Alexandra Martinakova Photos
Madelyne at the front door of her new apartment ...
... at the now-half-occupied Curtis Cofield Estates.
A welcome mat and a single small sunflower in a bright yellow pot sit in front of Madelyne’s new apartment at 691 Legion Ave., where she has been living alongside her three children for the last few months.
Her rental is a part of the newly opened Curtis Cofield II Estates — a 56-unit, townhome-style affordable housing complex that celebrated a ribbon cutting this week atop land that once held a neighborhood demolished to make way for a mini-highway.
Madelyne, 36, works as a school bus driver in Bethany and used to live in Westville. She said during an interview Wednesday that she would pass the newly built Cofield Estates on her way to drop her kids off at school.
Once she saw the application for the new apartments open up, she immediately applied.
“It was a lot of paperwork,” she recalled. “They wanted a lot of information, a lot of bank statements, a lot of stuff to sign. I sent it off right away.”
Madelyne, who asked to use only her first name for this article, spoke highly of her new housing so far. She brought all of the furniture from her old house. Even though half of the apartments are still empty and waiting for their future tenants, Madelyne said that the community at the Cofield Estates has already started to form. A few doors already sport welcome mats and the patios are full of lawn chairs or bicycle stands.
“Everybody is getting to know each other, everybody’s very kind, a lot of kids,” she said. Her apartment is right in front of the newly built playground, so the laughter and squeals are a common background noise.
The complex of 11 townhouse-style buildings containing 56 new all-electric apartments sits atop a 4.3‑acre site bounded by Legion Avenue, Ella T. Grasso Boulevard, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, and Tyler Street in the West River neighborhood.
The apartments were built by the New York City-based NHP Foundation and the locally based West River Self Help Investment Plan (WRSHIP) for $20.2 million — a mix of private, city, state, and federal dollars. NHP Foundation Project Manager Micah Hunter told the Independent earlier this week that the apartment complex is currently half filled, and that they expect to get to 75 percent occupancy by the end of the month.
Six decades ago, the city plowed through the neighborhood to build a mini-highway — that the state gave up on in 2000.
Still, the Cofield Estates are surrounded by two wide two-lane roads, Legion and MLK, that often see heavy traffic.
Madelyne isn’t too worried about it, though. “I’m glad I’m on this side,” she laughed, referring to Legion Avenue. “There’s always traffic on the other side.”
Forty-four of the apartments are for renters making no more than 60 percent of the area median income, which currently translates to $55,740 for a family of two. Fourteen of those below-market-rent apartments are also “supportive housing” for formerly homeless tenants. The remaining 12 apartments are reserved for renters making no more than the area median income.
Madelyne said her monthly rent is $1,800, which for her is affordable.
During Monday’s ribbon cutting, Mayor Justin Elicker singled out the 14 units of supportive housing as “a big deal for us” as a city. “One of the challenges we see with a lot of our residents, particularly individuals struggling with homelessness, [is] it’s not just about affordability, it’s about making sure people have the supports around them so they don’t” get trapped in a cycle of being unhoused.
He said that “a handful of people” from the city-owned, hotel-turned-homeless shelter on Foxon Boulevard have already moved into apartments at Cofield Estates.
“We certainly jumped on the opportunity to refer appropriate people there,” said John Labieniec, the vice president of acute and forensic services at Continuum of Care, a local homelessness-services nonprofit that runs the Foxon Boulevard shelter for the city.
Labieniec didn’t know if anyone from the Foxon shelter has definitely moved in to Cofield Estates, but he did confirm that Continuum has referred a number of shelter residents.
“The face of the unhoused is not what it used to be. What you see on the streets, that doesn’t identify the entirety of the unhoused and people who struggle,” he added. “I think everybody deserves housing and it’s wonderful for our people to get connected there to a unit like that. That’s why we do what we do.”
The playground behind the Estates is fenced off, with rules displayed in front of the gate.