Paul Bass Photo
After 40 years of paying the bills, Bobby and Scarlett Ewing and their neighbors were ready to burn the mortgage and own their co-op complex. Instead the feds are about to foreclose and hand it to someone else.
The heartbreaking tale is unraveling on Edgewood Avenue. City officials are working with the federal government on what they hope will be a somewhat happy ending.
The Ewings live in the Dwight Co-Op Homes, a community of 80 duplex townhouses and efficiencies and inner courtyards across from the old Dwight School. They’ve lived there since 1969, when the complex opened, and when they and other families embarked on a social experiment: government-subsidized co-ops. Working families earning low incomes, screened by a board, obtained shares in the co-op for around $325. They got a 40-year government backed $1.492 million mortgage. They ran the place jointly and paid monthly fees to keep up the place. Similar co-ops sprang up throughout New Haven in the 1960s, part of the “Model City” period of antipoverty experimentation.
For decades Dwight Co-Op Homes stayed in good shape. Kids played basketball and parents held meetings and parties in a standalone community center.
“It was a good environment to bring kids up in. It’s enclosed; it was a lot of kids here. They had friends. Even though we lived in the ghetto it was safe. Families got along,” Scarlet, a retired bank employee, said in an interview in her home this week. She’s pictured above with Bobby, a retired corrections guard.
Over the last 10 years the co-op fell apart — figuratively and literally. The board started fighting, a lot. It fell behind in bills. First the complex fell into receivership to the gas company in 2007. It paid back the $150,000 owed in early 2009, but fell way behind in payments to the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), which holds the mortgage.
Meanwhile, no money was going to repairs. Roofs started leaking throughout the complex. Boilers broke. A series of hired managers came and went. The community center (pictured) became uninhabitable. The deferred maintenance tab reached the millions. Twenty of the 80 apartments went vacant, and remain unfilled, compounding the fiscal crisis.
On Feb. 27 William H. Melvin sent a letter from Atlanta to all the co-op’s families. William H. Melvin runs HUD’s multiple-family properties division. He informed the families that HUD has initiated foreclosure proceedings on their complex.
Melvin wrote that HUD plans a foreclosure sale to the highest bidder. However, it is also negotiating with New Haven government’s Livable City Initiative (LCI) for a possible sale before that.
Whoever ends up buying the complex will have to meet conditions, Melvin wrote: spending $5 million on repairs over 24 months; maintain the complex as affordable housing for at least 20 years; and offer relocation assistance to families who need to move to make way for repairs to their units.
“I’m optimistic” about reaching a deal, city Economic Development Administrator Kelly Murphy said Tuesday. She hopes LCI can buy the complex then turn it over to a local developer to keep on the families as renters in remodeled spaces. That happened last June with another failed co-op, Canterbury Gardens on Sherman Parkway. (Read about that here.) Murphy hopes to avoid the fate of two other New Haven co-ops, Ethan Gardens and Trade Union Plaza, which fell into private hands after foreclosures.
Hard bargaining with the feds remains to avoid the latter fate. Murphy said she feels to make the deal work, HUD needs to allow a mix of low-income and middle-income families, in order to provide enough of a revenue stream for ongoing maintenance. She also called the $5 million repair estimate low.
The co-op board’s president, Bobby Durham, said he wishes the families themselves could have found a way to keep the complex. He blames HUD for proceeding with the foreclosure.
“We had a mortgage for 40 years. In the 39th year, they want to put us in foreclosure. What kind of people are HUD? I don’t understand.”
What Went Wrong?
But to other families at the complex, like Althea Tyson, the fault lies with poor decisions made by the co-op itself.
Tyson (pictured), a retired City Hall worker, remembers the heyday of the Dwight Co-ops. She, too, was an original occupant. She served for years on the board. She raised a family there.
“This was the best co-op in the city,” Tyson said. “You had to be almost perfect to get in. We turned down a lot of people. If you had financial problems, nope. If you had bad kids — everybody who came in was screened.” She remembered decorative gas lamps in common areas (now gone) and families helping each other out.
These days Tyson keeps a stack of New Haven Registers in her kitchen. To sop up the water that pours through the wall when it rains. Her roof leaks.
“It’s falling apart,” she said of the complex. “It breaks my hear to see it going on like this.”
“The board really wasn’t functioning. This one was fighting with that one,” she said.
She, the Ewings, and another longtime occupant and former board member, Michael Shanklin, all identified the same source of the problem: The families running the complex through the board wouldn’t agree to up their monthly fees. That left no money to keep up with maintenance.
The Ewings pay $704 a month for their three-bedroom duplex, where they raised three children. They said they should be paying more like $850. “You go to New Haven and try to rent something, you know what I’m saying? You’ll pay $1,200,” Bobby Ewing said.
Michael Shanklin and his wife (an original co-op member) pay around $700 in monthly fees for their three-bedroom. They should be charged another $250, he said.
Board President Durham said he doesn’t know how the families lost their co-op. “I don’t look back,” he said. “What happened with past boards, I don’t know what. That’s the problem: People are always looking back, blaming this one and blaming that one.”
Others said that looking back, they find lessons about what went wrong more over the long term with co-op experiments that worked so well in their heyday.
City Hall’s Murphy said one lesson is the need for income mixes at housing developments. When everyone’s earning below 50 percent of the median income, the majority on the board tends to avoid needed fee increases to keep the place up, she argued. And boards of smaller co-ops, she observed, tend to become “less about the business. It becomes personal: ‘I don’t like you.’ ‘I don’t want to raise the fees $100 a month.’”
Shanklin, who has attended conferences about the plight of co-ops here and in other cities, said the fault lies in “selfish, self-centered” people who occupy subsidized complexes like his. “They want to live day by day” rather than planning for the long term, he argued.
Scarlet Ewing reflected on how times have changed since she moved into the Dwight Co-ops in 1969.
“People are different now,” she said. “They keep to themselves. People don’t cooperate with each other.”
I see these co-ops and other similar government experiments in low-income housing as being flawed in two ways. First, they are fixed in time and established as if in a vacuum. However, New Haven's traditional neighborhoods were mostly built as highly functional and adaptable communities. Second, the government backed co ops are essentially a replacement for the absence of a defining middle class, and a pretty bad replacement at that.
As an example, the court street row houses in Wooster Square were built as modest family homes in the 19th century. By the peak of industrial urbanism in the early 20th century, the row homes had been bought up by developers and subdivided into boarding rooms and tenements for immigrant factory workers. As one of the few positives that came out of urban renewal, the row houses were refurbished and returned to their original purpose in the 1960s. Today, they are some of the most sought after and expensive housing in the city. This type of adaptation based on demand-modest family homes to tenements, back to modest family homes and finally to expensive housing-is lost in many of our housing units built since the mid 20th century.
There is an opportunity to rediscover the traditional neighborhood housing structure that defines New Haven's past, and New Haven's thriving neighborhoods. Successful implementation of this would be to build modest and large houses with nice materials, massing and generally high architectural quality and not as a way to gentrify by attracting the elite, but as a way of attracting the middle class to housing they normally can't afford. They way its made affordable is by allowing the first floor to be rentable as affordable housing, thereby reducing the principle mortgage.
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This is a highly adaptable building form. It can ideally hold a middle or upper class family in the top two floors, and provide affordable housing for a working couple, new parents or even young family. Its perfect as an apartment, or a starter home. And if demand should ever change (which it inevitably does), the house can become a mansion, or be subdivided to comfortably fit 4 apartments. The ground floor can even be turned into retail space with minor adjustments. No one is smart enough-not politicians, not architects, no one-to effectively address social problems for the rest of time. Problems change, grow and worsen and we need a built environment that changes too, not static housing projects. Probably the only things that should be maintained are public buildings because they should be built to the highest standard and represent permanence and security as well as the collective spirit of the citizenry.
Hopefully the co op is acquired by the residents and they are able to make it a changeable, adaptive place.