New Haven Independent

Dixon, a Fairmont Heights tenant since 1999, is taking steps to transfer out, and the others also describe a situation at their wit’s end. But the reason is not the, pardon the pun, garden-variety of complaints from public housing tenants about which she wrote to this website: long delays in repairs, leaky roofs, windows with bent frames so that winter cold enters, or even low-level but chronic drug use and prostitution.

Even the frustrating difficulty in working with HANH not to chop down Pittman’s hostas or to get the grass regularly cut around Corrine Burgess’s up and coming turnips and collards is not the difficulty that seems to be driving these women to a kind of quiet desperation.

Rather it is a handful of other tenants, actually two, described by these people as “abusive verbal predators” who are, in Pittman’s phrase, “driving out a lot of good people from this place.”

The problem reflects the challenge facing the city’s housing authority when it feels a need to house younger people with drug or mental problems in otherwise elderly complexes.

“I’ve been going through hell here for 12 years,” said Pittman, “with this one woman. She holds court calling us ‘fat asses’ and ‘black bitches’ and she also intimidates, saying ‘If I had a gun I’d blow your black ass off.’”

Josephine Dixon-Banks described another tenant who she said stalks her, listens through the adjoining floor monitoring her bathroom habits, plays his music loudly, confronts her regularly in the lobby when she returns from work, tells others she is a demon, and, in Dixon-Banks’ word “terrorizes me.”

On several occasions when Dixon-Banks called the police in to resolve the disputes, the man in question was told to still his music. Dixon-Banks asserted she was told if she called again, she’d be seen as the cause of the problem.

HANH has responded to such complaints with attempts at mediation, not prosecution. Officials see the situation by and large as not a question of police work but social work. Sometimes the first mediator is the building manager — in the case of Fairmont, Monica Wolfort, who also manages families at two other HANH facilities as well. Other times, a tenant calls directly to HANH headquarters and meetings are set up between HANH attorneys and security staff.

For Dixon, Dixon-Banks, and Pittman, none of these interventions has altered the declining quality of life represented by this small handful of disruptive tenants. It’s a situation reflective of others developments where an elderly population is mixed with individuals whose physical, developmental, or mental problems, especially if untreated, can undermine a frail community.

Responding to a call to HANH’s staff attorney, Executive Director Jimmy Miller said, “We are aware of the problems at Fairmont, that there are ongoing conflicts between tenants. Our approach is to try at all levels to resolve the conflict through mediation. Why? Because this is housing of last resort for our people. If someone is evicted, they are on the street. And the housing court judge knows this too. That’s why non-payment is usually the primary reason for evictions. We’re trying to deal with disruptive tenants, but these people do have rights, even special rights that we have to work with and around. We try to work with tenants’ difficulties so that they will be good neighbors and rent-compliant.

“If the nature of a complaint, for example, is related to a person’s disability, even a mental disability, then we have to act accordingly. It’s a difficult situation.”

“I know, I know all about ‘housing of last resort,’” asserted Dixon-Banks. “But it’s not right.”

“How does HANH go to such an extent to protect the ‘predator,’ added Pittman, “and how does that right outweigh 30, 40, 50 other families? Some of us don’t have our grandchildren come visit because it can be so bad. That’s a kind of abuse,” she said. “It’s a human rights abuse going on around here.”

Miller reiterated the shift he has described elsewhere for HANH to move from being merely a landlord to being a kind of social worker for the vulnerable population it serves, but Fairmont Heights has not yet benefited. “We used our resources first to place services of Cornerstone and Continuum Care first at Charles T. McQueeney, at Rupuolo Manor, and at Robert T. Wolfe Houses. This is extremely expensive,” he said, “to have social services available around the clock. At least $250,000 a year.”

What about the women’s assertion that they feel intimidated, terrorized, even, in one instance, threatened with a gun?

“That we have not heard. But,” he reiterated, “our goal is to resolve these disputes with mediation and conflict resolution. In a housing market, where if our people are evicted, they will have no place else to go, what’s the other option?”

Nevertheless, because these problems — arising out of HUD regulations dating back to the 1970s for mainstreaming people with emotional or drug-dependency disabilities with the elderly — are only getting worse, Miller’s team is reshaping the HANH complexes so that currently three are elderly-only: Newhall Gardens, Katherine Harvey Terrace, and Constance Motley. The currently vacant but slated-for-modernization Prescott Bush development will be the fourth in the system.

Fairmont Heights will continue to have its mixed population, and likely its problems, although Miller did say, “Fairmont has more than its share. I think that if we can marshal the social work resources, Fairmont will be next to receive them.”

That may not be soon enough for Lyda Dixon and Josephine Dixon-Banks. They have filed for a transfer already. If it goes through, the French honeysuckles that have lovingly been grown along the sunny east façade of Fairmont Heights will have lost more than two devoted gardeners.