Allan Appel Photo
295 Wilmot Rd.
A new roof and new bathrooms, computer upgrades, reconfigured office and community space and a whole range of modernizing renovations, to the tune of $3 million.
All that shiny new stuff’s on the way to the Housing Authority of New Haven (HANH)’s community and family center over in West Rock on 295 Wilmot Rd. — thanks to an old fashioned federal earmark.
HANH President Karen DuBois-Walton made the announcement Tuesday afternoon at the regular meeting of the public housing authority’s Board of Commissioners. The meeting took place at the housing authority’s headquarters at 360 Orange St.
It used to be called an “earmark,” she said, but now we refer to it as “congressionally directed spending.”
The grant of $3 million was secured through the efforts of U.S. Sens. Chris Murphy and Richard Blumenthal and signed into law last month by President Joe Biden as part of the new budget covering the departments of Housing and Urban Development and Transportation.
“It’s in the middle of a beautiful area,” DuBois-Walton added, referring to the aging one-story brick structure, a bit of an eye sore at the end of Wilmot Road, amid Rockview, Brookside, and Twin Brook, the spiffy and revitalized developments that HANH has nurtured into much desired locales out in the West Rock area of town.
Although it continues to be used for a wide range of HANH’s activities, as well as being a home base to important area nonprofits, the 20-year old building is in dire need of improvement, she said.
Currently several of the building’s steel beams are exposed to the elements and the maintenance staff had to put a fence around the southern section to guard against people being injured by falling brick and other materials.
A big part of the daily wear-and-tear comes from all the programming the building houses. These include HANH’s offices, a diaper bank, and the leadership training after school program Solar Youth, which is one of the mainstays for young people in the West Rock neighborhood; HANH’s financial literacy training programs, the free tax prep services, and an active branch of the New Haven Boys and Girls Club also use the building, she added.
An architect has been retained to initiate details of the renovation, and the plan is to continue to use the building as much as possible during the work, although some shut-down may be called for, DuBois-Walton reported.
The total cost of the project is $5 million, with the additional $2 million coming out of HANH’s capital budget.
It is one of 6,600 projects totaling $12.7 billion of the federal budget that had been requested by lawmakers across the country and included in the package of bills signed in early March.
More Money For Lawyers OK'd
As part of its brief proceedings Tuesday, the Housing Authority Board of Commissioners also approved two resolutions authorizing additional payments of $92,000 as part of existing contracts with the Crumbie Law Group, LLC, the subcontracted law firm that handles HANH’s “legal services for summary process of nuisance and lease violations” as well as eviction proceedings for tenants’ nonpayment of rent.
While those votes by the commissioners might appear to indicate that evictions are up, that’s not the case, explained Karen DuBois-Walton, who also helms Elm City Communities, HANH’s umbrella organization.
“We do a lot of [legal] filing,” she said, in dealing with tenants’ “lease enforcement activity,” as she put it in an interview after the meeting, but there are very few actual evictions.
The idea is to work with tenants who fall behind in their rent payments and to come to repayment agreements that acknowledge lease obligations without putting undue pressure on budgets of HANH’s largely low-income tenants.
Arriving at such repayment agreements, called stipulations, often comes about, or “has more teeth,” as she put it, when residents receive formal legal notifications that help them to acknowledge the need to repay what’s overdue. And that’s what the lawyers do, and thus the fees approved at the meeting.
“Our goal is to get families committed to pay,” DuBois-Walton added, and to do so over time. “The amount [of repayment of the past-due rent] is not key.”
In a July 2023 article on the apparent rise in HANH eviction lawsuits following the pandemic moratorium on eviction, the Independent reported that in the first six months of 2023 court records showed HANH had filed 50 eviction cases, more than the 42 it reported from all of 2019.
“There are very few [actual] evictions executed,” DuBois-Walton reported. “The last nuisance eviction was one case in June 2023. And there have been between zero and three non-payment evictions monthly” through the first quarter of 2024.
Clock Shop Purchase Ticks Forward
In a notification to her commissioners DuBois-Walton also reported that issues holding up the sale of the former New Haven Clock Factory on Hamilton Street — for redevelopment by the city’s public housing organization — have been resolved, and the project is moving forward.
In August of last year the commissioners authorized the purchase of the long vacant New Haven Clock Company factory in order to convert it into 100 mixed-income yet mostly affordable apartments. Read about that here, and how current owner Oregon-based Reed Community Partners was poised to lose the property to foreclosure due to $235,000 of unpaid taxes and interest.
She said that there had also been some confusion about the reported $4.5 million price HANH agreed to pay the owners. The confusion centered on whether a loan the city had made to Reed was forgivable.
“Now it’s been clarified that the loan is forgivable,” DuBois-Walton reported, and the lawyers are hoping to close on the sale to HANH as soon as this month.
More property off the tax rolls. And by the way, earmarks by Congress was outlawed because it wastes a lot of money. This is another big waste. While the upgrades may be nice, spending $3 million of taxpayer money means there will be a lot of waste in the process - making unnecessary changes that are nice to have but are not necessary to carry forward the mission.