And The Home-Buy Lottery Winner Is …

Seven-year-old Meklit and five-year-old Bethlehem ran around the empty rooms of 455 Howard Ave., dodging the legs of parents and realtors and city workers. This two-family home would soon be theirs.

“We always wanted a big house,” Meklit said, minutes after her father won the Livable City Initiative’s (LCI’s) latest affordable housing lottery. ​“I always wanted this to happen.” 

Meklit and Bethlehem are the daughters of 57-year-old Kostantinos Teklehaimanot, who is now set to buy his first home thanks to winning a Tuesday afternoon lottery hosted by LCI to sell a publicly-funded affordable house. 

“It’s big,” Teklehaimanot said with a smile about what this sale means to him. 

Teklehaimanot — who was joined by his wife, his daughters, his brother, and his realtor at Tuesday’s lottery — works for Yale Parking and Transit. He’s been saving up money to buy a house for more than 10 years, and has been in the market for five. He said on Tuesday he’s always lost to other buyers’ offers. Until now. 

“I’m very, very excited,” he said, sentiments echoed by Meklit. ​“I’m very happy.” 

Thanks to Tuesday’s lottery, Teklehaimanot won the right to buy 455 Howard Ave. for $240,000. With its two units and new condition, property real estate agent Yvette McNeil estimated that the home’s market value price is around $370,000. Both numbers are much lower than the $690,000 that the Elicker administration paid to have the new two-family house built.

This is thanks in part, according to LCI Deputy Director of Administrative Services Cathy Schroeter, to the fact that the house is totally solar-powered. The city owns the solar panels (which haven’t been installed yet), so there won’t be any leasing to an outside property. This is the first totally electric, solar-paneled house that the city has ever built.

The $240,000 selling price for the home was determined by the income limit imposed upon those eligible to purchase the city-build property. Only those making 80 to 100 percent of the area median income (AMI) — or, up to $112,600 per year for a family of four — qualified to enter the lottery 

“We’re not looking to house a millionaire,” said Angela Hatley, who has lived in the neighborhood for 38 years and is a member of the Hill South Community Management Team, which collaborated with LCI on the property. The project began in 2020, before Covid, and it is the culmination of desire to keep the neighborhood from being a transitory space. 

The house’s deed requires that it be owner-occupied for the next 30 years, preventing what Hatley called a ​“Mandy-Ocean production.” She hopes that ​“if you’re invested in where you live,” you’ll care for the area around it.

LCI most recently hosted similar lotteries in 2020 for small-scale affordable multifamily homes that it built on Winchester Avenue and Thompson Street. The mayor’s budget proposal for next fiscal year, meanwhile, seeks to split off LCI’s affordable housing development work and place it under the purview of a new office to be housed under the Economic Development Administration, so that LCI can focus exclusively on housing code inspections and enforcement.

Teklehaimanot was one of seven pre-vetted applicants to enter Tuesday’s lottery. Grace Walters, 45, had also thrown her hat into the ring, in hopes of becoming a first-time homeowner.

“A home,” she said when describing what winning Tuesday’s lottery would mean to her. ​“Somewhere I can put my head, where my kids be safe. Somewhere I can put down roots.” 

Walters, who works as a personal care aide at Yale New Haven Hospital, is from Jamaica, and has lived in Newhallville for 14 years. She was joined outside 455 Howard by her 8- and 12-year-old daughters and her real estate agent. She’s been looking for a house since August. 

Guillermina Duluc, another lottery applicant, said that if she were to win the right to buy Tuesday’s LCI-built house, ​“It’s going to be a miracle.” 

Duluc, a 42-year-old accounting assistant at Yale, currently rents a townhome in the Housing Authority of New Haven’s Twin Brook property with her two kids, a 17 year old and a 15 year old. She said that while she has been looking for a house to buy and make her first home, no other property compared to 455 Howard — the affordability and the condition couldn’t be beat. 

Emma McFadden, 58, said that if she were to win the house, she’d need to occupy both units — she would be joined by both her mother and her children. For her, winning would mean ​“everything.” She works in customer service and, so far, she’s been renting her home near the border of East Haven. 

In the end, the lottery-members clapped for Teklehaimanot and his family when his identification number was pulled from the bowl where it sat among theirs. 

After Teklehaimanot received his papers from Schroeter, he and his family joined LCI officials in entering the house and taking a look around. They peeked into sun-filled rooms and the girls claimed their own, and eventually, they made their way upstairs.