HANH Spinning Off Management Arm

The Housing Authority of New Haven has proven that it can compete with private out-of-town builders to redevelop property and create housing.

Now it aims to prove that it can manage property — its own and others — just as well as the big boys.

More than a decade ago, the housing authority established a not-for-profit redevelopment arm called the Glendower Group, to transform obsolete housing in its portfolio into sought-after affordable housing. Glendower has redeveloped the William T. Rowe apartment building (also known as The New Rowe); Monterey Place; Quinnipiac Terrace; Wilmont Crossing; Brookside; Rockview I and Eastview Terrace. (The housing authority just got a thumbs up from the City Plan Commission on its site plans for Rockview II, and last fall a groundbreaking was held for phase two of the Farnam Courts redevelopment.)

Now, the authority is embarking on a similar not-for-profit venture that will be known as the 360 Management Group. HANH Executive Director Karen DuBois-Walton said the venture will manage properties completed by the Glendower Group and ultimately compete for contracts to manage properties not affiliated with the housing authority.

“The way I see the work that we’re doing in the public sector is that we have to be as nimble, as flexible, as creative as we can be to continue to do this work and meet the ever growing need for affordable housing which is far outpacing the supply of existing units and units in the pipeline,” DuBois-Walton said.

That has meant thinking beyond being a public housing authority strictly in the business of managing and maintaining housing for low-income people with federal funding. It also has meant creating other organizations specifically under the umbrella of ​“Elm City Communities” that can take on some of the functions of the authority, or take on functions the authority is prohibited from doing such as seeking private financing, while leveraging public and private funding sources to rehabilitate existing public housing stock and provide supportive services.

“Our very first affiliate was Glendower Group. We formed that because the housing authority had the desire to continue the redevelopment of affordable housing and needed to be able to do some things that we, again, could have hired outsiders to do,” she said. ​“But most of the big developers that come in and redevelop public housing are not Connecticut-based companies.”

She said that creating the Glendower Group allowed New Haven to ensure that development fees stay in New Haven. The same will be true of the 360 Management Group.

New Haven’s housing authority is allowed to create affiliate organizations such as the Glendower Group, and the future 360 Management Group, because of its Moving to Work status under the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). That status was just extended to 2028 during the last session of Congress. The designation allows housing authorities more budget and regulatory flexibility in the hopes that they innovate and promote self-sufficiency. HANH is among the original 39 that have been in the program since the aughts; in the most recent extension 100 more authorities were added. There are 3,400 housing authorities in the United States.

The need to create an organization affiliated with HANH that manages properties grows out of plans to convert units in the authority’s portfolio from strictly publicly-owned housing to Section 8 ​“project-based” units owned by the Glendower Group.

“The Section 8 program in a lot of ways is seen as more stable,” DuBois-Walton said. ​“Now, all of a sudden we can leverage this building; I can go get a tax credit award and do really major stuff, which is what we have been doing with redevelopment.”

The HUD’s Rental Assistance Demonstration program, or RAD, created under the Obama administration, allows authorities like HANH to basically find a new way to get reliable money for public housing at a time when Congress has been cutting traditional public-housing subsidies. They can now obtain Section 8 ​“project-based” subsidies (tied to a housing complex, not a tenant) for facilities owned not just by private for-profit developers — but by not-for-profit entities the authorities spin off by themselves, like Glendower. That also allows HANH to obtain enough money for upkeep and redevelopment.

HANH plans to convert 1,000 units of traditional public housing it manages to Section 8 project-based subsidies over the next two to three years. That means instead of federal dollars going into the hands of private developers and landowners, it stays in the public sector to be reinvested.

“It’s bringing some of the tried and true private market development models into the world of federally subsidized housing,” she said. ​“You can bring those tools and allow housing authorities to use [them] to ensure the long term viability of affordable housing without demanding greater federal resources,” she said. ​“On some deals, I’m leveraging public dollars four-to-one; some deals I’ve leveraged nine times the investment for every public dollar put into it. That’s the kind of thing that I think that people should celebrate around the city.

“We’re using the public dollar to leverage all this private investment into property to meet a need in our community that is great, and to provide it at level you would put your mom, dad, grandma, and children in,” she said.

But DuBois-Walton said that one potential downside of converting the units is that the jobs associated with maintaining them would disappear because the property would technically no longer belong to the housing authority, but rather to the Glendower Group. The housing authority could hire private companies as it’s done in the past to manage those properties, or it could create an entity affiliated with the authority that is positioned to do the work, maintain the jobs and seek ways of generating a profit that ultimately is reinvested back into the redevelopment of public housing. With the unanimous support of the HANH Board of Commissioners, it recently got the go ahead to do the latter, and now awaits IRS approval on 360 Management Group’s application for not-for-profit status.

The Future

The new management group might not be the last not-for-profit that the housing authority creates, DuBois-Walton said. She said HANH has taken the fundamental position that low-income people should have not only adequate, safe and affordable housing, but also access to supportive services that help move them out of poverty. The housing authority has to find other means to fund that.

“The money that comes to us is really just housing money,” she said. ​“You can’t house 6,000 very low-income families and not think you’re going to need to do something more.”

Of those families, DuBois-Walton pointed out that the housing authority has a diverse clientele that includes elderly residents who need help to age in place and stay healthy; families who have children or adults with disabilities, while other families have people who are dealing with behavioral problems and need support services so they can keep working.

“The vast majority of our families are ​‘work-able’ families and are usually working two jobs — two jobs that still keep them in poverty,” she said. ​“We could just say, ​‘That’s fine,’ but that doesn’t help that family move forward. If I don’t create any flow, I’m never moving any families out of poverty; I’m never touching this wait list of families that need to be housed.”

She said the reality is most philanthropic organizations don’t want to give money to government agencies — some do, but most don’t. A social service organization, under the umbrella of the housing authority allows the agency to seek grant money that can better support those services.

“Whether you look at it from the altruistic perspective, or the economic, there is value in helping people build their skills, build their resume and connecting them to jobs so that they can start economically moving along, so that eventually they can say, ​‘I don’t need to live in public housing any more,’” she said.