New Day Beckons At Beechwood Gardens

Longtime tenants at New Haven’s rundown Beechwood Gardens complex will soon have newly renovated apartments — if they can remain there.

That’s the conundrum behind a ready-to-begin $8 million overhaul of the cluster of 82 townhouse apartments on the block bordered by Whalley Avenue and Pendleton, Eldert and Hubinger Streets.

It reflects a broader challenge in efforts to preserve and improve affordable housing in New Haven: How do you make sure existing tenants get to remain?

Tensions over the plan boiled to the surface Wednesday night when three dozen anxious tenants met with complex owners VestA Corporation at the nearby Community Action Agency headquarters on Whalley.

“Your concern is not the residents,” Shavon Gales, a 32-year Yale custodian and single mother of two who grew up at Beechwood and now faces possible eviction, told VestA Vice-President Chuck Moran. ​“Your concern is the money.”

“If my concern was about the money,” Moran responded, ​“we would have taken this property to market rate.”

“I don’t need you to blow wind in my face,” Gales told him.

“I have lost a ton of money” at Beechwood, Moran said.

Now both Moran’s company and tenants — some of the tenants, at least — have a shot at a better deal. With some tricky short-term terrain to navigate.

Keeping New Haven Affordable

Motives aside, Moran’s company is not just modernizing an apartment complex. With government help, it has tapped into an effort to preserve affordable housing in a gentrifying city.

VestA took over Beechwood Gardens three years ago following the death of the previous landlord, Wendell Harp. VestA has since planned to upgrade the apartments, from installing new kitchens and heating systems to floors and fixtures.

Meanwhile, the company discovered last year that it lacked records for tens of thousands of dollars of rent payments and utility payments. Plus tenants were living in units for which there weren’t leases on file.

It turned out that tenants had made most of those payments, often with money orders, and a VestA employee was allegedly stealing rent money and some of the utility payments. She has since been dismissed, and the company made a complaint to the city cops, who had detectives on site this week taking affidavits from tenants. VestA at first agreed to cover all the old unpaid utility payments through 2015; then the city’s neighborhoods agency, at the urging of New Haven Legal Assistance Association, convinced VestA to forgive the old payments through 2016. Moran said his company took a six-figure loss on the episode.

It is getting something in return — millions of dollars of guaranteed rental payments from the government.

VestA originally sought money from the state’s Connecticut Housing Finance Authority (CHFA) for the complete renovation. CHFA already financed work at Beechwood in return for rents to remain affordable (in most cases $675 a month for two-bedroom apartments) for low- to moderate-income tenants.

Then came the debacle across town at Church Street South, the 301-unit complex across from the train station, where living conditions deteriorated so badly that tenants are all being relocated and the buildings are coming down. The federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) subsidized the rents of all the tenants there under the Section 8 program. As part of a complex negotiation among legal aid, the city, and Church Street South’s owner, all tenants got approval to bring their rent vouchers to new landlords elsewhere, and HUD agreed to switch many of the ​“project-based” Section 8 approvals — tied to apartments, rather than tenants — to other locations in town. Legal aid and the city wanted that to happen in order to guarantee that apartments remain affordable even after subsidized tenants leave them.

So the hunt has been on for local landlords willing to take those project-based subsidies. VestA agreed to convert all 82 units at Beechwood to Section 8 project-based subsidies. It also agreed to allow former Church Street South tenants to move into the 8 – 10 currently vacant units at Beechwood once they’re renovated.

With the guarantee of those subsidized rents, Moran said, VestA can obtain a big enough mortgage that will, along with long-income housing tax credits, pay for the renovation job.

The work is scheduled to begin this summer and last a year, Moran told the tenants Wednesday night.

“You’re getting all new insides” — kitchens, bathroom fixtures, light fixtures, heating systems, floors, windows, paint, he promised.

And, he promised, no one has to move. However, he acknowledged that a small group of tenants who earn too much to qualify for Section 8 subsidies may want or need to move, because they’ll have to pay market-rate rents.

Who’ll Stay?

There are two catches.

One: Rents will rise for everyone, including subsidized tenants. Rents remained artificially low, even for subsidized apartments, because Beechwood was so rundown, Moran said. But now VestA qualifies for higher rents for Beechwood that reflect the costs of creating and maintaining better-quality apartments. After the renovations, the entire apartment complex will fall under the Section 8 program. Tenants who qualify for Section 8 subsidies — and that’s almost all of them — will pay 30 percent of their income on rent, which in many if not most cases will come out to more than $675 a month. Moran noted that they will still be paying the same or less than they’d pay elsewhere.

However — catch number two — some tenants (not the majority) earn too much money to qualify for Section 8 subsidies. So they’ll pay market rates, which these days is $1,033 for a one-bedroom apartment, $1,260 for a two-bedroom, $1,619 for a three-bedroom. To qualify for Section 8, tenants must earn no more than 80 percent of the area’s median income, currently $82,700 for a family of four.

VestA is offering those tenants up to $1,500 to help with moving out if they need or intend to leave. But they have to let VestA know by April 1, he said, by which time the money set aside is projected to run out.

That has caused confusion among the tenants, who charge that the company has poorly communicated the complicated details to them. Tenants showed up Wednesday night fearful they’re getting kicked out of the complex, or unclear about how to decide if they should leave.

Only a ​“handful” — maybe up to 10 households — fall under the category of tenants who earn too much to continue having subsidized units, VestA officials said.

Kimberly Johnson is one of those handful. She tore into Moran at the meeting. (See the above video clip for a sample moment.)

A blue-collar worker at Yale, she pays about $800 a month for her two-bedroom at Beechwood. (She pays more than others because she has a garage.) She’s not ready to start paying around $1,300 a month for the same apartment.

She criticized VestA for sending a notice she understood to mean she needs to be out by April 1 (the deadline for qualifying for VestA’s offer of $1,500 in moving help), then seeming to say something else. Moran insisted he and his staff have been consistent and clear in communicating with tenants.

“I’ve been here 15 years,” Johnson said later. ​“I’ve been an excellent tenant,” fixing appliances and making other repairs without notifying management for help. ​“Leaving is a great loss to me.” But she feels she has no choice.

She’s hoping to turn the change into an opportunity: ​“It’s time to consider buying a house.”

Gales (pictured) has fewer options. Money’s tight: She fell behind rent in December when her car broke and one of her two sons needed a root canal. VestA immediately hit her with eviction papers. She considered that cruel. Moran responded that after forgiving years of debts from tenants on utility bills, the company is insisting on prompt rent payments in order to keep finances in order.

“We have gone a long, long way,” Moran said. ​“All we’re asking people to do is pay the rent. Nothing more.” The company served five tenants eviction papers recently.

Gales worked out a repayment plan. Despite the turmoil over the changes at Beechwood, she wants to stay. She grew up there, and returned as an adult. She remembered a place where ​“I had to respect my next-door neighbor. I had to hide if I were doing something wrong.” Despite changes in management, the community remains that kind of place, she said.

“The community made me what I am today,” she said. ​“The essence of the community is what I wanted my children to have.”

Gales, a 32-year-old single mom, said she earns $36,000 a year as a custodial worker at Yale-New Haven Hospital.

The new deal works out well for lower-income tenants like Sandra Showers (pictured).

At the meeting’s start, she sought reassurance about where she’ll have to move within the complex when renovations start. VestA plans to renovate a cluster of apartments at a time, moving those apartments’ occupants to other units within the complex. The tenants will then have the choice of remaining in the new unit or returning to their old one, fixed up, Moran promised.

“I don’t want to move into someone else’s mess. ​‘Cause I’m not nasty!” Showers told Moran. Moran reassured her that tenants will move into temporary units that either have been renovated or are in good shape, with cable hooked up. ​“Wow!” Showers responded. A former certified nurse assistant, Showers is now on disability, and has had to contribute only $97 a month toward her subsidized rent, she said.

Next Moves

VestA will have crucial details available within the next week for all tenants, Moran promised: precisely how many earn above the HUD minimum to qualify for Section 8, and the projected new rents next year once renovations are completed (based on current Section 8 income guidelines, which change over time). Tenants will then need to decide if they can afford the new rents, and, crucially, whether they’d find comparable or lower rents elsewhere.

After the meeting, New Haven Legal Assistance attorney Amy Marx buttonholed Moran. She has represented some tenants during the fracas over the unpaid and disappearing old bills. She is also representing tenants facing eviction.

She pushed Moran to provide firmer numbers for the tenants. And she pushed for management to ​“understand the traumatic impact” that sudden spikes in rent of hundreds of dollars a month — no matter how fairly arrived at — can prove for low-income and working families on tight budgets. She said the company should offer more than $1,500 to move, for instance; she suggested offering money to cover the security deposit and first month’s rent on a new place. Overhauling a housing development to make it better and more stable necessarily involves disrupting real people’s lives. How disruptive that proves, and how fair, will be the challenge for VestA, government officials monitoring them, the tenants, and their lawyer in the months ahead.