This bombed-out house on Winchester Avenue looks like a candidate for city fix-up money. Guess what — “City Hall already spent more than $150,000 of federal money to “fix it.” The owner, a former NFL player, claims the city paid the money to a hand-picked subcontractor who didn’t do the work and endangered workers’ health.
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The conversation took place a year ago. Kenny Hill says he remembers it vividly.
Hill, a former pro football player who now rebuilds homes in New Haven neighborhoods (see “From the NFL to Wooster Square”), was on the phone with a city health official. Hill was mad. The city had given Hill a $168,000 loan to remove lead paint from 14 units of an 18-unit apartment building he was fixing up at 235 Winchester Ave. The city health official pressed Hill to pay a subcontractor the city told him to hire to remove the lead paint. But, Hill says, the subcontractor hadn’t done the work. Pay him anyway, Hill claims the health official demanded.
New Haven needs to see that the money gets spent, Hill says he was told, or else the federal government won’t give the city as much money next year.
“If that happens,” Hill remembers being told, “I will hold you personally responsible.” The official threatened to sue Hill, Hill says. The two started screaming at each other. Then Hill hung up and called his attorney.
The city health official, environmental health director Paul Kowalski, remembers the conversation differently. He claims the contractor did do his job but Hill wouldn’t pay him. Kowalski says he threatened to take back Hill’s money and return it to the feds if Hill wouldn’t spend it. “I told him that this program ends in two months, and this project has to be finished,” Kowalski recalls.
Whatever the case, the city now has a mess on its hands. A year later, instead of bringing stability and affordable new apartments to a neighborhood in transition, 235 Winchester Ave. stands windowless, vacant, a sad testament to government failure. Hill’s lawyer is preparing a federal lawsuit against the city. And the city is going after Hill to get the $168,000 loan back on the grounds that he never completed fixing up the building.
Meanwhile, the city may have allowed a subcontractor to continue on a job despite allegations of blatant disregard for health and safety rules.
The saga of 235 Winchester Ave. is more than a spat between a builder and a bureaucrat. It jeopardizes both economic and neighborhood development in New Haven’s Dixwell neighborhood. Decent affordable housing is hard to find in a gentrifying city. This decrepit building stands across the street from 25 Science Park, a refurbished cornerstone of a crucial high-tech project. Also across the street are new homes built for working families.
Kenny Hill’s Side
Kenny Hill returned to New Haven, where he played college football, in 2000. He began buying older, neglected houses with a friend in Yale’s athletics department, and fixing them up. He’s been having success in Wooster Square, including a good relationship with city inspectors. But that changed when he and his partner came to Winchester Avenue in May of 2003.
They formed a partnership called MBMB LLC to buy 235 Winchester, a sturdy but neglected three-story brick building, for $420,000. (The acronym stands for “My Buddy My Buddy,” referring to a beloved pooch the friend gave Hill while he played for the pros.) The building was a mess. The people living in its apartments tended to owe lots of back rent and be hard on their luck. Hill began to do a gut-rehab. He evicted the remaining tenants, one of whom shut off the water valves on the boilers in the middle of winter; every pipe in the building froze, destroying the heating and water systems, not to mention bathroom fixtures.
City Hall’s neighborhood-rebuilding office, the Livable City Initiative (LCI), gave him a $168,000 loan to remove lead paint in the building. Under the program, the loan is forgiven after five years if the owner completes his rehab job and keeps rents affordable. The program is federally funded; it helps cities get affordable housing on the market in older homes.
Under the program, Hill needed to hire a subcontractor to remove the lead paint. Hill says he chose two contractors from a city-approved list. He claims that a city health inspector, Brian Wnek, then informed him that he had to hire a company called Alpha Abatement instead. Hill says Alpha Abatement hadn’t originally been on the list, but only appeared after the fact. He said he didn’t want to hire Alpha but gave in to Wnek.
Alpha started work on the project. Alpha was supposed to receive checks in several installments based on completing work. Both Alpha and MB&B LLC, Hill’s partnership, had to sign the checks.
MBMB signed the first $23,500 check, which Hill understood to cover demolition work and taking out permits. When none of that got done, Hill says, he and his partner refused to sign more checks.
Hill and Alpha’s principal, Israel South, began arguing over whether Alpha was doing the promised work. South said he didn’t have the money to buy new windows that needed to be installed, according to Hill. Hill complained to city officials, who insisted that South was doing what he was supposed to.
According to a written log by inspector Wnek, Hill went ahead and bought the windows with the understanding that South would pay him back and install them. The windows never got installed.
By summer of 2004, according to the case file at LCI, Hill was asking to hire a different subcontractor. But Craig Russell, LCI’s deputy director of administrative services, insisted that he keep Alpha on the job. “Either Alpha continues or no funds will be expended,” the file quotes Russell as stating.
Hill was in an unusual position for a developer: He was asking the city not to spend money. And the city was pushing him to spend it.
Hill’s partnership finally agreed to sign the checks if they were kept in escrow, meaning Alpha couldn’t cash the checks until the agreed-upon work was done.
“They Were Killing This Kid”
Work progressed on removing the lead. Hill says he showed up at the site and saw workers doing the job without basic safety precautions required under the law. He says he called city officials to alert them and received no response.
He wasn’t the only one concerned for the workers’ safety. In September, Inspector Wnek got a call from the city’s Commission on Equal Opportunities (CEO). Some of Alpha’s workers were “complaining that they were under paid and that they were given no safety equipment (i.e. respirators) for the job,” according to the file.
In fact, John Hayward, the CEO staffer who made the call, was furious. One of the workers on the job had called Hayward to alert him to major safety problems on the site. That worker had graduated from a city-run job-training program, where he had learned about proper safety procedures. He refused to work on the Alpha project when he saw the rules being broken, according to Hayward.
Hayward says he went to the site and found Jamaican workers hired to do work without the proper equipment. He asked one worker to take off a dust mask. “There was white powder all over his nose” because of the lack of a respirator. “They were killing this kid.”
This was just the latest job in which he found city agencies rushing work through without protecting public health or otherwise following procedures, Hayward says. (He has since given notice out of frustration.)
“Your Health is Our Community’s Wealth”
A second dispute arose when asbestos was found during the construction work. Alpha began work on getting rid of the asbestos. The workers worried about asbestos being in the rubble of plaster on the first floor.
According to Inspector Wnek’s log, he tried to reach Alpha’s Israel South for two days when he found out about the asbestos, but couldn’t. The piles remained; no work was done. He shut down the job. He received reports that South had people working there anyway, after hours; Wnek visited the house but found no trace of work taking place, according to his notes.
Hill eventually hired someone else to test for and then clean up the asbestos. He and South remained at a standstill over whether to release the money and whether to resume work.
On Aug. 30, 2004, Wnek inspected the building. In a memo on city health department stationery (printed motto: “Your health is our community’s wealth”), Wnek declared that Alpha had done the entire job, that the lead had been removed, and that his money should be released.
Hill vehemently disagreed. He insisted that the money remain in escrow.
But LCI gave Israel South a check MB&B had already signed under pressure from the city—“and South cashed it instead of putting it in escrow, according to Hill. All told, South ended up receiving more than $150,000 of the $168,000 loan—“and, to this day, the building remains windowless.
When he discovered the check had been released, Hill was livid. His attorneys fired a series of letters to LCI demanding that it stop payment on the check, then complaining that South had “absconded with the funds” that were supposed to be in escrow.”
South declines comment for this story. “I found I cannot make it onto your newspaper,” he said in a voicemail message. “And I must ask you kindly to desist from trying to contact me.”
The City’s Side
LCI’s Russell defends releasing the money. He claims LCI had no knowledge of the escrow agreement, because it was between Hill and South, not with the city. He also says South did the work so he deserved the money.
LCI in January declared Hill and his partner in default on the $168,000 loan. They filed papers to try to get it back. “The objective of the Lead-Base Paint Grant Program is to abate hazardous structures and further make available housing and/or rental units to low income families,” Craig Russell wrote. “In violating the terms of such an agreement you are not allowing low income families the opportunity to better their quality of life. The City of New Haven will not allow our low income residents to be taken advantage of and will pursue action, to the highest extent of the law, to deter such violations from occurring in the future.”
Russell and health department officials blame Hill, not South, for the problems at 235 Winchester. They say South did his job, but Hill failed to fix up the building as promised. Russell says the city hopes to take the property back or see that someone fixes it up, but first he’s waiting to see if Hill loses the property in foreclosure.
Health inspector Wnek and his boss, Paul Kowalski, adamantly deny Hill’s account. Wnek says that Alpha Abatement was on the list from the start and that program rules require hiring the lowest bidder, which Alpha was. (However, Hill kept a copy of what he said was the original list of approved subcontractors which the city gave him. Alpha Abatement does not appear on that list.)
Wnek also says Alpha has done other lead-removal work under the program and always performed well.
The health department’s Kowalski says he’s proud of the city’s track record under the two federal grants it has received for lead paint removal. It removed lead paint from 648 housing units across the city, he says.
See You in Court
Hill blames both South and the city for the building’s failure, pointing to his successful rehabs elsewhere in town. He argues that by insisting on paying a hand-picked contractor for work he didn’t do, city officials cost him not just the work paid for by the loan, but millions of dollars more in lost rental income and potential appreciation of the building’s value, both at 235 Winchester and other rehab projects that were stalled by all the haggling. Hill hopes to recapture that money through his upcoming federal lawsuit.
“A 9 year-old could have driven by” and seen the work wasn’t done, says the attorney preparing to file Hill suit, Douglas Varga of the Bridgeport firm Zeldes, Needle & Cooper. “It’s either inept conduct [on the part of the city], or they didn’t care and they wanted the paperwork done so they could get the money replenished.”
“I find it hard to believe anyone was on the take,” Varga says. “What I do see is the word coming down from on high saying, —ÀúGet this done.’”
The next time City Hall puts out a glossy brochure about all the work it has gotten done rebuilding housing in New Haven, don’t look for a photo of 235 Winchester Ave.
