Brenda Foskey-Cyrus came home Monday — to a new home.
She cut the ceremonial ribbon alongside dignitaries to the rebuilt Canterbury Gardens complex on Sherman Parkway.
Foskey-Cyrus and the rest of the complex’s inhabitants moved out of the townhouse apartments a year ago. The place was a cooperative then, run by the tenants. The complex had become run down. And the cooperative had gone bust.
A not-for-profit builder in town, NeighborWorks New Horizons (formerly called Mutual Housing), came to the rescue. It performed a $5 million renovation, transforming Canterbury into a spanking new, energy-efficient complex. It’s no longer a co-op. But it retains idealistic missions:
• Affordable housing: Tenants pay 30 percent of their income for rent on the complex’s 34 two- and three-story townhouses. The average two-bedroom rents for $600 a month. (The apartments range from one to four bedrooms.)
• Supportive housing: Nine of the apartments are reserved for people with HIV/AIDS who are homeless or at risk of becoming homeless. The group Leeway will have a case worker on site. The idea is to blend the families into the complex, to avoid stigma; and to have services they need right there.
Foskey-Cyrus moved to Hamden last year when the complex was cleared out for renovations. She asked NeighborWorks if she could move back in. The agency said yes — and gave her her old apartment, number 2.
“It’s a delight to be back home,” Foskey-Cyrus told a gathering of movers and shakers at Monday’s ribbon-cutting. She’s pictured at the top of the story cutting the ribbon, in between U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro and Seila Mosquera, who runs NeighborWorks.
A retired clerical worker, Foskey-Cyrus is raising four grandchildren (including Sunshine Foskey, pictured, who accompanied her Monday) while taking care of her husband, who’s disabled.
“It was my dream to live here,” Foskey-Cyrus said later. She used to visit the complex as a teenager living nearby in Newhallville; her uncle lived there. She wanted to come back because she likes the way it’s secluded — up a winding driveway from the street a block from Hillhouse High School — yet also conveniently located right in the city.
Rosa DeLauro played a key role in making the project happen, according to Mosquera (pictured). So did a state program that no longer has any money.
The federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) closed on Canterbury when the federally subsidized co-op’s members fell hopelessly behind on their bills. DeLauro convinced HUD not to put up the complex for a public auction, at which it might have fallen into the hands of speculators. Instead, HUD agreed to sell the property to the city, which in turn sold it to NeighborWorks.
About $4.5 million of the $5 million total cost of the purchase and renovation came from the “Next Step Initiative,” a supportive housing program run by the Connecticut Housing Financial Authority. Gov. M. Jodi Rell defunded the program earlier this year, one of a series of emergency budget cuts. She originally created the program at the suggestion of her State Interagency Council on Supportive Housing and Homelessness.
Rep. DeLauro got a look around the apartments before Monday’s ceremony.
“Let’s hear it for the closet space!” she told the gathering. “They had a lot of good women give input.”
I'm usually a fan of the bold way Rosa dresses, but today she dropped the ball.