No retirement home here: more Black women are raising their grandchildren--even as they struggle to find housing.

Edward Hodge isn't allowed to play outside, nor is he eager to.

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The last time Edward, then nine, ventured out--by poking his head out of a broken window screen--he nearly fell into the dumpster right below. But the 12-year-old has since heard too many bullers pop outside to fancy having fun beyond the doorsteps of the apartment he shares with his grandmother, an older sister and younger brother on the east side of Detroit. So a brand new basketball sits unwrapped on top of a heap of hand-me-down toys inside their cramped, cluttered apartment.

Edward's grandmother and sole caregiver, Dolores Dumas, 57, feels the isolation as keenly as the grandchildren she has raised since birth.

"I was here by myself. There is no one to share my concerns with," said Dumas. "So many nights when 1 lay my head, no one knows the tears. I know what sacrifice is."

More grandparents, mostly grandmothers, are shouldering parental duties for the second time around. They do it to salvage their grandchildren's lives from family tragedy. They do it sometimes over their children's objection. They do it on their own.

According to the 2000 Census, 5.8 million grandparents live with their grandchildren, a five percent increase from the 4.7 million who did so in 1997. After native Hawaiians, Blacks have the highest proportion--eight percent--of adults living with their grandchildren. This is a far cry from just spending a summer with grandma. Nearly half of Black grandparents who take on the care-giving duties keep their charge for five years or longer.

"These grandparents are the result of the disintegration of the inner city," said Dorothy S. Ruiz, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, who has traced the evolution of a grandmother's role in the Black family since Emancipation in her book, Amazing Grace: African-American Grandmothers as Caregivers and Conveyers of Traditional Values.

Historically, grandmothers have been an anchor of Black families, Ruiz said. In researching, she found that since the 1990s, the crack cocaine and AIDS epidemics, as well as increased incarceration of women, have left more families asunder. Grandmothers, once again, have to step in to hold the family together.

"We say that it takes a village to raise a child. We don't see that in inner cities," said Ruiz. "[Grandparents] are suffering from the issues and problems of the inner city."

Both at work and at home, Paul Bridgewater, executive director of Detroit Area Agency on Aging, has confronted the issues of grandchild-rearing. His agency sponsors a counseling group for senior grandparents raising kids. Bridgewater, who is Black, and his wife, Juanita, brought their grandson home three years ago from foster care because the boy's parents were not able to provide for him.

"African Americans have always taken the responsibilities of their [grand] children. It seems now it's happening more and in greater numbers," said Bridgewater. "This is an emerging issue."

Trapped in Poor Housing

Over the past decade, 25 percent more children--totaling 143,000--came under the care of grandparents in Michigan, which ranks among the top ten states for the most children being raised by grandparents. More than 70,000 grandparents statewide, half of them in Metro Detroit, are providing for their grandchildren or great-grandchildren.

Just as these grandparent caregivers struggle to create as nurturing an environment as possible for the next generation, they find themselves trapped in some of the worst housing situations. They receive scant financial support from their family or the government. Some are several years away from being eligible for senior housing, which rarely permits minors. And the live-in relationship between the grandparents and grandchildren--one more commonly forged by love than by legal imprimatur--may not pass muster with public housing officials.

When Dumas moved into the subsidized housing complex nine years ago, she found it to be a good place to raise children. But management grew negligent over the years. The broken screen in her bedroom's window, which Edward almost plunged through, has never been fixed despite her persistent complaints. The barren open space between sections of the complex is a stage for frequent gun play. Bullets have pierced the siding above the front door and a kitchen window in the back of the Dumas home.

For her part, Dumas is doing her utmost to make the three-bedroom apartment the best place to raise her grandkids. "I just want them to be safe and in a nurturing environment--and housing plays a big part. Right now, we improvise," said Dumas.

Inside the Dumas home one Sunday, Edward tapped a few self-taught tunes on an electronic keyboard that his grandmother got him for Christmas. His younger brother, D'Alluntae, 10, crouched on the floor with his latest Legos creation. The only table that can fit into the tight living room is stacked with books and papers. After their big sister, Dominique, 13, threw a tantrum, Dumas sent her back to her dingy bedroom to chill out.

Whatever is lacking at home, Dumas makes up with attention and discipline, because she's learned the hard way that the environment alone does not make a good child.

"I just want them to know they're my priority. I'll never again take for granted that other people have my children's best interest at heart," said Dumas, who quit her job in 1991 to care for her grandchildren full time.

As a single mother in the 1970s, Dumas made a good enough income to afford to move to Highland Park in suburban Detroit with her only daughter, Yvette. After college classes and a 12-hour shift at a spark plug factory, Dumas, however, had no time to spare for her daughter. Soon enough, Yvette fell in with the wrong crowd in high school and became a crack addict.

Her daughter loved her babies, Dumas said, but her addiction and association with bad acquaintances made her an unfit parent. Dumas took the grandchildren home, beginning with her first grandson, Keith Shelton. Yvette pulled herself together and got clean, but she never cut ties with her old acquaintances and was eventually killed by one of them. She left four children; D'Alluntae was six months old when his mother was buried.

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They joined the more than 56,000 children in Wayne County, which includes Detroit, that are in grandparents' care. That means nearly one in every ten of those under the age of 18 in the most populous county in Michigan will grow up in a so-called "grand-family," according to the 2000 Census.

In a 1999 national survey of 771 grand-families, researchers at the Urban Institute found that 31 percent of grandparents surveyed couldn't afford their housing bills. Of those whose income is under 200 percent of federal poverty level, only 16 percent live in subsidized housing.

For four years, Avonne Johnson has been waiting for a Section 8 voucher--the ticket for her and her step-granddaughter, Terika Aikins, to escape the west side of Detroit where shootings recently hit home. Johnson recalls that when Terika, now 14, was "the size of a Tootsie Roll," she took her home. Terika's mother has been in and out of jail for most of the past decade. Where in the 1960s Johnson had raised a daughter and eight sons without worries, gunfire in the neighborhood has already claimed two of Terika's playmates.

With her meager income, mostly from the Social Security benefits of her first husband, Johnson can't afford a better place without a housing voucher. Since Johnson, like many grandparents who took it upon themselves to raise their grandkids, has yet to formally adopt Terika, she is getting less than her fair share. In Michigan, foster parents can get some $400 per child per month, but informal adoptive parents like Johnson receive less than half as much in welfare payment for each child they take in.

But money alone can't keep her going. Johnson has found much emotional support in a grandparents' counseling program she joined last year. Funded in part by the city's area agency on aging, the year-long Project GUIDE (Grandparents United Intergenerational Developmental Education) provides group counseling for both grandparents and the children, trains grandparents on parenting, managing stress and money, and organizes these families, so often alienated from their biological kin, into a mutually supportive network.

"The support helps a lot," said Johnson, 64, who survived a heart attack in January while shoveling snow. They constantly called and checked on her as she recovered. Now, in giddy anticipation of her first getaway in 30 years--a Mothers' Day resort retreat organized by the group--she has packed her suitcase weeks in advance.

Parenting at an old age, Johnson says, has brought both stress and meaning to her life.

"[Terika] has been a life-saver. She keeps me active," said the grandma. "I don't have time to feel sorry for myself." Johnson only wishes she could receive such support as well as decent housing under the same roof.

This might not be a far-fetched dream. But for Frances S. Howze, executive director of the Messiah Housing Corporation in Detroit's Lower East Side, it has been a long time coming indeed. Howze has been trying for three years to find funding for Champlain Village, a 46-unit housing complex planned for grandparents raising developmentally disabled children. The complex, featuring a clubhouse and fully handicapped-accessible two- to four-bedroom units, is to be built on the church-owned parcels near a city hospital. A refurbished library two blocks away will house mentoring, counseling and computer classes.

Although the corporation's goal has always been to build only housing, Howze, who is Black and cared for her own granddaughter for ten years, knows all too well what the grandparent caregivers need to survive.

"The need of the grandparents is so unique. There are many socio-economic issues [that] need to be addressed," said Howze. "In order for the grandparents to maintain themselves in these units, they need the support." The corporation has recruited service providers to offer counseling, legal help, employment training and other services to future tenants. Howze has to secure $5 million for the project's first phase, but she knows better than to count on federal funding.

In February 2004, Congress passed the Living Equitably: Grandparents Aiding Children and Youth Act, known as the LEGACY legislation, to establish a five-year demonstration program that provides for $10 million a year to develop housing that meets the needs of grandfamilies. So far, Congress has not set aside funds for the new provision, according to officials at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Housing for Grandma and Kids

Seeing the needs of intergenerational families, nonprofit housing development corporations and social service providers in various cities have teamed up to create special housing programs for grandchildren-rearing. These programs follow the example of the GrandFamilies House, established in 1998 in the Boston area as the first such housing community for grandparent-headed households in the country.

In New York, Presbyterian Senior Care moved the first tenants into its new intergenerational housing in the Bronx. In Baltimore, Family and Children's Services of Central Maryland and Communities of Care, a nonprofit agency that serves grandparents, collaborated to build and service 30 apartments for adoptive families on the site of a former Catholic orphanage. Rechristened as Clare Courts, the housing community is now home to a mix of families with special needs, including four headed by grandparents.

Two months ago, Evon Henry, 54, moved into Clare Courts with her five grandchildren, ages three to nine, after living two years in a house where sewage had overflowed the bathtub and left them without a shower for weeks. One of her grandsons, who is autistic, was found to have an elevated blood lead level after six months of living there. Henry's decrepit old home would have made it impossible to adopt her grandchildren because state child welfare officials require conditions to be safe and sanitary.

But now, as Henry is applying to formally adopt her grandchildren, the support services that come with her new home offer her an added level of assurance that she can manage.

"Once you've adopted, the services will still be there," said Henry, after she set down her grandchildren for breakfast before Sunday service.

Across from her apartment building is an original stone house from the site where many programs, such as counseling, parenting and mental health, are based. A Family and Children's Service staff member has moved into Clare Courts to serve as an on-site manager.

Residents maintain not only their own families but are also asked to contribute to the well-being of others. They take turns watching each other's children or help the elderly and disabled tenants with grocery shopping.

"I live here. If I can't help my neighbors, what am I here for?" said Henry. "They built this community so that everybody could be a support to each other. We're here to strengthen each other."

That's the kind of the environment where Vicki Holeman of Detroit remembers growing up. Holeman, 52, still remembers concerned neighbors slapping her rear end for misbehaving. But now that the grandmother of three is in the position to mete out discipline, Holeman feels it is a struggle even to shield her grandchildren from negative influences in her Dexter-Elmhurst neighborhood in Detroit.

"When [my neighbors] smoke weed over there, the smell comes over here," said Holeman, who shares a duplex with those neighbors. She has been looking hard for a detached home on a quiet block where she hopes her grandchildren will be exposed to a more positive environment.

"I can't save the neighborhood. I can't save the world," said Holeman, "but I'm responsible for taking care of my grandchildren."

Violet Law is a newspaper reporter who has covered housing issues since 2000.