A story from Louisville illuminates what NeuroHomes is building toward in the rural Pacific Northwest, and why proximity to community is not a luxury.
Mariam Applegate cried when she pulled into the parking lot. She wasn’t overwhelmed by grief, though grief would have been understandable. Her daughter Reese is in Kansas. Her teenage child lives in a facility more than 700 miles from home because Kentucky, like most of the United States, does not have enough appropriate housing for autistic and intellectually disabled adults. The tears were something else. They were recognition. There’s hope for other families like ours.
A story published this week by WHAS11 in Louisville profiles two mothers, Applegate and Rachel Moldoveanu, who are working with Cedar Lake, a company providing residential and community-based services to adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD), to develop a former foster care campus in Anchorage, Kentucky into an adult housing facility. Both of their children are currently placed out of state. Both could not find adequate services at home.
“For so long our kids have had no resources here or very little, and the fact that there is so much potential here at this property to serve this population.”
-Rachel Moldoveanu, Louisville parent advocate
This is not a Kentucky story. It is not a Louisville story. It is the story of nearly every county, every rural stretch of highway, every small city in America that has watched the autism diagnosis rate climb without building the infrastructure to meet it. It is happening in Wahkiakum County, Washington. It is happening in Clatsop County, Oregon. It is happening in the precise geography NeuroHomes is working to change.
The Population We Are Not Prepared For
Julie Torzewski, executive director of Cedar Lake Foundation, named the issue directly in the WHAS11 report: “The IDD population is living longer and healthier lives because we have done intervention and done medical care that they need, which is wonderful, but we aren’t prepared for having a place for them to go when they age.”
This is the central contradiction of a generation of progress in autism and disability care. Early intervention works. Medical support works. People are living longer, fuller lives. And then they turn 21, age out of school-based services, and face a landscape where the adult infrastructure was never built to receive them.
1 in 36 children in the U.S. are now identified as autistic (CDC, 2023)
700K+ autistic individuals will age out of school-based services in the next decade
~87% of autistic adults are unemployed or underemployed
The shortage is acute in rural regions. Urban centers, with their larger tax bases and denser nonprofit ecosystems, have at least begun to build capacity. Rural communities have not. When families like Applegate’s or Moldoveanu’s discover that no local placement exists, they are not confronting a failure of their local government alone. They are confronting a systemic gap that has never been adequately named, funded, or solved.
What NeuroHomes Is Building
NeuroHomes is a neurodivergent-led nonprofit developing affordable, community-integrated housing with on-site supportive services for autistic and neurodivergent adults in the rural Pacific Northwest, with a planned site near Astoria, Oregon. Our model is built on a principle that Cedar Lake and the Louisville mothers are also articulating, even if in different language: disabled people are not prisoners. They are part of the world.
Moldoveanu described her vision for the Kentucky campus with striking clarity: a greenhouse, community integration, walking trails, and the simple dignity of being close enough to share a holiday dinner with family. That is not a special need. That is a human need. It is the same need NeuroHomes centers in our work, from our site selection near the Columbia River to our housing design philosophy to the wraparound services we are building in partnership with regional healthcare and research networks.
The Louisville story also highlights a model of community parent advocacy that NeuroHomes recognizes and honors. These were not passive recipients of a developer’s plan. They were mothers who lost sleep, drove hours, made calls, and then showed up to shape what the campus would become. Lived experience is not supplemental expertise in disability housing. It is the core expertise. NeuroHomes is a neurodivergent-led organization precisely because we believe the people most affected by a system are the ones most qualified to redesign it.
The Road Ahead
Cedar Lake’s Kentucky project will take years. So will NeuroHomes’. The Anchorage campus must wait for a Fern Creek property to be developed first. NeuroHomes is working through incorporation, capitalization, and community partnership, with Washington Commerce Housing Trust Fund timelines on the horizon. These are not short roads. But they are roads being built, and that matters.
What Applegate felt when she pulled into that parking lot in Anchorage, Kentucky, we want every family in the Columbia River region to feel. Not relief that something exists elsewhere, but recognition that something is being built here, by people who understand the stakes because they have lived inside them.
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Read the original story“New Anchorage adult housing campus has mothers of intellectually disabled children hopeful” — WHAS11, Louisville (March 14, 2026)
NeuroHomes does not have a formal affiliation with Cedar Lake or the Anchorage, Kentucky campus. We share this story because it reflects the same housing crisis we are working to address in the Pacific Northwest, and because the voices of these families deserve to be heard widely.
NeuroHomes is building something different.
Community-integrated, neurodivergent-led, and rooted in the rural Pacific Northwest. Follow our work and join the effort.
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