Melissa Bailey Photo
The broken stairway that sent Tonda Spell tumbling has been replaced, as Mutual Housing Association picks up the pieces of 65 apartments that fell apart when a not-for-profit landlord suffered financial troubles.
Spell (pictured) lives at 172 Rosette St., one of four partially boarded-up homes on two short blocks of the residential side street in the Hill.
The homes were among 15 rundown buildings that the Hill Development Corporation fixed up in the mid-1990s, bringing an influx of affordable housing into the Hill. Last year, as HDC fell apart amid financial distress, Mutual Housing Association rescued the whole portfolio from the brink of foreclosure, according to Erik Johnson, head of City Hall’s anti-blight agency, the Livable City Initiative.
Now the city plans to pitch in money to help the Grand Avenue not-for-profit fix up the homes and rent them out again, Johnson said.
Seila Mosquera, Mutual Housing’s executive director, said her organization is aware of the blight and plans to start rehabbing the buildings soon.
Meanwhile, some of the homes have suffered.
Joanne Wesley lives below Spell in a four-family apartment building (pictured). The apartment next door to hers has been boarded up for over a year, she said. An extra padlock went up after someone broke into the basement and stole the copper pipes. Now mice are using the home as a hideout.
“The mice are nice and fat,” said Wesley. “They come out, run across the floor like they pay rent.”
She said the landlord does hire an exterminator from time to time. She suspects the mice seek refuge in the vacant apartment and come back when the coast is clear.
Neighbors said the houses have relatively nice apartments, but their boarded-up windows stand out on the street.
The first floor of 162 Rosette sits vacant.
“It feels like a ghost town,” said a neighbor named Jose, as he left the corner store at Rosette and Button.
Mutual Housing, also known as NeighborWorks New Horizons, owns four homes on Rosette, all of them partially covered in plyboard. The rest of the 15 homes it bought in the Hill, comprising 65 apartments, are nearby on Davenport, Putnam, Hurlburt, and Howard, according to Johnson.
Johnson said the apartments, were at one point a source of great hope for the Hill. The city lent the Hill Development Corporation money to help kick off a major redevelopment in 1996 of all 65 units. First Niagara Bank financed the deal. HDC teamed up with Enterprise Social Investment Corporation on a low-income tax credit deal. Enterprise signed up as the majority owner of the Hill Associates LP, which technically owned the properties; HDC and its affiliate, Hill Housing Corporation, served as the not-for-profit partner that facilitated the tax credits and managed the properties.
Amid financial troubles, HDC in 2010 backed out of a deal with the city to revamp six houses on Vernon Street; read more about the organization’s struggles here. The organization filed paperwork to officially dissolve the business in December 2010, according to aldermanic President Jorge Perez, who represents the Hill neighborhood and served as a member of HDC’s board.
HDC “went out of business like many other non-profits went out of business in hard economic times,” he said. The official dissolution may take a couple of years to be finalized, he said.
An HDC affiliate owned and managed the 65 apartments. It struggled to keep up with mortgage payments for two reasons, Johnson said. First, there were requirements on how cheap the rent had to be. Second, there were no federal subsidies to help balance the books. The leases weren’t generating enough income to pay the debt service and operating costs, Johnson said.
“Income requirements without any subsidy put the properties in a state of financial distress,” he said. “The situation got worse. Ultimately, the bank decided to take action.”
Thomas MacMillan Photo
Mosquera.
First Niagara Bank was about to foreclose on the properties last year when Mutual Housing stepped in to buy the mortgages in March of 2011, according to director Mosquera.
Mosquera said the properties suffered from “a lot of deferred maintenance.”
At least a third of the apartments were vacant when Mutual Housing took them over, according to Johnson.
“There were many challenges” with the homes, Mosquera said. In some cases, Mutual Housing had to evict squatters. In other cases, “people left the units empty and they were vandalized and the copper was stolen.”
Tenant Tonda Spell, who walks with a cane and suffers from HIV and epilepsy, recalled taking her trash down her back stairs one day last June. The third-to-last step slipped out from under her feet and sent her sprawling onto her back. She said she lay on the ground for an hour and a half before she could summon help.
Mutual Housing fixed the step in August after she fell a second time, she said.
Spell admitted causing some damage to the home: Her son kicked in the thin, plyboard door on the second-floor porch when he forgot his keys, leaving them without a porch door for a month. She also admitted withholding rent because she couldn’t afford the three-bedroom home on her disability income; she plans to move out soon.
Mosquera said Mutual Housing did its best to board up the vacant homes and make emergency repairs, but “we do need more resources to fix those buildings.”
The vacant first floor of 139 Rosette St. mirrors a vacant first-floor of 140 Rosette, both inherited by MHA.
Johnson said the city is now working with Mutual Housing on a redevelopment plan. The plan is to apply to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) for project-based Section 8 vouchers for some of the homes. The city and Enterprise, the investment company that still owns a majority share in the buildings, have agreed to each kick in at least $200,000 to pay to fix up the homes, Johnson said.
He said the city’s contribution would be paid for with federal money.
The first step of the process, a capital needs assessment, was completed in the past week, said Mosquera.
“Now that we have the information of how much money each building is going to need,” she said, the plan is to start fixing them up “in a couple of months.”
Mosquera said of the 15 homes, four are completely vacant at the moment. Those are “are being prepared to undergo significant rehabilitation in the coming months.”
In addition to the Hill project, Mutual Housing plans to turn 10 vacant and blighted properties and 10 vacant lots in Fair Haven into 44 apartments, she added.
Johnson said the city “supports Mutual Housing’s efforts to stabilize and improve the properties” in the Hill.
“They’ve done the best to their ability,” he said. “We always want to get things done faster,” but the city recognizes how long it takes to fulfill state and federal requirements.
Johnson said with Mutual Housing’s new efforts, the homes will turn “from a good story, to a bad story, to a good story again.”
“What Hill Development Corporation did was great for the neighborhood,” Johnson said. “It was unfortunate what happened, but the fact that there was a non-profit partner that was committed to affordable housing was a good thing.”
Now that Mutual Housing has stepped in, he said, “we look forward to making those houses available to residents again.”
Meanwhile, LCI neighborhood specialist Chris Soto (pictured) has been keeping an eye on the properties — as well as several other abandoned homes on Rosette and nearby streets. He’s pictured outside a city-owned property, 160 Rosette, where squatters have been making trouble. Someone this week left an empty box from a 30-pack of Genesee Cream Ale on the porch.
Last week Soto found himself tearing down green flyers that had been stapled onto the boarded up homes. The flyers appear to be placed there by Occupy New Haven as part of a citywide effort to highlight blight.
“Un-occupied. What does this cost the City of New Haven? A sense of community,” the flyers read.
“I’m a little upset that someone just went and posted the obvious on my houses,” Soto said, “though I completely understand the point they’re trying to make.”
700 boarded up houses in New Haven. 700 people spent at least one night homeless last year in NH. One house per person.
The city needs to hold these owners (flippers???) responsible.
Banks in Cincinnati have started demolishing houses to avoid paying taxes (we in CT pay on sq footage of livable area).
The city needs to demand that any banks who demo houses need to rebuild at or above the same sq footage.
Also the city needs to send a message to banks that foreclosure eviction is not welcomed in our city.
A moratorium on all foreclosure evictions must be put into place.
Housing is a right AND a responsibility. We are sick of these "groups" buying up houses and abandoning them for whatever reason.