned into year-round boarding houses. This happened around the time of deinstitutionalization, so soon the boarding houses were full of people who had just been unceremoniously released from long-term residential mental hospitals. New York City made the problem worse by engaging in Greyhound therapy, in this case, the practice of putting their homeless on intercity buses headed south.
While the story I’d picked up over the years wasn't untrue, there was more to it than that. The deinstitutionalized didn't end up in the unfashionable hotels and B&Bs for the reasons I’d assumed – because they were the most affordable option, you could pay by the week, and you could walk to the shops. They ended up in Ocean Grove by the dozens as part of an organized program, funded by multiple government agencies, to move mental patients from closed institutions into the community.
Yes, I had gone all the way to Belgium to learn about boarding out only to realize I grew up in a town with a huge boarding out program.
Innkeepers who were struggling to stay open with the few tourists who were still visiting the Jersey Shore were invited to enroll in the boarding-out program. Essentially the same legislation that allowed foster care in Geel resulted in people living in dilapidated boarding homes on the Jersey Shore. One big difference was that in Belgium boarding out had become restricted to Geel, while in the US it didn’t have official geographic restrictions.
The other big difference was the scale. The foster families in Geel managed up to three boarders, maybe four at certain points in the history of the program. In New Jersey innkeepers could be responsible for managing as many boarders as there was room for in their inn. Innkeepers were given some training and held responsible for the behavior of their boarders, just like in Geel.
When my step-mom had said she'd worked as a waitress in a hotel while she was in high school, I assumed it was no different than when she’d worked as a waitress at the Starving Artist Cafe, serving omelets and grilled cheese sandwiches to tourists. It was only after I came home with my head muddled with the story of Geel that she explained that as a “waitress” at the hotel, she’d delivered trays of food and medication to boarders in their rooms.
My dad explained that his go-to-bakery, the Macaroon Shop, had once been a few blocks away from where he lived with his grandparents in Ocean Grove. They had moved away from the beach, to an oddly isolated strip of Main Street two towns over, to get away from the boarders who would loiter outside and hassle customers.
I was told the program came to a stop because of a fire in the next town over, Bradley Beach. The innkeepers had taken to locking the doors in order to manage troublesome behaviors they were held responsible for. That, combined with old Victorian Inns, had tragic results.
Thanks for sharing this, Cori. Admittedly, I kind of love the imperfections of Jersey Shore. Especially in the spring, it is a welcomed change to the frigid cold. But boarding houses is something I haven't studied much. And your note on hoarders, etc--all really made me curious about whether similar correlations exist in other parts of the country, maybe in different ways?
This is so interesting. Boarding houses are used widely here in Canada and in the UK too as a solution to lack of other supportive housing for disabled people, those released from jail, people with children needing emergency housing... the list goes on. Isn't it funny that we never connected this government organized solution to the tales of Geel? Like you, I always thought Geel was a naturally evolved cultural program, rooted in compassion. Hmmm....