Tenants To HANH: Remember Our Swamp, Too

With hedges clipped and lawns mowed, it’s a new day at Ribicoff Apartments. Now neighbors like Debbie Hill are seeking the same treatment at another complex in West Rock’s forgotten shadow.

Hill (pictured) and other tenants of the nearby Westville Manor project were the second group of West Rockers in a week to air complaints about neglect and lack of maintenance by the Housing Authority of New Haven (HANH), which oversees housing projects throughout the city. The latest complaints include grass left unmowed for two years and backyards that became swamps thanks to clogged storm drains.

Last week, the complaints came from the residents at Ribicoff Apartments. This week, Debbie Hill (pictured) and other residents aired their grievances at Westville Manor, another housing project in a neighborhood whose half-demolished landscape of subsidized apartment complexes is cut off from the rest of New Haven by West Rock and woods and from Hamden by two fences.

Seniors at Ribicoff Apartments on Brookside Avenue recently spoke out on a variety of problems caused by a lack of regular upkeep by HANH. After the Independent published an article about the overgrown lawns and shrubs at Ribicoff, HANH employees immediately set to work cleaning the place up. A Tuesday afternoon visit to the project found a transformed landscape and happier residents.

Down the road at Westville Manor, a larger housing project, residents gathered later on Tuesday afternoon and led a reporter on a tour of untended problems in the area.

On hand was Ward 30 aldermanic candidate Darnell Goldson, who during his campaign has organized residents in Ribicoff and Westville Manor to seek improvements to their neighborhoods. The plight of housing project residents in West Rock has emerged as one of Goldson’s top campaign issues.

Contacted later Tuesday, HANH Director Karen DuBois-Walton promised to address neighborhood complaints. She also encouraged tenants to call on HANH higher-ups directly.

Ribicoff Reborn

At 1 p.m. on Tuesday, Blondell Murray was outside by the gates to Ribicoff Apartments, waiting to catch the bus to a doctor’s appointment. Behind her were neatly trimmed bushes and lawns. ​“They cut the grass so good,” she said happily.

Murray, who had previously said that she was afraid to sit on her back porch because of her overgrown back yard, has gone back to enjoying her porch. ​“It feels good,” she said. ​“It looks better.”

The bus arrived, and resident April Rogers stepped out. She praised the mowing. She added that the HANH employees had left all the cut grass on the lawn and residents had had to rake it up. ​“But we got to be grateful they did do something,” she said.

A quick tour through Ribicoff revealed that overgrown bushes had been completely cleared away. Residents said that workers had been testing for mold in all of the units.

The question now is whether the landscaping was a one-off or a sign of a new era. ​“Are they going to keep up with it, or is the grass going to grow back?” Rogers asked.

Darnell Goldson said he has been working with Ribicoff residents on a letter to HANH requesting a meeting to ensure regular maintenance and a follow-up on mold reduction.

Problems Remain

Later, on Lodge Street in Westville Manor, Terese Stevenson was sitting in a folding chair in the shade, keeping an eye on neighborhood kids playing in the spray from an open fire hydrant.

Stevenson, president of the project’s Tenant Resident Council, pointed up at the new security cameras mounted high above the street. She complained that while the housing authority seemed to have money to install an expensive new surveillance system, it hasn’t repaired the parking lot lights that have been out for over a year, even after a home invasion on the street in June. The area is pitch-black after dark, she said; that doesn’t make it very safe, regardless of the cameras.

A lack of lights was the first of a list of problems that Westville Manor residents shared over the next hour. Despite repeated complaints, they said, HANH has done little to address their concerns, which cover clogged storm drains, overgrown lawns, mold, inexplicable dirt, and a variety of rules and restrictions. Neighbors feel HANH is ignoring them.

“It’s like they’re putting us in a little corner,” Stevenson said. ​“A little dark corner.”

Nearby, a pair of clogged storm drains had flooded a sidewalk and turned the backyards of several units into swamps.

“It’s like this every time it rains,” said Maria Langston.

Up a hill, residents pointed out where the grass has gone uncut for weeks. Stevenson said that HANH last cut the grass around the Fourth of July. Some tenants have bought weed whackers to take care of their lawns, a job that they said HANH is required to do.

“Really, truly, this is a hot mess,” said Carol Suggs (pictured), standing in her unmowed backyard. She said that HANH hadn’t cut the lawn in two years.

Dennie Hill, vice-president of the Tenant Resident Council, showed off the black mold in her bathroom. ​“I’ve been complaining about it since 2001,” she said.

Melda Suggs, who lives in an apartment with her mother and her 1‑year-old son, pointed out the area in her apartment where the water had come through the ceiling in her kitchen after the toilet broke in the upstairs bathroom last week. It was an emergency, she said, but it took her mother eight hours of phone calls to finally get through to HANH. Employees came after two days to fix the problem.

Suggs pulled back a couch in her living room to show an area where dirt is inexplicably seeping into her apartment, creating mold on the floor.

“I can sweep and sweep and it keeps coming,” she demonstrated, pulling more and more sand out from under a baseboard heater. There seems to be some kind of gap between the wall and the floor there, because the room never gets warm in the winter, Suggs said. It’s been like that for three years.

“I told housing. They didn’t do nothing,” she said.

Water Call

In addition to a lack of maintenance, residents said that some HANH rules have complicated their lives and left neighborhood young people with little to do. These rules cover external faucets and kiddie pools.

“They took all the water faucets off the outside of the units,” said Debbie Hill, vice-president of the Tenant Resident Council. Stevenson said that she was told that the external faucets were for HANH use only. HANH chief DuBois-Walton later said that the faucets were removed as a water conservation measure because tenants used too much to wash their cars. She promised to look into the issue.

Residents also complained that they are not allowed to have any kind of wading pools in their yards. Residents complained that kids already have little to do in the neighborhood. With even kiddie pools banned, kids have no outlet for playing in the heat. DuBois-Walton later said that kiddie pools are ​“discouraged,” since they can be a drowning hazard or a breeding area for mosquitoes.

Mel, who’s 17 and declined to give his last name, said that there’s no place for young people to hang out and have fun. ​“No more gym, no more store,” he said. ​“We need some courts.” Four years ago there was a ​“community room” stocked with a ping pong table, a pool table, and a flat screen TV. But it’s not open any more, Mel said.

The community room is still there, but it stands empty. Yul Watley, who was the Tenant Resident Council (TRC) president until 2008, said he used to receive $15 per year per occupied unit from HANH. With that money — called ​“resident participation funds” — Watley used to stock the community room with games. Stevenson, the current TRC president, said she hasn’t received any resident participation money from HANH.

DuBois-Walton later said that each TRC needs to submit a budget to receive money for games and community room equipment. She promised to look into the matter ​“so we can work with Terese [Stevenson], to see what they want out there.”

HANH: We Have Not Forgotten

Following the monthly meeting of the Housing Authority Commission on Tuesday evening, HANH Director Karen DuBois-Walton (pictured) stuck around to answer questions about maintenance concerns at Westville Manor.

Informed about the clogged storm drains, DuBois-Walton vowed to take action. ​“I’ll follow up on that,” she said.

Although HANH has an ​“appropriately sized staff,” it has to make choices about where to send workers, DuBois-Walton said. Next year it will contract out lawnmowing, as well as landscaping for larger projects like Westville Manor, she said.

In general, HANH faces a difficult task maintaining aging structures, DuBois-Walton said. ​“Our men and women work tremendously hard to keep up with everything,” she said. But in many cases, the buildings were built in the 1940s, she said. ​“Just by the age of the infrastructure, more and more things go.”

DuBois-Walton expressed a desire to ​“empower residents to speak up.”

“We will respond,” she said. ​“We truly will respond.”

DuBois-Walton was surprised to hear that the lights were out at Westville Manor. She said that United Illuminating is scheduled to install night-time lights there in the near future.

“Unfortunately, some folks want it to be dark,” she said, bringing up another challenge that HANH faces in its attempts to maintain the projects. Some areas have to deal with the vandalism and trouble-making of outsiders who come into the projects to hang out. Lights can be shot out by BB guns, for instance.

“It’s certainly not a forgotten place,” DuBois-Walton said. She said that apartments in Westville Manor recently had their roofs, doors, and windows replaced.

Dubois-Walton had some words of advice for residents with problems to report. ​“They should start with the property manager,” she said. ​“And continue going up the ladder if it’s not getting resolved.”

“Let’s get together and see what people want out there,” she said. ​“We have not forgotten Westville Manor.”

Candidate’s Response: Complex

Contacted later, Darnell Goldson said neighbors shouldn’t have to keep calling to get results. ​“I think that the housing authority should be more proactive.”

A history of perceived unresponsiveness from HANH has likely left residents feeling ​“beat down,” Goldson said. ​“They’ve lost all hope that something is going to be done.”

Goldson’s opponent in the Ward 30 Democratic aldermanic primary race, Carlton Staggers, was later reached by phone. Asked what he thought was needed to help the people of West Rock’s housing projects, Staggers said, ​“a sports complex.”

“We need to build a sports complex out there to give the kids something to do,” he said. The building could include a community center, a computer room, and an arts and crafts room, Staggers said.

He said that the area where the Brookside housing projects recently stood would be a ​“perfect area” for a sports complex.