Paul Bass Photo
The Sampedro/Cruz family, from left: Vanessa, Nancy, Betzabeth, Virginia, Alejandro, Jessica.
Betzabeth Sampedro will get her own room — and her mechanic father Alejandro will spend some of the money he saved up to renovate a neighborhood eyesore — now that the city has picked winning bidders for two abandoned houses.
New Haven government’s Livable City Initiative (LCI) held auctions in July for the trashed, empty houses it had seized at 55 Dickerman St. in the Dixwell neighborhood and 129 Clay St. in Fair Haven.
LCI officials hope these will be the first two success stories in an aggressive program to take control of abandoned, foreclosed-upon properties throughout town and put them in the hands of people who can revive them. (Click here to read about the effort, announced in June.)
Several people bid on each of the two houses. The city chose Alejandro Sampedro’s family to buy 55 Dickerman for $8,000 and an active Fair Haven home-renovator, Oren Bitman, to buy a former crack house at 129 Clay for $7,500, according to LCI Deputy Director Frank D’Amore. Both were the high bidders, D’Amore said. D’Amore was preparing paperwork to send to the winners this week.
Bitman’s partner, Gil Marshak, said Thursday that Bitman was out of the country this week and that neither had learned about winning the auction. They plan to fix up 129 Clay and rent out the apartments, Marshak said. Click here and here to read previous stories about their work.
Sampedro’s family — they live across the street from 55 Dickerman in a crowded third-floor apartment — hadn’t heard about winning the auction either, when informed by a reporter. They were overjoyed.
55 Dickerman, interior view.
Sampedro, a 36-year-old Mexican immigrant, said he has saved $50,000 over the years as an automotive mechanic so he could buy his family a home. He plans to spend much of that money making all three floors of ripped-apart 55 Dickerman inhabitable for his family; plus he plans to call on family friends to donate their labor. Because it’s a big job. Click here to take a look at the devoured carcass of a property as revealed in a July walk-through.
Sampedro’s 8‑year-old daughter Betzabeth is overjoyed, too. She’ll get her own bedroom. She now shares with 7‑year-old sister Nancy.
And Sampedro’s wife, Virginia Cruz, who’s also 36 and from Mexico, is happy she’ll have a safe place for her kids to play in the backyard of 55 Dickerman. They can’t use the backyard of their rented home right now. She doesn’t like the idea of her four kids playing in the street.
“It makes sense” to sell the family the house, LCI’s D’Amore said. “They live there. They have the means. They want to live there.” And Bitman, he said, does a good job renovating houses and then holding on to them rather than flipping them.
LCI is in the process of preparing a bunch more seized properties for sale, D’Amore said. He didn’t have a firm number. Overall it is targeting some 150 long-abandoned vacant homes blighting neighborhoods across town.
This is one of the best news stories I have read all year.
While efforts like these are appreciated, this should also be a reminder that very little has been done about the hundreds of other, foreclosed and blighted properties that continue to destroy our neighborhoods.
If blight and foreclosures were truly an issue of concern to our city and state government, they would have been addressed many, many years ago.
Unfortunately, since this issue concerns neighborhoods and families who actually live here, and not the suburban-based union workforce that controls the political system, it is not a priority for the city.
Instead, it seems our administration and Board of Aldermen is focusing on creating hundreds of millions of dollars worth of NEW public buildings and new "pipeline" programs for unions. We will able to afford to maintain none of these (as we can't even come close to maintaining our existing buildings, which sit empty 80% of the time), and, even worse, they will produce no measurable impacts. To pay for them, services that actually help the people who live here -- like transportation investments, libraries, parks, open schools in summers, street maintenance, youth at work programs, and housing -- are shrinking, or cut entirely.