Tenant Leader’s Work Pays Off

Brenda Harris fought for safer, higher-quality homes throughout her 50 years living in the once-dilapidated housing complex known as Farnam Courts. On Tuesday, she helped unveil the results of her advocacy: about 200 gleaming new townhouse-style apartments and community spaces in the second phase of a complex reborn as ​“Mill River Crossing.”

Harris has lived at the complex under both titles, on the block between Hamilton Street, Franklin Street, and Grand Avenue, since she was a baby. She recalled decades of fending off cockroaches and rodents and witnessing neighbors develop asthma from apartment mold. Tenants also reported unrelenting crime in the decades before the new Mill River Crossing renovations occurred.

“It was not a place for people to raise their children,” recalled U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, who grew up in the Wooster Square neighborhood and whose parents advocated for change at Farnam Courts.

But Farnam also had an organized tenants’ council, which Harris would come to lead herself. The council pressed city and housing authority leaders to act on their living conditions, and convened regularly from 2013 to 2019 for hours at a time to pore over architectural designs and provide input into the new plans.

​“We fought day and night,” Harris said. ​“I’m just so happy. I can’t believe our dream finally came true.”

Harris now lives in the ​“Phase 1” development of Mill River Crossing — a five-story, 94-unit apartment building facing Grand Avenue that opened its doors in 2018.

She arrived at Tuesday’s celebration led in the 93-degree heat by Elm City Communities/New Haven Housing Authority Director Karen DuBois-Walton, and attended by families of a number of individuals remembered for their contributions to the life of Farnam Courts/Mill River Crossing. The group convened to officially recognize the second and final phase of Mill River Crossing’s development, completed just weeks ago (except for a soon-to-be-built playground in the courtyard.)

The new Mill River Crossing is a public-private partnership developed by the Glendower Group, the nonprofit arm of the city’s housing authority. A majority of the units there are affordable for families at 25, 50, and 60 percent Area Median Income (AMI). (A family of four at 50 percent AMI earns $56,300 per year.)

Mill River Crossing also includes a number of market-rate units — marking a shift in philosophy of affordable housing development since the original Farnam Courts was built.

Farnam Courts had been one of the oldest public housing projects in New Haven. It was built in 1941 as veterans returned from World War II and Black Americans moved northwards during the Great Migration. At the time, the prevailing practice in American public housing development had been to ​“cram people [seeking affordable housing] together in one place,” said DeLauro.

The new Mill River Crossing, by contrast, is a mixed-income development. ​“Phase 2” of Mill River Crossing comprises 170 affordable units and 31 market rate units. The new market rate units were in high demand and have all been filled up, according to Ed LaChance, Glendower’s vice president.

In total, the second phase of apartments comprises 64 two-bedrooms, 38 three-bedrooms, and nine four-bedrooms. More than $130 million in private capital and federal funding paid for this phase of the project, including demolition, road construction, and electrical work outside of the apartments themselves.

The redevelopment process entailed demolishing the existing Farnam Courts building, which had been set back from the street behind Ted DeLauro Park, and rebuilding the five-story high rise right up against the sidewalk, moving DeLauro Park back to become a courtyard.

Behind the park, a glass-walled community center now stands, with offices and a kitchen space that will soon house social services, Elm City Communities offices, and computers for residents, according to DuBois-Walton. And the rest of the block is filled with rows of new multi-story, townhouse-style apartments, each with massive closets and spacious kitchens.

One of Harris’s and the tenant council’s requests was to name the streets running through the development in memory of people who were instrumental to the Farnam Courts/Mill River Crossing community. Those people included former Mayor John DeStefano Jr., Rosa DeLauro, architect Regina Winters, and the late maintenance worker Al Bell and housing authority leader Sheila Allen-Bell.

Harris made sure that one tenant in particular was remembered with a street name: Annie Sellers, a fierce advocate for change who ran the tenant council before passing the baton to Harris, and who died in 2009 at the age of 103.

Sellers’ family, including her daughter Viola Nelsen, arrived at the celebration to remember Sellers’ work. ​“I think it’s so nice,” Nelsen said of the renovation. ​“She would have been so proud.“

Glendower and the housing authority’s property management arm, 360 Management, are still seeking a business to fill retail space in the front.

The new units hold up to the ​“highest environmental standards and the highest housing quality standards,” said DuBois-Walton.

When it comes to new housing developments, ​“I always think, ​‘Would I want to live here?’ ” said Mayor Justin Elicker. ​“I would love to see my kids playing in this field, meeting their neighbors.”

Living in roomy, storage-filled, newly renovated apartments is more than just a matter of functionality, housing authority leaders explained. It’s a matter of respect for the people living in Mill River Crossing.

“Beauty creates dignity for people who deserve it,” said Erik Clemons, the chair of the housing authority’s Board of Commissioners.