Public-Housing Senior Shivers

At 3 a.m. on this coldest of January mornings, 80-year-old Dorthea Mitchell crawled out of bed to turn on the oven. It was that, or go to the hospital.

Contrary to what the housing authority had told her, the heat was broken inside her apartment at the Newhall Gardens senior complex on Daisy Street.

Mitchell (pictured) was already keeping two space heaters burning night and day before a cold snap hit town this week. As temperatures headed to the teens and single digits, the space heaters weren’t doing the trick.

“It was very cold,” she said. ​“I was starting to feel shortness of breath. I thought I was going to have to go to the hospital.”

Finally, after complaints from her alder and an inquiry from the Independent, the Housing Authority of New Haven (HANH) — which had previously told her she was simply using the system improperly — sent a technician to Mitchell’s apartment Wednesday. As temperatures headed toward zero degrees Wednesday night, Mitchell’s heat was back working.

The visit was one of many efforts across New Haven to keep people warm — and prevent people from suffering frostbite or more serious injuries — as officials dealt with a cold emergency.

The city activated daytime warming centers. (For a list of warming stations click here.) It dispatched patrol officers looking for people who might be at risk of frostbite and hypothermia such as the homeless. The number of available beds was expanded at homeless shelters; the mayor said she plans to ask churches to make spaces available if those beds all get filled.

As of late Wednesday afternoon, the city had so far received ​“no significant reports of issues relating to people needing medical assistance,” said Rick Fontana, deputy director of emergency operations. ​“We have seen an uptick in folks using the warming centers and the train station,” said

HANH Executive Director Karen DuBois-Walton said no other heating complaints had come in to her agency besides Mitchell’s. The authority has contracts with hotels on the east and west sides of town to place tenants in rooms in case of emergencies, she said.

An HVAC technician from Crest Mechanical Services, on contract with the housing authority, worked for about three hours figuring out why heat wasn’t flowing to Mitchell’s apartment. It turned out a component that is supposed to pump heat into Mitchell’s unit was not working and needed to be repaired. He was able to patch it. By 10 a.m. the heat was working again, for now. The technician called it a temporary fix at best.

Mitchell said she was grateful to have the heat flowing again, but it’s been a long road to getting an expert out to look at her heating system. She’d been calling the authority since October to ask for it to be repaired.

Squeaky Wheel Gets The Heat

When Mitchell received a maintenance visit from a housing authority employee, she said she was told that there was nothing wrong with her heating system.

HANH’s Newhall Gardens property manager, Jennifer DeJesus, said when contacted on Tuesday that she had been under the impression that Mitchell’s heating system was working, but a technician was being sent to provide a second opinion. She also said that Mitchell had been offered a hotel room, but had declined.

Mitchell said she was so fed up with the situation that she has even called the mayor’s office, and never heard anything back. She said she didn’t take the offer of a hotel room because of her age and because she didn’t know how long she would have to stay away from her home before the heating issue was resolved, especially given that authority officials didn’t believe anything was wrong.

“They haven’t done anything to fix this in three months, I wouldn’t put it past them to keep me in a hotel for three months,” she said.

Rather than risking a fire hazard by leaving the space heaters on unattended, or turning everything off and risking the temperature in her apartment plummeting, Mitchell said, she just tried to leave her house as little as possible. She canceled doctor’s appointments if she thought she’d have to be away from home too long.

Mitchell said she wasn’t aware that someone was coming to look at her heating system until that person showed up at her door at about 7:15 a.m. Wednesday. She wondered how many of her neighbors in her complex were having similar problems, but were afraid to say anything, or just resigned to not getting any help.

Newhallville Alder Delphine Clyburn wondered the same thing. So much so that she tagged along with a U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) inspector during a health and safety check in December. Just more than half of the 26 apartments at Newhall Gardens were inspected forbroken smoke detectors, problems with electrical panels, windows that were unable to be opened and plumbing problems.

The inspector’s random visits didn’t include a stop at Mitchell’s apartment during the review. The results of the report have yet to be released by HUD; Clyburn said during the inspection there were no complaints for heating issues, but there were lots of requests for other repairs. She said she has recently been contacted by another resident who said her heat is not working either.

“It’s shocking, but things like this go on all the time and there is always something that these seniors really have to fight for,” she said.

Clyburn stopped by Mitchell’s house Wednesday with new Livable City Inbitiative Director Serena Neal-Sanjurjo.

Neal-Sanjurjo was on a neighborhood tour of Newhallville that brought her to the senior housing complex on Daisy Street. She told Mitchell that she didn’t have the authority to make the housing authority do anything, but she said she would reach out to see how LCI might partner to help the authority address issues with property management.