Lucy Gellman Photo
Carmen Maldonado before Monday’s move.
When Frank Correa, 13, bounded down the stairs of the Church Street South apartment he shares with his mom and three siblings Sunday morning, he was expecting to get ready for church with his family.
He found the floors soaking wet, and getting wetter. He could hear water rushing from the living room, drenching the clothes and belongings in its path. Rousing his mom and older sister from upstairs, he identified the culprit: The boiler had busted, sending a deluge into his family’s apartment and the unit below.
The wet walls needed badly to be ventilated. When a repair crew opened the walls — not until 24 hours later — they revealed heavy mold, mold that had been growing for years.
Possessions out on the balcony.
If the story inside Apartment 74B sounds familiar — including its ending with tenants being moved to live in a hotel — it is.
Last year dozens of families at Church Street South, a federally subsidized apartment complex across form the train station, fled similar conditions. Many continue to live in hotels, while city and federal officials race to move all 288 families into permanent new homes and then demolish the complex in order to rebuild it. (Selected demolition of non-residential areas of the complex is scheduled to start this week.)
The drama these past few days in the life of Correa, his three siblings (ages 19, 17, and 12) and mom, Carmen Maldonado, revealed that while that delayed mass-migration plods forward, more families hanging on at Church Street South continue to have their lives uprooted. Several more families have been moved recently to hotels. (The latest word from the feds: the first batch of rental vouchers for new apartments, first promised for last Thanksgiving, will be available May 1.)
The flooded apartment provides a glimpse into the hazards still unaddressed at the 301-unit subsidized housing complex prior to its eventual demolition.
On Monday afternoon, New Haven Legal Assistance attorney Amy Marx visited Maldonado and her family, checking up on them as after complaints about mold went unaddressed for months, only coming to the fore after the boiler broke.
“I’m very upset about what’s going on,” said Marx, herself coughing from mold as she surveyed the apartment. Around her, workers from Total Plumbing and Servpro, under contract from complex owner Northland Investment Corp, tried to remedy losses to the boiler and wet walls. They said they grappled with one problem: Property management wouldn’t let them follow the most reasonable course of action, which would require cutting the walls open, taking out and replacing mold-riddled insulation, and moving the tenants off the premises in the process.
Clogged vents in the bathroom.
Ceiling mold in the bathroom.
For Maldonado and her children, the boiler break signals a last straw in a panoply of mounting concerns with the apartment. Already, poor ventilation in an upstairs bathroom led to a ceiling coated with dark mold, which Maldonado and her daughter, 17-year-old Ashley Ramirez, credit with the severity of their asthma and chronic bronchiolitis over the past two years.
That mold creeps on the walls and ceilings of other rooms, too. Maldonado maintained she was able to smell it long before the walls became soggy last weekend. She said she has reported the problem to Church Street South maintenance, and inspectors from New Haven government’s Livable City Initiative (LCI) have previously visited the apartment.
A Big, Wet Problem
Mold beneath the walls.
The boiler break and ensuing nightmare, Maldonado said Monday afternoon, has exposed both the danger of living in Church Street South, and the difficulty in getting out of it.
“When we get by the stairs, everywhere it was water from the pipe. The tube. It was broke,” she said of the commotion that greeted her around 8:20 a.m. Sunday, when Correa alerted her to the problem.
Moments later, her downstairs neighbor knocked, noting that the water was seeping into her unit and soaking the walls.
“She told me that she was trying to call maintenance, and when somebody answered, they say that they cannot do nothing about it,” Maldonado said. She said she did not know that Servpro has both weekend hours and a 24/7 emergency water and mold removal line.
By then, everyone in the unit was awake; Sunday church routines had been replaced with prayers for the flooding to stop.
They were informed that no repair people would arrive until Monday. The downstairs neighbor called maintenance about water in her apartment, then called the fire department. Four firefighters arrived. They helped close the leaking pipe and begin cleaning the water from Maldonado’s apartment around 9:30 a.m.
By 10, the family was picking through wet possessions with large black trash bags to see if any items were salvageable.
That was the morning. Around 3:40 p.m. Sunday, an LCI inspector arrived at the unit, checking the boiler and broken pipe. Without heat or hot water Sunday afternoon and evening, Maldonado and her family ate on their small balcony, showered at a friend’s home and waited for help, in some form or another, to arrive.
One Problem Becomes Two
Ramirez.
Early Monday morning — Maldonado estimates 8 a.m., as her kids were getting ready for school — two men from Servpro showed up at the unit, calling in two more reinforcements when they saw how bad the damage was. Around the same time, a contracted worker who wished to be identified as “Dan” showed up from Total Plumbing to replace the boiler. Someone from LCI dropped by around 10 a.m. to say the pipe would be fixed by the end of the day.
Ramirez’ inhaler: “I don’t go anywhere without it.”
That wasn’t the only issue. The Servpro guys ran into a problem almost immediately. Per protocol, they bored holes in the wet walls to aerate them, running into pungent, thick mold in the process.
Normally, said one Servpro worker who asked not to be identified, those walls would be cut open and cleaned, moldy insulation removed and replaced while tenants were moved off the premises. But the Servpro manager hadn’t given them the green light to do that, nor had Northland. Instead, the Servpro contractors sprayed the mold with something to cover the smell, and explained that they would have to leave the mold exposed.
“It’s horrible,” Maldonado said. “I cannot live with them here like this, with this smell. I can’t.”
Hopefully, she won’t have to after today. Maldonado and her family are now staying at the Premiere Hotel and Suites, off I‑95.
Northland declined comment for this story. Rafael Ramos, deputy director of the Livable City Initiative, said Northland moved the family to the hotel on its own without being forced to by a city order. Northland has down that in other cases recently, too, Ramos said.
“We like that. They’re taking responsibility,” Ramos said.
For permanent housing, Maldonado has identified a three-bedroom, two-bathroom home in East Haven that fits Connecticut’s Department of Housing (DOH) Section 8 criteria. Once the federal government delivers new portable rental vouchers first promised last year.
Federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) spokeswoman Rhonda Siciliano said those vouchers have been approved and should be available to New Haven’s housing authority by May 1. The authority is in the process of screening and preparing paperwork for tenants so they can make use of those vouchers. HUD pays the rent for all Church Street South families through the Section 8 program; it is now deciding how many portable Section 8 vouchers to approve for families to take to new apartments they find on their own; and how many site-based subsidies to approve, which are attached to apartments and remain in place after tenants move. Siciliano said HUD has identified two New Haven apartment complexes it is in the process of approving for those site-based “8bb” subsidies.
Authority Executive Director Karen DuBois-Walton said HUD said the first batch of portable vouchers arriving May 1 will cover 198 families.
Families won’t be able to move in immediately on May 1 because the city will still have to inspect and approve chosen apartments, DuBois-Walton said. She said that process should be quickest for apartments where former Church Street South tenants are already living on a temporary basis.
Paul Bass contributed reporting.
Previous coverage of Church Street South:
• Surprise! Now HUD Flunks Church St. South
• Church St. South Tenants Get A Choice
• Home-For-Xmas? Not Happening
• Now It’s Christmas, Not Thanksgiving
• Pols Enlist In Church Street South Fight
• Raze? Preserve? Or Renew?
• Church Street South Has A Suitor
• Northland Faces Class-Action Lawsuit On Church Street South
• First Attempt To Help Tenants Shuts Down
• Few Details For Left-Behind Tenants
• HUD: Help’s Here. Details To Follow
• Mixed Signals For Church Street South Families
• Church St. South Families Displaced A 2nd Time — For Yale Family Weekend
• Church Street South Getting Cleared Out
• 200 Apartments Identified For Church Street South Families
• Northland Asks Housing Authority For Help
• Welcome Home
• Shoddy Repairs Raise Alarm — & Northland Offer
• Northland Gets Default Order — & A New Offer
• HUD, Pike Step In
• Northland Ordered To Fix Another 17 Roofs
• Church Street South Evacuees Crammed In Hotel
• Church Street South Endgame: Raze, Rebuild
• Harp Blasts Northland, HUD
• Flooding Plagues Once-Condemned Apartment
• Church Street South Hit With 30 New Orders
• Complaints Mount Against Church Street South
• City Cracks Down On Church Street South, Again
• Complex Flunks Fed Inspection, Rakes In Fed $$
• Welcome Home — To Frozen Pipes
• City Spotted Deadly Dangers; Feds Gave OK
• No One Called 911 | “Hero” Didn’t Hesitate
• “New” Church Street South Goes Nowhere Fast
• Church Street South Tenants Organize