Public Housing Evictions On The Rise

Ronisha Baskin didn’t know how to tell her 14-year-old daughter that the Housing Authority of New Haven had evicted them. ​“I didn’t even know what to say.” She could not find the words to explain that a lack of housing options would force them to split up across different cities.

After their June eviction from the Essex Townhouses on Quinnipiac Avenue, Baskin crashed at her mom’s apartment in Waterbury with her four-year-old son, braving the family conflicts she knew would await her. She sent her teenage daughter, who still had a few weeks left of eighth grade, to live with an aunt related to her ex-partner in New Haven. 

Public housing evictions are rising in New Haven after a pandemic-era lull. In the first half-year of 2023, the public housing agency has filed more rent-related eviction lawsuits — 50 — than in all of 2019, when it filed 42 cases. This year, nine Housing Authority tenants had to leave their homes due to unpaid rent, either through a summary process eviction or a stipulation in which they agreed to move out.

Non-payment cases have affected 5 percent of all 1,022 Housing Authority of New Haven (HANH) households this year. The agency reported that among those families, 29 have received rent assistance from the state’s UniteCT program — an ​“eviction prevention fund” that recently changed to only serve tenants who have already been summoned to eviction court. (These statistics do not include tenants who rent from HANH’s non-profit affiliate, 360 Management.)

As a government agency providing federally-funded affordable housing, the Housing Authority primarily serves very low-income families. Rent is typically set at 30 percent of a family’s income. According to the agency’s director, Karen DuBois-Walton, the average rent among Housing Authority tenants is about $250 per month — less than a quarter of New Haven’s federally-determined Fair Market Rent of $1,186 for a one-bedroom.

Public housing tenants who fall behind on rent to the point of facing eviction are typically earning poverty wages or surviving on social security. For some fighting to stay in their homes, daily routines are made up of painful financial calculations. Internet service gets canceled. So does summer camp. Car notes go unpaid. Meals turn into bowls of dry cereal, if anything at all. 

In a local housing market distinguished by very low vacancy rates, tenants who get evicted often struggle to find another place to go. And when their landlord is a major government system serving the lowest-income city residents, evicted tenants are left with even fewer options. 

Baskin struggled to tell her daughter about the eviction because she felt ashamed. ​“Me and my kids are very close,” she said. ​“They are so used to me being supermom.” After agreeing to a ​“final stay” stipulation that required her to leave at the start of June, Baskin arranged for her daughter to live elsewhere without quite explaining why.

Baskin finally broached the topic with her daughter. ​“She keeps saying, ​‘Mom. It’s all right. You’re not less than,’ ” Baskin recounted. ​“I said ​‘I’m sorry. I don’t even know what I did wrong, but I’m sorry.’ ”

The loss of their home has pulled the three-person family apart into different cities. ​“It’s changed a lot. My life. My kids’ life,” Baskin said. ​“It messed my mental health up a lot.” 

Having been kicked out, the family tumbled into a new depth of uncertainty about where they would find their next home — and how long they’d go without one. 

Housing Authority: "We Do Not Take It Lightly"

“We realize that one of the most significant things you can do in people’s lives is to end their rental agreement,” said Karen DuBois-Walton, the president of Elm City Communities (an umbrella organization including the Housing Authority and its non-profit development and property management offshoots.) 

“We do not take that lightly. We do use it very sparingly. And we execute only after having tried a lot, a lot, a lot of things, to help people keep their family intact in housing that they can afford.”

Although DuBois-Walton said that the Housing Authority could not comment on specific eviction cases, she and four other Elm City Communities staff members provided general context for the agency’s approach to evictions in an interview.

They said that before an eviction is initiated, Housing Authority staff members reach out to a tenant who’s fallen behind on rent with letters and face-to-face check-ins. They connect tenants with Elm City Communities’ Community and Economic Development (CED) department, which can connect tenants to social services, provides financial literacy education, and small grants.

Tenants who owe back-rent can form a repayment agreement with the Housing Authority, the staff members said. They can also request a grievance hearing before an independent arbiter. 

While the Elm City Communities staffers said there is no specific amount of debt that would trigger an eviction process, they said they try to file court cases relatively early, before the debt accumulates. Most of those cases do not lead to an actual eviction. 

“You gotta work kinda hard” to get kicked out of public housing, DuBois-Walton argued. 

“It takes quite a bit of time to get there and a lot of missed opportunities that residents did not take advantage of,” added Elm City Communities Executive Vice President Shenae Draughn.

Tenants who are evicted with outstanding debt to any public housing agency in the country are automatically placed on a federal database, preventing them from renting from a housing authority in another town. Those tenants are typically unable to afford a majority of housing options in their area.

“We work really hard not to evict families, because we recognize that we are a big part of the safety net, and if families can’t make it with us, there are not great options for them beyond that,” said DuBois-Walton.

“My heart breaks for anybody that’s able to not be here,” she added. ​“I worry about where they end up.”

Advice To Tenants: Ask For Help

DuBois-Walton said that the rise in public housing eviction lawsuits this year can be attributed in part to a transition away from more lenient pandemic policies.

In July 2020, early on in the Covid-19 pandemic, the Housing Authority canceled rent for the month. In the early stages of the pandemic, federal and state moratoriums prevented most rent-related evictions from April 2020 until July 2021. 

“When the moratorium ended, we took a while to ease families back in” to the responsibility of paying rent, said DuBois-Walton.

The Housing Authority continued to pause rent-related evictions for over a year. The agency filed no rent-related eviction lawsuits in 2020 and 2021, and seven in 2022. (According to the Housing Authority, none of those seven cases resulted in someone having to leave their home.) 

Now, the Housing Authority is back to filing eviction cases for past-due rent — and has seen a jump in eviction lawsuits compared to before the pandemic. Since 2019, the Housing Authority has reduced the number of housing units it oversees by over a third, from 1,705 to 1022, primarily transferring those units to non-profit ownership under the Elm City Communities umbrella.

Yet in the last six months, court records show that the Housing Authority has filed 50 eviction cases — more than the 42 it reports having filed in all of 2019. 

One reason for the uptick from 2019 is that the state’s primary rental assistance fund, UniteCT, is now requiring that all recipients have an active eviction court case in order to receive rental aid. According to DuBois-Walton, 29 households — over half of the Housing Authority families who have faced an eviction case this year — have received UniteCT aid.

Meanwhile, the pandemic’s effect on the economy and on mental and physical health continues to affect New Haven, especially families living in poverty.

“We’re gonna see the impact of the pandemic ripple out for the next few years,” said DuBois-Walton.

Karen Coleman, the Housing Authority property manager who oversaw Baskin’s apartment complex, said that the most common reasons why tenants have fallen behind on rent relate to employment changes and substance use disorder. In the latter cases, Coleman said, she refers tenants to CED’s services.

Monica R. Wolfork, another Housing Authority property manager, added that ​“some of our clients appear to be depressed.” She recalled that during some recent pre-scheduled home inspections, after knocking loudly and announcing her presence, she’d encounter tenants under bundles of blankets who would ​“cover their heads back up,” seemingly unable to get dressed or interact with the officials.

“We make sure to make those referrals,” Wolfork said. ​“Eviction is definitely the last thing we look at.”

DuBois-Walton said she suspects that tenants in dire poverty decide to prioritize paying for urgent necessities like healthcare over rent because the Housing Authority is relatively flexible compared to debt collectors for other bills.

She and Draughn urged Housing Authority tenants to reach out for help as soon as they expect to fall behind on rent.

“Don’t be afraid to approach us,” said DuBois-Walton. ​“It is so much easier to do a repayment agreement for $500 than for $5,000. Work with us.”

Bureaucracy And "Struggle Meals"

When Jannie Ellison received an eviction notice from her public housing apartment on Lodge Street, she tried to reach out to the staff members she knew at the Housing Authority for assistance. She said that when she asked her property manager for assistance, she was told that there were no other resources to help her. (“I won’t comment on specific cases,” DuBois-Walton wrote in an email, ​“but our team works hard to assist with UNITE CT and other rent payment resources.”)

It would take months of bureaucracy before Ellison received rent assistance and reached a repayment plan with the Housing Authority that allowed her to stay in her apartment. Throughout the wait, Housing Authority staff and outside social services sent her from person to person, agency to agency, and back again. Reading back through emails and text messages, Ellison compared her search for help to ​“playing ring around the rosie.”

In the meantime, Ellison faced excruciating choices about which basic needs to pay for and braved hard conversations with her children. 

Ellison first moved into her apartment, a townhouse in the Westville Manor complex, in 2013. She arrived straight from a domestic violence shelter. Her monthly rent was set at $7. ​“When I first came here, I had absolutely nothing,” she said.

The day Ellison moved in, she recalled, someone in the complex got shot. The incident worried her. She would come to learn that shootings just like it were a fairly common occurrence in the West Rock housing complex. The sound of bullets is ​“traumatizing.” She does not let her two kids, a ten-year-old and 14-year-old, ride their bikes in the area. She tells them to be careful when they take out the trash.

Ellison found work in a variety of group homes, where she helped to take care of developmentally disabled adults. Her rent increased to about $500 per month. She eventually got a job as a program manager at a group home, a supervising position that paid her a base salary of about $20,000 a year, paid in $850 checks every two weeks. As a manager, she said she did not receive priority for overtime hours. When she could work extra time, she would earn about $3,000 per month.

At first, the Housing Authority raised her rent to $1,000 a month — about a third of what she made when working overtime, but over half of the salary she was guaranteed. 

After a chain of emails and text messages with multiple staff members, Ellison met with the property manager in person. She negotiated the rent down to about $800 per month — which was still nearly an entire two-week paycheck. ​“I can try,” she remembers saying to her property manager, ​“but this is my whole check. I’m not gonna have nothing for two weeks. Then everything’s going to get behind.”

When her rent bill arrived every month, Ellison said, she paid what she could afford. Her rental debt accumulated to $5,907 by January 2023 — prompting the notice to quit at her door. By the time her case was resolved, she owed the Housing Authority $9,147.

Ellison did not find help with the Housing Authority. She turned to the Community Action Agency of New Haven, where a case worker suggested that she apply for CASTLE, the city’s eviction prevention fund. She said she never heard back from that program. Eventually, she returned to the Community Action Agency, where she learned about UniteCT. 

She tried to apply for the state-issued funds, only to learn that she needed an active eviction case filed in the court system in order to receive assistance. This shocked Ellison. ​“I’m scared,” she thought. ​“I don’t want to get that far.” She had no guarantee that the program would approve her application down the road. But she was out of ideas. 

Ellison waited for a court summons and then submitted her application for UniteCT. It took months for the program to issue a ​“pre-approval” of her application, let alone a definitive ​“yes.”

Meanwhile, in April, Ellison was placed on unpaid leave after making budget-related mistakes at work. Her income plummeted to zero, but she could not qualify for unemployment until she was officially fired. 

She applied for food stamps, which took weeks to process. She picked up UberEats jobs and doubled down on training to become a truck driver, which she knew was a more lucrative field.

She sat down with her kids and told them, ​“We might have to go to the shelter.” She did not want them to be blindsided if that day ever came.

On May 23, Ellison reached a stipulation with the Housing Authority in her eviction case. indicating that her rent would be paid off in full by UniteCT. That week, she reported her job loss to the Housing Authority, dropping off a letter at the agency’s office. It took a month for the agency to confirm that her rent would be lowered, weeks after she received a rent bill for $810 in June.

After a period of unemployment, Ellison is now training with First Student to work as a bus driver. But the new job and paid-off back rent are far from portals to immediate financial stability. ​“I’m in, like, $20,000 debt,” Ellison said with a half-laugh. 

Ellison got rid of the family’s WiFi and skimped on their phone bill ​“so we could eat.” She’s worried about how to pay tuition for her trucking classes. She’s behind on her car payments, too, and can only hope that she does not lose her vehicle.

The family can no longer afford their usual Wednesday outings to McDonald’s. They could not afford the food they needed at home. For dinner, Ellison serves plain noodles and dry cereal, her go-to ​“struggle meals,” more frequently than ever. She skips some meals altogether so that her kids can go a little less hungry.

Three miles away, at the towering George Crawford Manor complex on Park Street, Jonathan Stewart spoke of a similar financial stress that lingered after his public housing eviction case was resolved. A hardware store worker, Stewart received an eviction notice from the Housing Authority in March. He had fallen $1,795 behind on rent. By mid-May, he reached a stipulation agreeing to pay $145 per month toward that debt, on top of his $945 monthly rent.

“It’s a tight budget right now,” Stewart said. ​“At the end of the day, I have no other where to go. I have no choice to abide by this court payment plan because they said if I’m late on it, they sending a state marshal to put me out. I’d rather just do what I gotta do and stick by it.”

Nowhere To Turn

Ronisha Baskin’s eviction was not her first time leaving home in a hurry. She used to escape from her family’s Ohio home as a teenager. ​“I used to run away a lot,” she said. 

She did not expect to go back to living with her mom 30 years later, in the condo her mom now owns in Waterbury, with only one of her two children. 

Her mom is ​“a great person,” Baskin said, but their relationship has long been turbulent. She sat in her mother’s kitchen, adorned with vintage-style stick-on tiles and filled with the faint scent of tobacco.

“We’re a lot alike,” her mom, Linda, said later. ​“We clash. She’s used to her own space.”

Baskin received her eviction notice in late January. By mid-March, per a ledger she keeps in a sprawling stack of documents, she owed $6,816 after going over two years without paying rent. 

She used to work as a private security guard for banks and office buildings, until a back injury sent her out of work in 2018. Since then, she has been trying to stretch the $1,200 per month she receives in Social Security Income to feed and clothe her fast-growing children. A domestic violence survivor, she is a single mom to her two kids, whose fathers are both incarcerated. A growing pile of ​“bills, bills, bills” began to dominate her life.

She also said in an interview and in court documents that she did not pay rent because a person she believed to be an inspector had deemed the apartment ​“unlivable.” She provided photographs of exposed wires in the apartment and claimed that there was mold in the apartment. (The Independent could not find a record of a city inspection in her home, and formal work orders associated with her apartment did not note the presence of mold.)

Baskin signed a stipulation in late May agreeing to leave by June. She did not realize she had the right to a lawyer in housing court. She felt intimidated by the legal professionals in the room. She believed she had no other choice but to agree to move out.

For over a month since leaving Essex Townhouses, Baskin has been searching for another place to crash. Despite calls to 211, she hasn’t had luck finding even a shelter that will take her in with her kids — let alone a real apartment.

Now that she’s indebted to the Housing Authority, she won’t be able to access public housing anywhere in the country until she pays off her old rent, and believes she’s lost her place on the wait list for federal Section 8 housing choice vouchers. She suspects that her eviction carries even more baggage in the eyes of other landlords because it is from a public housing agency.

Baskin’s teenage daughter, still living in New Haven, reacts to her mom’s anxiety with kindness. She seems to enjoy spending time with her cousin. 

Baskin’s four-year-old son, who stays with her in Waterbury, likes to play with the other kids in the complex. He runs up to hug everyone he meets. He gives his mom constant updates: ​“Mama, I drinking water.”

She responds with encouragement. ​“You drinking water for me? That’s my good boy. Thank you for drinking water for me.”

Baskin wants to show her kids that what’s happening to them matters. ​“I want them to fight for anything that’s not right in the world,” she said. ​“I have to try to put my word out there, my name out there. What’s going on out there. I want it to benefit everyone. I just need all the families who’s going through this…” She trailed off. ​“It’s not fair.”

See below for other recent stories about New Haven evictions:

• Landlord Letter Didn’t Spare Tenant
• Eviction Notice Served — By Whom, Exactly?
• Investor Tries Evictions First, Repairs Later
• Eviction Fallout Follows Ex-Newhallville Family
• Judge Rejects Newhallville Eviction
• Landlord’s Court No-Show Debated In Eviction
• Lenox Landlord Prevents Sheffield Eviction
• Senior Dodges 50-Cent Eviction
• Landlord Prevails After Eviction-Paper Delivery Debate
• Sunset Ridge Becomes Eviction Central
• Eviction OK’d After Restaurant Shutters
• Eviction OK’d After​“Lapse,” Rent Debate
• Mandy Leads Pack In Eviction Filings
• Eviction​“Answers” Reveal Renters’ Struggles
• Eviction Suit Caps Tenant’s Tough Run
• Investor Skips Hello, Starts Evictions
• Eviction Deal Drops $1 Ruling Appeal
• Judge’s $1 Award Tests Eviction Rule
• Court Case Q: Which​“Nuisances” Merit Eviction?
• ​“Or” Evictions OK’d
• Fair Rent: Dog’ll Cost You $150
• Rent Trumps Repairs In Elliot Street Eviction
• Though Sympathetic, Judge Blocks Eviction
• Family Feuds Fill Eviction Court
• Rent Help Winds Down. What’s Next?
• Eviction Withdrawn After Rent Catch-up
• Hill Landlord Prevails In​“Lapse” Eviction
• Landlord Thwarted 2nd Time On Eviction
• Church Evicting Parishioner
• Hard-Luck Tenant Hustles To Stay Put
• Eviction Of Hospitalized Tenant, 74, Upheld
•Judge Pauses Eviction Amid Rent-Relief Qs
• Amid Rise In​“Lapse-of-Time” Evictions, Tenant Wins 3‑Month Stay
• Leaky Ceiling, Rent Dispute Spark Eviction Case