New Haven Independent

Since this spring DeJanette has spent her days on the first floor of the Robert T. Wolfe public-housing complex. She runs a new program there aimed at one of public housing’s biggest challenges in New Haven.

She and the program’s participants and organizers held an open house (pictured) there Thursday so the community could see what they’re up to. In a sense, the program has come to serve as an “open house” to the community already, day in and day out.

The program comes under the category of “supportive housing.” It aims at two separate problems in New Haven: homelessness, and the mix at nine public-housing complexes of seniors and younger tenants struggling with mental illness and/or substance abuse.

Organizers invited the public to the Wolfe open house (pictured) to see what they’re up to. The Wolfe program started a few months ago. It’s aimed at homeless people or public-housing tenants with dual diagnoses of mental illness and substance abuse. It helps people become self-sufficient by having help available to them right where they live.

ALSO-Cornerstone, an agency that helps people struggling with substance abuse and/or mentall illness, runs the program along with the housing authority.

Wolfe is a public-housing building with 95 apartments. Elderly people used to fill most of those apartments. Now seniors are a minority; most tenants are younger, classified as “disabled,” often with substance-abuse problems.

That can be a volatile mix. Some public-housing towers have seen seniors complaining about crime or harassment tied to younger people with drug problems in their complexes. The housing authority, which under federal laws has to find somewhere for adults with substance abuse problems to live, has struggled to find solutions to the problem. It is looking to these supportive housing programs as one solution.

Two such centers have already been up and running, at Ruoppolo Manor and McQueeney Towers, which remain more than half occupied by seniors. The new center at Wolfe came about thanks to $135,000 from the state Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services. The housing authority is throwing in another $93,000, in addition to providing the first-floor space for the program for free as well as staff assistance.

By the end of 2008, the housing authority hopes to have similar centers running at all nine complexes where seniors live side by side with younger people struggling with addiction or mental illness, said Executive Director Jimmy Miller (pictured).

The centers host narcotics anonymous meetings and Bingo games. Case workers meet regularly with participants to help them get their lives together. Sometimes that means steering them to programs that can find them jobs. Other times it means lining up health care or substance abuse counseling, or wrangling with bureaucracies to help people on the margins get their financial house in order so they can meet their rent bills and stay off the street.

“If you do these other things, then tension will be reduced” at the complexes, Miller said.

The Wolfe program works with both tenants of the complex and other people referred there from, say, Fellowship House or Connecticut Mental Health Center. The aim is in part to help some homeless people qualify eventually to move in to Wolfe.

In addition, people coming from the outside to attend weekly Narcotics Anonymous meetings at the center on Wednesday nights enables other participants to “see people out in the community living productively free of drugs,” said DeJarnette.

In that sense, an open house takes place every day at the center.

“It’s exciting to watch people come in and see their lives change,” DeJarnette said.

So far, six tenants and eight community members participate in the Wolfe program. The design is to increase the total number to 25.

Doris Doward and Linda Whitley, president and secretary, respectively, of the Wolfe tenants association, said the program has been a welcome addition since it opened in April.

Howard Henderson (pictured) moved to Wolfe three years ago from the housing authority’s tower at 904 Howard, which has experienced more problems between the two groups of tenants. Henderson, 58, said he likes Wolfe better. He has started attending NA meetings at the new center, he said.

On Thursday he had to decide between wearing his Vietnam cap and his Benjamin Franklin cap. He chose the Franklin.

What does he like about Franklin? “The money.”