Christopher Peak Photo
Dinah Sellers, one of Antillean Manor’s original residents, at Monday night’s meeting.
Residents of Antillean Manor, a subsidized housing complex, voted to reconstitute their long-defunct co-op board — checking off the first requirement in the complicated and controversial process of selling off the property to a developer eager to raze and rebuild it.
Families residing in the 31-unit cooperative on Day Street, between Chapel Street and Edgewood Avenue, in the Dwight neighborhood, said they are eager to vacate the squalid premises, with its cracked walls, waterlogged floors and rodent infestations. They’re willing to hand ownership off to Carabetta Management, which has run the facility since 2011, to tear down the half-century-old apartments and rebuild. It would become the latest of a series of housing co-ops in New Haven to fail, following the Dwight Co-ops (now “Dwight Gardens” around the corner on Edgewood) and Ethan Gardens a couple of blocks away.
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), which subsidizes the units through Section 8 and holds a mortgage on the property, supports Carabetta’s plan to take over and rebuild Antillean. But to move forward, the project requires a vote from the co-op board in favor of a sale. And the board hadn’t met for years. Many families didn’t even realize the board existed.
Carabetta officials originally tried to spring the election on Antilean’s tenants at an outdoor meeting last month, when they tried to move ahead without giving advance notice and without sharing the procedure with anyone. That didn’t fly. On Monday, in the Dwight police substation’s community room, the Meriden-based developer succeed on its second try, though not nearly as fast as it wanted to move.
West River Alder Tyisha Walker, who represents the tenants and had previously ding the company for its lack of transparency, called Monday night’s vote a “step in the right direction.”
“We’re one step closer than we were,” said Walker, who is president of the Board of Alders. “I got involved because I want to make sure that they have a safe place to live, and I just want Carabetta to be up front with them.”
She added, “This is about their lives.”
To get the co-op board back together, Antillean’s residents had to follow a process set out in bylaws that no one had read in years. Those rules dictate that 20 percent of the complex’s members can call a meeting and propose revisions to the bylaws, which can then be passed with a majority vote and sent to HUD for final approval.
Antillean Manor.
Easy enough, right? Except that the co-op hadn’t followed the rules on adding new members in years. According to the bylaws, those seeking membership had to apply to the board, pay a $325 fee and obtain a certificate. Most of the current tenants had simply signed papers with Carabetta; only two remaining households still had their original member certificates on file, and another nine had occupancy agreements that were a prerequisite to membership.
Others may have had certificates, too, but when Carabetta took over, the co-op’s remaining records were handed to them in a garbage bag and were hard to track down, said Helen Muniz, the company’s development officer. Some important records appear not to have been inside that garbage bag.
Around 6:30 p.m., two female members — technically a majority of the remaining members — stood up to call a meeting of the co-op’s board of directors for the first time in as long as anyone can remember.
After consulting in the hallway with a New Haven Legal Assistance Association attorney, the two members, Dinah Sellers and Carmen Casillas, moved to amend the bylaws. They suggested changing the membership criteria. Waiving the $325 fee, every household would now get one member. (“I don’t care if it’s 15 family members that are in one household, it’s one member,” Sellers said.)
At the next meeting, they proposed, the larger group will elect a seven-member board of directors that can ink the final sale.
Carabetta’s team, in a rush to get construction started, asked if the board could not be put together right then and there. Residents responded that it would be preferable to involve every resident in deciding which neighbors would represent them on the board. (Sellers and Casillas also removed a requirement that one of the directors be an attorney, since Legal Assistance agreed to represent the board.) Legal aid attorneys Shelley White, Amy Marx, and Lizzie Rosenthal are working with the residents.
After Casillas struggled a few times with grasping what it meant to second Sellers’s motion, the two women approved the petition they’d drafted.
Casillas later said that she wanted to reconstitute the board so that she can get out of Antillean.
“I want a better place to live,” she said, “in a better neighborhood.” Sellers added, “If it’s gonna work, why not” bring the board back?
The changes now must be approved by HUD. Carabetta officials asked if it could rush a copy of the revised bylaws to the feds by Tuesday, when they have a weekly check-in call, but legal aid lawyers and city officials protested. Serena Neal-Sanjurjo, executive director of the Livable City Initiative, New Haven’s neighborhood anti-blight agency, said the draft could wait until her agency’s standing meeting with HUD on Friday, giving all parties extra time to review the edits.
Attorney Laura Skalver and Carabetta rep Helen Muniz.
Laura Sklaver, an attorney with Susman and Duffy representing Carabetta, said the document would likely need to be reviewed by HUD’s programmatic office as well as its counsel. But she is optimistic that they’ll hear back as “quickly as possible,” she said. “I believe it will be very brief.”
Carabetta plans to hold the next meeting as soon as possible, because, as Muniz pointed out, Antilean “is deteriorating as we speak.”
Previous coverage of Antillean Manor:
• Not So Fast, Antillean Tells Eager Builder
• Plan Unveiled To Raze, Rebuild Co-ops
• Tenants Wooed In Land Grab
• Clean-Up Crews Descend On Antillean Manor
• The Next Church Street South?
I find it very disheartening that an attorney is going to be on the Board. The attorneys should be empowering the members to run their own Cooperative by teaching and advising them outside of the meetings where the members conduct their own official business. This is the same paternal posture that is the geneses for the entire debacle. The attorneys are still an outside interest even if they represent the members. Advocating for the rights of the members is one thing. Creating a situation where it can be construed that an attorney is taking over the members' rights to run their own Cooperative is another.
[Chris: I believe you misread. For the reasons you noted, no attorney will serve on the board, though the old bylaws required one.]