Housing Options Provided for the Elderly, Inc. (HOPE)

Housing Options Provided for the Elderly, Inc. (HOPE) HOPE helps older adults live with dignity and independence in the housing most appropriate to their circumstances.

We provide housing options counseling, housing navigation & relocation to St. Louis area seniors & Reverse Mortgage Counseling nationwide.

HOPE is proud to join colleagues from LifeWise StL, St. Louis Area Agency on Aging, and the social media-less St. Louis ...
04/21/2026

HOPE is proud to join colleagues from LifeWise StL, St. Louis Area Agency on Aging, and the social media-less St. Louis City Senior Fund at the National Conference of the American Society on Aging to present about what we’ve learned from our response & recovery work with older adults impacted by the May 16, 2025 tornado.

03/27/2026

(12/12) “Since the tornado happened, I’ve been able to focus on little else besides whatever it takes to help our clients recover. During those early days, I remember I was returning phone calls in the evenings at like 8:30 p.m. I returned several at that time from my dear friend when he finally asked me, ‘Why are you still working?’ I said, ‘I have no work-life boundaries. Like, this is the time I can return calls. So I’m doing it!’ But I’m dedicated. I love this job. There’s nothing else I’d rather be doing. I love my community. I’ve worked with the residents of North St. Louis for almost 20 years. And I love them, too.

I feel that way about St. Louis in general, but particularly the northside, because it’s been handed a raw deal for decades. Intentional disinvestment, redlining, going back decades before Team Four and their plan for ‘benign neglect’: Team Four was the consultant group that developed a plan in the 70s essentially telling the City of St. Louis to just let that part die. Like, ‘the southside is worth investing in, the northside is not, so just let it die slowly and then come in and redevelop it.’ Which is exactly what we’re facing right now. So that’s the next fight that’s going to happen. And I’m a fighter, ready to fight for them.

To see the disparities, as I have all of these years as a social worker… Man, I was crazy in the beginning. I’m still crazy. I used to be like, ‘Put me in the trenches. Send me into that HUD building getting shut down. The one that’s scary where the manager was assaulted and sometimes the elevator works and sometimes it doesn’t. Someone has to help to move people out of there who can’t get out on their own.’ That’s exactly where I wanted to be. Send me into the places falling apart to help those folks. That’s exactly who I wanted to help. I’ve been helping the unhoused for years. I’m not afraid to go anywhere, do anything.

I’ve always had a hard time dealing with injustice, even since I was a child. I want things to be fair. Not just for me, but for other people, too. So I get really upset by that. And I was very upset before the tornado. So please don’t mistake my work for pure altruism. I’m no savior. Taking action to help is the only remedy for that feeling of upset. It’s really the only way I can cope with the visceral feeling of the injustice that so deeply disturbs me.

I heard somebody say, ‘The city’s not responsible for helping people rebuild.’ And I was like, ‘Yes, they are. White folks don’t like the R-word: reparations. But, yes, we are responsible.’”

𝑂ℎ, 𝑇𝑟𝑎𝑐𝑦, 𝑦𝑜𝑢’𝑟𝑒 𝑠𝑜 𝑆𝑇𝐿 𝑀𝑎𝑑𝑒.

“Born. Raised. Never lived anywhere else.”

Tracy Fantini, MSW, LCSW, Executive Director, Housing Options Provided for the Elderly, Inc. (HOPE)

03/26/2026

(11/12) “We shake our heads a lot of times at the choices people make and the reasons they make them. However, one of the core tenets of a social worker’s code of ethics is that people have the right to self-determination. I explain that to my case managers, other professionals, and other people, who all get frustrated. People have the right to make their own decisions. You can’t make anybody do anything, even if it’s not the decision you would make for them. Our jobs are to do our very best to help them understand their options and all the risks associated with whatever their decisions are. At the end of the day, they’re the ones who get to make it. And that is hard to accept sometimes.

I think people like 88-year-old Mr. J with the tangled title and all the relatives should go and live with his kids at this point. The house was literally falling down around him before the tornado happened. I was working with our service partners at LifeWise StL, who ended up taking over his case to figure out what to do. When we looked at how we could help him, we wondered, ‘How many resources do you put into this structure?’ Because I’ve seen people living in that situation before. I’ve been called in by the city because they condemned a house, and the people living there refused to leave. They were adamant about staying there, and they had their reasons. So when we talked with Mr. J, it was like, ‘Let’s say we put several thousand into the roof. We still don’t know if the electricity can be restored. We don’t know what other damage is undoubtedly in here. It might be futile.’ And we can walk down that road to help him untangle that title, find help for his legal fees, find an organization that was paying for hotel rooms — the ULSTL or The Salvation Army. But he doesn’t want to live in that hotel room. He wants to be in his home. The bottom line is, what we want or what we think he should do doesn’t matter. He is legally competent and of sound mind. It’s his decision.

Since day one, who was I worried about? The folks in their homes. To this day, I am still worried about those folks living in damaged dwellings. I’ve had that client who was stubborn and determined to stay many times over. And I was terrified, I still am, that people are going to freeze to death. Mr. J apparently contacted my colleague at Lifewise STL after we had that first night after the tornado when the temperature got below freezing. He spent the night in his house, wearing those really thick coveralls. He told her, ‘I found out last night that I think I really can freeze to death.’ Thank God he realized that and went to a hotel. Still, people are gonna stay as long as they possibly can.”

Tracy Fantini, MSW, LCSW, Executive Director, Housing Options Provided for the Elderly, Inc. (HOPE)

03/25/2026

(10/12) “There was a building called Roosevelt Towne that provided low-income housing on the corner of Delmar and Euclid. And a lot of older adults lived there because they moved in when it opened 40 to 45 years ago. HOPE had been called in there a few times over the years because it was not well-maintained, and management wasn’t doing anything about it. The building would get condemned by the city, but then they would fix something just enough to get it ‘uncondemned.’ For example, when the elevator didn’t work, people who were mobility-impaired and as high up as the eighth floor couldn’t get downstairs because they used wheelchairs. They were trapped. I remember when we went there with the city to provide emergency supplies a few years ago, and we also offered residents our services to help them move out. Well, most of them did not want to go, which was baffling to us.

Now, the conditions in this building were bad for a long time. This is a place where I would not recommend any of my clients live. Except that it’s one of the few affordable places where, if you’ve got a record, if you’ve got a history of eviction, if you’re under 60 with a disability — it’s a place you can get into. So, it served a purpose. And yeah, we would move people in there sometimes. A lot of the people liked the location. And the thing is, there was a community there, and we didn’t realize that part. That’s why when we offered help to move out, folks didn’t want to move. With the tornado, there were two of our seniors in that building who had to be evacuated immediately because of the damage, and they went to a hotel because they had renters’ insurance that paid for it. Other residents from there were in Red Cross shelters. And so many of those folks were adamant about going back at first.

Right after the tornado, you’d ask a property manager or landlord, ‘Is this place repairable?’ and we heard, ‘Yeah, it is.’ And the standard answer to, ‘Well, how long is it gonna take?’ was six months. I know from contractors how these things work. It is completely unpredictable. Whether a place is going to reopen or be repaired, and in what time frame, nobody knows. Especially when there was a huge demand for rehabs, there were high tariffs on materials, and relief money wasn’t being allocated for repairs fast enough. So I couldn’t believe that time frame. And for HOPE and a lot of others working with seniors, it was about convincing them, ‘Hey, we gotta look for temporary housing because they were in shelters that were going to close.’”

Tracy Fantini, MSW, LCSW, Executive Director, Housing Options Provided for the Elderly, Inc. (HOPE)

03/24/2026

(9/12) “We also helped people get to their FEMA appointments because to give you anything, they have to come out to where you lived to put eyeballs on your damaged home. Errol Bush put me in touch with Mr. J, a gentleman Elliott Davis did a story on, whose home was in pretty bad shape prior to the tornado. We had the hardest time finding People to tarp his roof because it was three stories high. I had known many clients like Mr. J. He was 88 years old and adamant about not leaving his home. That was his mother’s home. She died maybe 25 years prior, and since the deed was never transferred into her son’s name, that got in the way of him receiving FEMA benefits. Because your name has to be on the deed. And only that one person in the household will get that check. In this situation, it was a family home, and Mr. J has several brothers who weren’t living with him but would also be heirs to the property since his mother didn’t have a will. We’ve seen large multi-generational families with many people living in homes like this, partly because the home’s paid off, but they had no insurance, and rehousing them has been an incredible challenge. Affordable housing for five, six, seven, or more people? It's practically non-existent. Those cases are the toughest.

I went through a process with a client to title a property in his name, and we had to go all the way back to 1900 when his uncle bought it. This was around 2010, and it cost $3,000 for a real estate attorney to untangle that title. Consider all the people who have tangled titles — where there was no will, the house didn’t go through probate, someone just kept paying the taxes and the bills, no matter whose name was on it and living there — and then FEMA says, ‘Oh, well. The deed’s gotta be in your name for us to give you help with repairs.’ For those who had no insurance or not enough insurance, the title to the home must be in their name to get any help from any governmental sources. Such an incredible barrier.

We call on Legal Services of Eastern Missouri in these situations, but the fact is, the demand is far greater than they can handle. And that’s the case at HOPE, too. So we gotta think outside the box. ‘Have we reached out to The Missouri Bar? Is there an association of real estate attorneys who can do pro bono work? Can we reach out to law schools so students can help?’ This is an all-hands-on-deck moment.”

Tracy Fantini, MSW, LCSW, Executive Director, Housing Options Provided for the Elderly, Inc. (HOPE)

03/23/2026

(8/12) “One of the first people we were really able to help when the tornado hit was a woman in her 60s living with her adult son and her brother, also in his 60s. She had been sitting on her couch when the tornado hit, and the back of her house fell off. She did have some insurance, though not enough, but some that allowed her and her family to stay in a hotel for a few weeks. Knowing she was going to have to get temporary housing, she was on top of things, immediately going out and securing an apartment. Once again, the St. Louis Senior Fund provided emergency funding for HOPE to help survivors, and we covered her first month’s rent and security deposit and provided some basic furniture because they had lost pretty much everything. She told me all her things had water damage because of the storm that came a few nights later that just poured torrential rain. And she was the only one of her three-person family handling all the things related to the tornado. Her son was busy working, and her brother also had a full-time job. It was all on her. She figured it all out, but talk about overwhelming.

I was introduced to her by Errol Bush, Cori Bush’s dad, whom I knew from working for her campaign. Seeing him at a community meeting, he was working at Better Family Life, Inc., trying to help tornado survivors. I walked over and said, ‘What can we do?’ He said, ‘I’ve got somebody we’ve been trying to help right here.’ He brought her over, and I did an intake right there. In a small way, we were able to help stabilize that family’s situation.

One of the things social workers do is help people navigate benefits and advocate for them. Because, amazingly, sometimes all it takes is another person sitting there with you. It sounds simple, but another person’s involvement, even just to ask questions, is enough to produce results that they don’t get on their own. My team and I do a lot of that. So we were identifying the help she needed. At that time, she was still in a place, like, ‘I don’t think my house can be saved. Where do I go from here?’ She was stable, but still unsure. I’ve been thinking about her lately, and I need to follow up. Last time I talked to her, she was in the process of jumping through all the FEMA hoops, because, of course, that came next. And as we learned very quickly from meeting with disaster relief organizations, like the American Red Cross and Catholic Charities, and folks involved in relief efforts from the Joplin tornado, recovery takes years. Not months. Years.”

Tracy Fantini, MSW, LCSW, Executive Director, Housing Options Provided for the Elderly, Inc. (HOPE)

03/23/2026

(7/12) 𝑊ℎ𝑒𝑛 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑡𝑜𝑟𝑛𝑎𝑑𝑜 ℎ𝑖𝑡, 𝑤ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑤𝑎𝑠 𝐻𝑂𝑃𝐸 𝑎𝑙𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑑𝑦 𝑑𝑜𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑤𝑜𝑟𝑘-𝑤𝑖𝑠𝑒 𝑖𝑛 𝑡𝑟𝑦𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑡𝑜 𝑚𝑒𝑒𝑡 𝑖𝑡𝑠 𝑔𝑜𝑎𝑙𝑠?

“People over the age of 50 are the fastest-growing age group of people experiencing homelessness. This is a national statistic, and I have seen it in reality on a personal level. I attribute it to the rise in rents and housing costs over the last five years. We’ve all seen property values going through the roof and housing shortages. Because of that, landlords can get higher rents. So consider the people who were barely affording a market-rate apartment, duplex, flat — they were just getting by. And then many of their landlords said, ‘I’m not going to renew your lease. I’m going to renovate instead. Where you were paying $600 or $700, I can get $1,000 or $1,200.’ And then we started to see more people displaced. Some people didn’t know what to do, didn’t know where to go.

We were already seeing the demand for our services increase before the tornado. We had served over 800 clients in 2024-2025, and then even more requested assistance whose needs we couldn’t meet. We see more and more living on the street or in their cars. I mean, when I started working here almost 20 years ago, those folks were mostly the young-old. Now they’re the old-old. And their age group being unhoused was a serious problem before the tornado. Add the tornado on top of it, and my case managers and I were doing whatever we could do. Many of our existing clients were affected, because the zip codes that were impacted — 63112, 63115, 63107, 63106 — are among the top five zip codes we serve anyway. So we got straight to work to identify them and try to meet their needs.

My immediate worry was not as much for those in the senior apartments because I knew they were already connected to services. The St. Louis Area Agency on Aging knew about them; we knew about them. People connected to senior centers were at least connected to some help. My concern was the older adults in their homes who didn’t know about us. So our first strategy was twofold. I had a couple of case managers in Red Cross shelters trying to identify older adults staying there so we could get to work with them straight away. We had no idea how long they would keep shelters open. And I jumped right into outreach to neighborhood hubs, like The People’s Response and 314Oasis, and all of those places that sprang up to help. I was passing out flyers letting people know HOPE can help with relocation, filling out insurance claim forms, and, since FEMA hadn’t arrived yet, applying for relief benefits. The goal was to get to agencies that weren’t regularly in the network of aging services providers and let them know we can provide services to survivors who are seniors aging.”

Tracy Fantini, MSW, LCSW, Executive Director, Housing Options Provided for the Elderly, Inc. (HOPE)

03/21/2026

(6/12) 𝑊ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑎𝑟𝑒 𝑠𝑜𝑚𝑒 𝑠𝑝𝑒𝑐𝑖𝑓𝑖𝑐 𝑛𝑒𝑒𝑑𝑠 𝑜𝑓 𝑜𝑙𝑑𝑒𝑟 𝑓𝑜𝑙𝑘𝑠 𝑤ℎ𝑒𝑛 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑦 𝑔𝑒𝑡 𝑑𝑖𝑠𝑝𝑙𝑎𝑐𝑒𝑑?

“In my line of business, there’s the young-old, the old-old, and the oldest-old. You know, there’s a difference between 65 and 85! Well, HOPE adopted a senior building called Latter Glory Manor, on North Newstead, that was right in the tornado’s path. If you drove down that street, that was a strikingly serious example of the destruction. The apartment building lost part of its roof, the windows were blown out, and around five of the apartments were not inhabitable. Of course, it lost power, and we had some old-old and oldest-old folks living there. When they got displaced from their homes, a lot of people had just lost everything. And that population has all sorts of needs for medication; durable medical equipment like wheelchairs, walkers, and bath benches; incontinence supplies; and nutritional supplements. They may already be set up with a personal caregiver or a chore worker who comes in to help them. And transportation can be a problem for the caregiver or chore worker, too. So if their client gets displaced, often the worker has to find them and then figure out how to get to them. Older folks may need help with personal care, like bathing, getting dressed, and meal preparation. We’re talking about typical needs of older folks that span across income levels. Consider all of that, and then even more pressing was that the main tornado damage was done in an area that was already impoverished, disinvested for decades, and had already been suffering. So there was that layer of need underlying everything.”

Tracy Fantini, MSW, LCSW, Executive Director, Housing Options Provided for the Elderly, Inc. (HOPE)

03/21/2026

(5/12) 𝑆𝑡. 𝐿𝑜𝑢𝑖𝑠 𝑗𝑢𝑠𝑡 ℎ𝑖𝑡 𝑡ℎ𝑒 10-𝑚𝑜𝑛𝑡ℎ 𝑚𝑎𝑟𝑘 𝑠𝑖𝑛𝑐𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑡𝑜𝑟𝑛𝑎𝑑𝑜. 𝐻𝑜𝑤 𝑑𝑖𝑑 𝐻𝑂𝑃𝐸 𝑠𝑡𝑒𝑝 𝑖𝑛 𝑒𝑎𝑟𝑙𝑦 𝑜𝑛?

“An hour after the tornado hit, I was contacted by my longtime colleague, friend, and mentor, Anneliese Stoever, the director of the St. Louis Area Agency on Aging. We maintain a housing list of all of the affordable or market-rate apartments we know of mostly for older adults. So we were asked to sort that list quickly and identify the buildings that we thought were in the path of the tornado to see what we could do to ensure our seniors were safe. Reports came in from everywhere. One was from a St. Louis senior center van taking people home after lunch and the activities of the day, and the windows were all blown out. Everybody was OK, thank God, but we started trying to figure out which buildings were in the hardest hit areas to see if they had power and who needed help to get to safety.

It was 4 p.m. on a Friday. And I left a lot of messages on emergency maintenance lines, saying, ‘This is who I am, and I’m calling to see if your residents need help. Please, someone, call me back.’ That first weekend, people with mobility issues were trapped on upper floors after the electricity went out, and no elevators worked. So we identified them to get the fire department over there. I communicated with Anneliese, who was with the police captain, the fire chief, all the emergency management personnel, and someone from Ameren. How were we going to get these elderly people trapped on upper floors out of their apartments?

The next morning, there was a lady trapped on the third floor of her building who needed dialysis. She already missed her appointment the day before so she couldn’t wait much longer for her next treatment. Plus, her dialysis clinic, down the street on DeBaliviere and Forest Park, had been destroyed. Luckily, we were able to call the fire department, get her downstairs, call the dialysis clinic, and find out where people were being rerouted to. I mean, people need dialysis every day. Turns out, the nearby clinic was diverting patients to other locations, so we made sure somebody picked her up to take her to another clinic. So, at first, it was a lot of managing crises like that, along with meeting people’s basic needs for food, water, power banks, flashlights, and toilet paper.”

Tracy Fantini, MSW, LCSW, Executive Director, Housing Options Provided for the Elderly, Inc. (HOPE)

Address

1120 South 6th Street, Suite 502
St. Louis, MO
63104

Opening Hours

Monday 9am - 4pm
Tuesday 9am - 4pm
Wednesday 9am - 4pm
Thursday 9am - 4pm
Friday 9am - 4pm

Telephone

+13147760155

Website

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