Church St. South Refugees Fight Back

The quest for justice for hundreds of families who lost their health, their belongings, and ultimately their homes in New Haven’s worst housing disaster in a generation took a new turn Thursday with the filing of a federal class-action lawsuit.

New Haven civil rights lawyer David Rosen filed the lawsuit in U.S. District Court on behalf of six named plaintiffs and 280 people overall from 85 different families who lived in the federally subsidized Church Street South housing complex across from Union Station over the past three years. The class could eventually cover more than 1,000 people, Rosen said.

The 32-page suit — against the complex’s Massachusetts-based owner, Northland Investment Corp.; Northland board chair Lawrence Gottesdiener; and affiliated corporate entities — seeks unspecified monetary damages for the respiratory problems, skin disorders, migraines, loss of furniture, temporary dislocation and homelessness suffered by the families because of rampant mold, leaking ceilings, crumbling porches, and other long-term safety hazards at the 301-unit complex known as ​“The Jungle” and ​“Cinderblock City.”

Northland knew about the problems in the complex and made shoddy repairs, which failed to address the roots of the problems, only after government inspectors hounded them about over 1,000 health and safety violations, the suit charges. The suit accuses the company of neglect and recklessness in pursuing ​“demolition by neglect” — allowing conditions to deteriorate so badly that the complex would need to be torn down — at the expense of tenants’ health and safety. That strategy amounted to a violation of the Connecticut Unfair Trade Practices Act, the suit charges.

“Defendants’ conduct was a plan of ​‘demolition by neglect,’ allowing conditions to deteriorate to a point where tenants would be forced to move out,” attorney Rosen and associates Barbara Goren and Alexander Taubes write in the complaint. ​“Defendants knew that each tenant relocated from Church Street South would be another tenant unlikely to desire a place in a future development of the property and that its neglect of Church Street South made the eventual condemnation of apartments inevitable, but they refused to address the hazardous conditions, instead spending as little money as they could repairing the structural elements of Church Street South,” such as replacing porous decades-old roofs.

Click here to read the complaint.

Northland bought the property in 2008 at the invitation of a mayor who wanted the company to raze it to build a market-rate development. ​“I bought it,” Gottesdiener recalled, ​“to build something better there.” (Read the previous Independent interview where he said this.)

But the city and Northland failed to reach an agreement about how to do that, differing over the amount of affordable housing the new development would contain. So Northland continued housing poor families there with the help of some $3 million in annual Section 8 rental subsidies from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

It took a lawsuit by the New Haven Legal Assistance Association and continued failed inspections by New Haven’s Harp administration to push HUD to force Northland to find new homes elsewhere for the remaining 269 tenant families and then to demolish the unsalvageable complex.

Since the decision was made 13 months ago to raze rather than seek to permanently repair Church Street South, officials have scrambled with the biggest family-relocation challenge in memory. Meanwhile, a question has lingered: What’s the best way to bring justice to the families whose lives were uprooted and harmed?

Different Roads

Rosen said Thursday’s lawsuit is one way to accomplish that. It can recompense uprooted families for the losses to their health, for their lost furniture, for their emotional distress, and for the time their kids missed out on school or spent living cramped in temporary hotel rooms.

“Poor people in America, as elsewhere, don’t have much power at all,” Rosen said. ​“They have very few means to do things rather than have things done to them. They have a voice that is a vote, which is critical. The other route that poor people have is the civil justice system. The civil justice system is built on the premise that same justice is going to be given to rich and poor alike. It is a doorway to something that approximates an equal approach and an equal to justice that’s not dependent on your social class.”

Rosen praised the work New Haven legal aid did in forcing the government to act to get the families new housing. ​“But they’re still behind because of what was done to them. A private lawyer like me can bring an action for money damages for these families,” Rosen said.

Shelley White, legal aid’s litigation director, said her agency doesn’t file personal injury cases seeking money damages. Private attorneys can take on those cases, she said. She said legal aid takes on cases that private attorneys can’t afford to take on — like the original suit that forced HUD to take action against Northland.

“How best is justice brought to these families? To allow them to live in safe, comfortable housing,” Northland’s Gottesdiener argued Thursday in an email message to the Independent. He said that’s what his company is currently doing in coordination with New Haven’s Harp administration and the Housing Authority of New Haven. They have been working since last fall first to arrange new HUD subsidies for the tenants to move into permanent new apartments elsewhere, then to help those tenants obtain the subsidies and find the new apartments. Gottesdiener stated that he ​“cannot comment on pending litigation at this time”; in previous interviews he said his company inherited a mess and spent millions of dollars trying to keep it livable.

Northland originally promised to have all families out of Church Street South by the end of 2015. The process — which includes finding and qualifying interested private landlords, working with tenants — has proved slower and more difficult than predicted. According to Gottesdiener, 118 families remain on site.

The housing authority is overseeing lining up tenants with subsidies and new homes. Three families have requested and obtained ​“project-based” Section 8 subsidies that are attached to a different housing development; the other 266 have requested portable Section 8 vouchers they can take to any qualified landlords (and then to new places if they move again), according to authority Executive Director Karen DuBois-Walton. The government has issued 251 of those 266 vouchers; DuBois-Walton said her staff hopes to issue the other 15 after meeting with families this week. She said 133 families have moved into new homes so far, 101 in New Haven, 32 in other communities. The others are still looking for apartments.

Twelve families, three of which will probably move to new homes this weekend, remain in hotels, DuBois-Walton said.

Future Justice

A larger question of justice concerns not just the fate of those families, but the availability of affordable housing in New Haven. Church Street South was one of the few remaining complexes in town where poor families on Section 8 could find three‑, four‑, or five-bedroom apartments they could afford.

The plan for rebuilding Church Street South calls for a mixed-use developments with stores, maybe offices, and 900 to 1,000 apartments. The initially skeptical Harp administration has now agreed to work with Northland to rebuild the complex rather than try to get the property in new hands. The two sides have agreed to seek federal or state money to support making 30 percent of the new apartments there ​“affordable.” (The rest would be market-rate.)

The meaning of ​“affordable” will depend on what government source provides the funding: It could mean ​“low-low-income” families like the current and recently displaced Church Street South tenants, many of whom make under $30,000 a year in income. Or it could mean four-person households earning as much as 120 percent of New Haven’s $87,000 annual area median income.

“We have huge concerns around regentrification,” said statewide NAACP President Scot X. Esdaile. ​“My fear is this will be like 360 State. A successful model would be like Ninth Square,” where as much as 40 percent of the housing is subsidized in mixed-income apartment buildings.

Legal aid lawyers have continued to push city officials to make sure that New Haven preserves, or even gains more, affordable housing during this process, through a combination of site-based Section 8 subsidies at other locations as well as a replacement of the 301 or so subsidized apartments to be lost when Church Street South comes down. Officials have promised that any former tenants who want to return to the newly rebuilt complex will have an opportunity to do so.

It’s not clear that many, if any, will want to return.

Personna Noble, the lead named plaintiff in the new federal suit, said she won’t want to come back if Northland continues to own the complex.

“They’d still have the same workers,” she said. Noble said she lost all her furniture after it got destroyed during three months in storage while Northland put her family up in a hotel. She now has a permanent new apartment on Quinnipiac Avenue. She said she’s happy there.

“Not if it’s under the same management,” agreed fellow former tenant Leeza Skovinski, who’s now living on Eastern Street. She said Northland moved her to a new apartment on site after it couldn’t eliminate the mold in her original one. Then ​“I came home with a newborn from the hospital and I didn’t have hot water” for a month in her second Church Street South apartment. ​“No one would fix it.”

Previous coverage of Church Street South:
• LCI Chief Seeks Hill Support For Church St. South Rebuild
• City Teams With Northland To Rebuild
• Church Street South Tenants’ Tickets Have Arrived
• Church Street South Demolition Begins
• This Time, Harp Gets HUD Face Time
• Nightmare In 74B
• Surprise! Now HUD Flunks Church St. South
• Church St. South Tenants Get A Choice
• Home-For-Xmas? Not Happening
• Now It’s Christmas, Not Thanksgiving
• Pols Enlist In Church Street South Fight
• Raze? Preserve? Or Renew?
• Church Street South Has A Suitor
• Northland Faces Class-Action Lawsuit On Church Street South
• First Attempt To Help Tenants Shuts Down
• Few Details For Left-Behind Tenants
• HUD: Help’s Here. Details To Follow
• Mixed Signals For Church Street South Families
• Church St. South Families Displaced A 2nd Time — For Yale Family Weekend
• Church Street South Getting Cleared Out
• 200 Apartments Identified For Church Street South Families
• Northland Asks Housing Authority For Help
• Welcome Home
• Shoddy Repairs Raise Alarm — & Northland Offer
• Northland Gets Default Order — & A New Offer
• HUD, Pike Step In
• Northland Ordered To Fix Another 17 Roofs
• Church Street South Evacuees Crammed In Hotel
• Church Street South Endgame: Raze, Rebuild
• Harp Blasts Northland, HUD
• Flooding Plagues Once-Condemned Apartment
• Church Street South Hit With 30 New Orders
• Complaints Mount Against Church Street South
• City Cracks Down On Church Street South, Again
• Complex Flunks Fed Inspection, Rakes In Fed $$
• Welcome Home — To Frozen Pipes
• City Spotted Deadly Dangers; Feds Gave OK
• No One Called 911 | ​“Hero” Didn’t Hesitate
• ​“New” Church Street South Goes Nowhere Fast
• Church Street South Tenants Organize