A double foreclosure in the Hill was the latest blow to an already hard-hit block lined with boarded-up houses. But down the block, alongside vacant homes, a brand new house was being built for a disabled Gulf War veteran.
The two separate side-by-side foreclosures took place at the same hour, 11 a.m., on Saturday on Truman Street.
One of the houses was subject to a foreclosure auction, but no bidders showed up. It was returned to the bank along with the other.
In a small vacant lot down the street, Yale grad students were hammering out a new home as part of a program to provide housing for veterans. Two more houses are planned for the same lot in the coming years.
Boarded Up
The pair of foreclosed multi-family houses, valued at $240,000 each, were the property of one owner, a North Haven resident.
One house was returned to the bank without auction, in a strict foreclosure, because the amount of debt ($250,000) exceeded the value of the house. The other (pictured) could have been bought for $219,000 had any real bidders been there to buy it.
There was one “bidder.” He was just going through the motions, as an educational exercise.
“I’m here to practice,” said Matthew Short (pictured), a visitor to the Hill who said he’s trying to understand the current housing crisis.
“So if I were to bid $219,000, then what happens?” asked Short, as he received a lesson in foreclosure auctions from the two lawyers present, Steven Bennett and Corrine Boni-Vendola.
Short said that he wasn’t trying to personally make a profit on the housing market. “It’s a little bit of a curiosity for me,” he said. “I just feel like you gotta understand this dynamic to real estate.” He explained that he wanted to be able to help friends and relatives to buy homes.
Short said that he was also motivated by a desire to protect his community from outside investors looking to capitalize on the housing market at the expense of locals. “I grew up in this town,” he said. “I don’t want to see people come in and do that kind of stuff.”
He did not rule out the possibility of becoming a buyer himself. “Who knows? I live on the third floor of a friend’s house now, so…”
Advice: Buy Near Immigrants
Bennett (pictured) offered Short advice, saying that he thought that a hard-working immigrant neighborhood like Fair Haven would be a better investment than Truman Street. “They’re all working three jobs over there,” he said. Bennett said that neighborhoods of immigrants increase in property value more rapidly.
As the two men spoke on the drug-dealng-ravaged block, a dented blue car pulled up. A woman got out, had a brief transaction with a young man nearby, and drove away.
A shirtless young man stood in front of his house playing with a cat. There were at least a half-dozen boarded-up houses in view nearby. Asked to speculate about the reason for his neighborhood’s decline, he had a one word answer: “crack.”
Going Up
Just a hundred yards away, the sounds of sawing and hammering filled the air as Yale students worked on putting up a new two-family home (pictured). The construction is part of the First Year Building Project at the Yale School of Architecture. The project is a requirement for new architecture students, who design and build a site-specific house over the summer.
The project is run in cooperation with Common Ground — a New Haven homelessness and affordable housing organization — and the Connecticut Department of Veteran Affairs, explained Adam Hopfner, the building project director.
The house, at the corner of Truman and King Streets, will go to a female disabled Gulf War veteran. She will buy the house “at a significant subsidy,” said Hopfner.
“Yeah, there’s a bit of an irony to it,” Hopfner said when asked about the fact the the new home is being built amidst boarded-up old houses. He said that the Yale project doesn’t do renovations because of their unpredictability and because of the learning possibilities of working on a new building. “We’ve always done ground up,” he said.
The building site, purchased from the city, has room for three houses. Hopfner said that the site was chosen partly because of the opportunity to build three houses together.
The current house is scheduled for completion by August and the other two “in the course of the next couple of years,” said Hopfner.
Previous Independent coverage of New Haven’s foreclosure crisis:
‚Ä¢ “Everybody’s Got To Eat”
• More Foreclosures, More Signs
‚Ä¢ Foreclosure Sale Benefits Archie Moore’s
• Rescue Squad Swings Into Action
• A Bidder Shows Up
‚Ä¢ Bank Beats Tanya’s Bid
• Westville Auction Draws A Crowd
• DeStefano: Foreclosure Plan Ready
• Can They Help?
‚Ä¢ “We Should Over-Regulate These Bastards”
• Rosa Hears of Rescues
• WPCA Grilled on Foreclosures
‚Ä¢ WPCA’s Targets Struggle To Dig Out
• Sue The Subprimers?
• WPCA Hearing Delayed
‚Ä¢ Megna’s “Blood Boils” at WPCA Tactics
• Goldfield Wants WPCA Answers
• 2 Days, 8 Foreclosure Suits
• WPCA Goes On Foreclosure Binge
• A Guru Weighs In
• WPCA Targets Church
• Subprime Mess Targeted
‚Ä¢ Renters Caught In Foreclosure King’s Fall
‚Ä¢ She’s One Of 1,150 In The Foreclosure Mill
‚Ä¢ Foreclosures Threaten Perrotti’s Empire
‚Ä¢“I’m Not Going To Lay Down And Let Them Take My House”
‚Ä¢ Struggling Couple Sues Over “Scam”
The following links are to various materials and brochures designed to help homeowners avoid foreclosure.
How to prepare a complaint to the Department of Banking; Department of Banking Online Assistance Form; Connecticut Department of Banking, Avoiding Foreclosure; FDIC Consumer News; Statewide Legal Services of Connecticut, Inc; Connecticut Bar Association Lawyer Referral Service.
For lawyer referral services in New Haven, call 562-5750 or visit this website. For the Department of Social Services (DSS) Eviction Foreclosure Prevention Program (EFPP), call 211 to see which community-based organization in the state serves your town.
Click here for information on foreclosure prevention efforts from Empower New Haven.