Homeless Hotel Plan Scrapped. What’s Next?

Mark Colville serves a hungry passerby named Michelle his homemade pasta and meatballs during a recent meeting of the Unhoused Activist Community Team at 266 State St.

Antar Adams: Done searching for housing. “All the low-income spots are taken."

A year after a tentative plan to convert a Long Wharf hotel into housing for the homeless fell apart, the city is considering a second attempt to invest federal pandemic-relief dollars towards stable long-term shelter for the unhoused.

Meanwhile, those with nowhere to sleep but the streets, bracing for the start of winter, are upping their demands on local government for safe places to stay, public bathrooms and city-funded storage units.

With federal aid in hand and an understanding of quality housing’s role in promoting public health, New Haven followed a slate of other cities in the early months of the Covid-19 outbreak in closing homeless shelters and relocating the city’s most vulnerable into hotels. 

The Elicker Administration and the local homelessness services nonprofit Columbus House even considered purchasing and fully converting a hotel into housing to protect people well past the pandemic. 

But a tentative plan to turn Long Wharf’s 112-room Village Suites hotel into supportive shelter and affordable housing failed to pan out. That extended-stay hotel is instead on track to become 112 new apartments, with 5 percent reserved at below-market rates per the city’s inclusionary zoning ordinance. 

Meanwhile, as the one-time bounty of pandemic-relief aid gets allocated by the Elicker Administration and the Board of Alders for a mix of initiatives related to housing, vocational technical education, youth engagement, business support, climate resiliency, police surveillance, and fire truck and hydrant repairs, the amount of federal money available to put unhoused people in four-walled rooms is beginning to dry up. 

According to United Way Senior Director of Financial Stability Kelly Fitzgerald, the Greater New Haven region currently relies on just four shelters that follow a coordinated access model, a streamlined system to get those with nowhere else to go into beds across the community that they can return to each night. 

Those shelters include Columbus House, Martha’s Place, Beth-El Center and Spooner House, the first two of which are located within New Haven’s city limits. 

Taken together, those four shelters provide the region with a total of 175 beds for those experiencing homelessness. 

That represents a significant drop from the 285 beds available in pre-pandemic years — a result of the closure of another New Haven-based shelter, Immanuel Baptist Church’s Emergency Shelter Management Services, as well as Columbus House’s move to establish greater social distancing, and in turn lower capacity, in one of its two shelters.

In an effort to mitigate the impact of that loss of shelter, city Community Services Administrator Mehul Dalal said that city government is focusing on boosting the number of warming centers, or places where people can take refuge from the cold. Those centers are not necessarily equipped with cots or storage spots. 

Fitzgerald said that pre-pandemic New Haven formally funded one or two warming centers. This year, New Haven and the United Way of Greater New Haven are funding four warming centers in the city.

Fitzgerald also noted that warming centers can only take in around half the capacity they they could in years prior in an effort to keep safe distancing and prevent further spread of Covid-19.

Columbus House CEO Margaret Middleton said New Haven’s housing crisis is centered around a lack of apartments priced at or below 30 percent of the area median income (AMI) as well as a lack of shelters with cots that you can reliably come back to.” 

I really applaud the city for paying attention to the issue and being great partners for making sure we can get people inside,” Middleton said in a recent interview. But warming shelters are not emergency shelters.”

So Long, Long Wharf

Juan Salas-Romer, owner of the Village Suites, which, after serving the homeless during peak Covid-19, is now on track to become apartments.

One city project that might have helped homeless New Haveners stay safe this winter was a soft plan to convert Long Wharf’s Village Suites, an extended stay hotel, into at least 112 residences, a third of which would have been free, transitional shelter housing and another two-thirds of which would have been low-cost rentals.

At the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, the city used Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) aid to pay the hotel to use its rooms as substitute homeless shelter space. 

Read more about that initiative here, which allowed for Columbus House, a nonprofit focused on eliminating homelessness that operates two shelters by Ella Grasso Boulevard, to temporarily close down its facilities during the height of Covid-19 and relocate residents into individual hotel rooms. The city stopped renting hotel rooms at the Village Suites in March, when funding for the program reportedly ran out.

The success of that hoteling program prompted a new idea: The state expressed interest in purchasing the property for Columbus House, which would have left its shelter space and set aside 40 rooms to serve a total of 80 individuals while also creating 72 affordable units.

Paul Bass file photo

City social services director Mehul Dalal in August 2021.

We were very excited about that potential plan,” Dalal, who helms City Hall’s social services department, recently told the Independent. In the last two years we’ve had a pretty generous amount of federal resources that came through the state that really carried us through” the pandemic. In an ideal world, we would’ve continued that aid.”

According to Dalal, the state ordered appraisals of the property. Those appraisals found that the hotel was worth significantly less than the seller’s asking price. The state had some governing rules regarding what they could purchase in terms of how far above appraisal they could actually offer for the deal,” Dalal summarized. It went on for a little while to see if the appraisal might get closer to the asking price or the asking price might come down,” he said. Ultimately, the idea was a no-go.

Asked about his perspective on the possible sale of the hotel to the state for a longer-term use as shelter housing, Village Suites owner Salas-Romer said there is nothing on the table regarding this, nor was there something concrete in the past as far as I know.” Now, Salas-Romer is working towards converting the hotel into primarily market-rate apartments.

File photo

Columbus House CEO Margaret Middleton.

We tried really hard because we thought 112 units of deeply affordable housing would be an amazing thing to add to New Haven, but it didn’t happen,” Columbus House CEO Middleton told the Independent. You can put a tremendous amount of energy into trying to secure a location and then it doesn’t work out,” she said. She added that Columbus House is now working on tentative plans to convert two Middletown properties, including a hotel, into affordable housing and shelter space.

Prior to the pandemic, winter emergency shelter was not funded by the state of Connecticut at all,” Middleton noted. Thanks to the pandemic and an influx of federal funding,” she said, interventions like city-funded hotel rooms have come into play as life-saving services” supplementing a pre-pandemic landscape of extremely bare bone operations that took place in church basements.”

Mark Wilson, the manager of neighborhood and community development at the city’s Livable City Initiative (LCI), further mourned the loss of an opportunity to address fundamental housing rights during the pandemic during a recent meeting of the city’s Affordable Housing Commission. 

Most homeless folks were housed at the New Haven suites, but that is no longer available,” Wilson said during that late October commission meeting. They didn’t gain anything over those two years and they’re just back where they were… we could’ve come out the end of this with something.” 

Dalal, on the other hand, said of the coming winter that In terms of keeping people safe from the elements and all, I think we’ll be okay.” He estimated that the city’s four warming shelters should be able to collectively serve around 150 people daily.

He said that although the city’s pot of FEMA money has run out, the city still has $4.6 million from the federal Department of Housing of Urban Development (HUD) specifically tagged to use for building up capacity in the homelessness services system.” 

Dalal said the city is currently in a community engagement process” to collect feedback about how to use those funds. The ultimate goal is to put that money towards building a sustainable shelter model with permanent rooms for those who need them.

The Elicker Administration’s current approach to homelessness services should also soon receive a public hearing at City Hall, per a request submitted on Thursday by Westville Alder and Health and Human Services Committee Chair Darryl Brackeen, Jr. That legislative communication calls for a workshop to receive and review an update on annual homelessness strategies and initiatives, and departmental updates on the effectiveness of existing programs and initiatives made to solve this important social problem.”

In Lieu Of Housing...

Donna Abate: "Experiencing homelessness is rough."

Meanwhile, some New Haveners without homes have been working on putting together a list of more immediate demands for the Elicker Administration as they continue to make their beds each night on the city’s streets.

On Election Day, members of a new organization called the Unhoused Activist Community Team (U‑ACT) rallied outside of City Hall requesting an end to evictions of homeless individuals from public land. They also advocated for public bathrooms on the Green and throughout New Haven’s neighborhoods, and city-funded storage spaces where those experiencing homelessness could keep their belongings. Read about that demonstration here.

Antar Adams, a member of U‑ACT who has been living on the streets for at least four years and who has been sleeping on Union Avenue since April, said he’s not looking for housing.”

Adams, 43, shared that he’s given up that search because the odds are stacked against him. With on and off work opportunities at minimum wage jobs, he said it’s been impossible to find an apartment as most landlords require tenants to have proof of an annual income at least three times greater than the cost of their yearly rent. All the low-income spots are taken,” he said.

He added that that he distrusts the verification process used by shelters to determine who is deserving of a cot in their space. It’s kind of crooked,” he claimed, reasoning that he’d rather not subject himself to yet another unpredictable selection process.

I called 211 the other day and was told that Connecticut is not a right to shelter’ space,” he said. Apparently you do not have the right to safe, warm shelter — or safe, cold shelter.” In other words, completing an assessment distributed by the Coordinated Access Network to identify need does not guarantee anyone a bed throughout the region — especially as New Haven and neighboring towns struggle with a new dearth of shelter spaces.

In the meantime, Adams said he rolls out a thick yoga mat” on Union Avenue each night and then wakes up at 6:45 each morning to head to the daily drop-in center Fellowship Place, where he can get a shower, do some laundry, and eat breakfast.

For those without a spot at a place like Fellowship, day to day is even harder.

Donna Abate, 50, said she typically goes to a McDonald’s bathroom and uses sink water to clean up before work each day. 

Abate is one of around seven people living in a tent in the backyard of the Amistad Catholic Worker community in the Hill. That’s the home of Mark Colville, a lead organizer for U‑ACT, who has divided his and his neighboring daughter’s yard into informal properties for anyone who needs a space to sleep and live. While the first floor of the Amistad House undergoes renovations, those living on the property are without an indoor shower.

It’s just outrageous to get an apartment nowadays. You can’t even get a studio. If I wasn’t able to stay in Mark’s backyard, I don’t know what I would do,” Abate said. She said she found herself in a tent with her boyfriend and four-year old dachshund, who she calls hot dog” or Tiny T,” just a few months back after getting evicted from her apartment in Ansonia. 

We stay under the covers a lot,” Abate said. She teared up thinking of her dog — she’s not used to this either. I wonder what she’s thinking when she’s freezing!”

She said she typically wakes up around 6 a.m. and is able to grab some coffee from Colville’s first floor before starting a shift as a driver for handicapped kids.”

I have no hours at work and the very little money that I make, it just goes,” she said. 

Rather than looking for an apartment, Abate said she’s searching for a cheap car that would offer some form of shelter — one that’s potentially more stable than a monthly rental.

But in the meantime, she said, those on the streets are hoping for the basic demands requested by U‑ACT. Public bathrooms and showers, she said, are particularly necessary public health measures.

I was used to a shower everyday, and a bathroom available 24/7,” she remembered. After losing her home, she quickly developed a urinary tract infection — which was made more painful without an accessible bathroom or health insurance. It took weeks, she said, to finally get a prescription and an antibiotic with the help of Cornell Scott-Hill Health Center’s healthcare program for those affected by homelessness.

Of the past few months, she concluded: Experiencing homelessness is a little rough.”

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