Housing Rebuilds Mark Candidate’s Tenure

Justin Elicker’s record as mayor isn’t the only government tenure at issue in this year’s mayor’s race. So is the record of his main opponent, Karen DuBois-Walton, in running the city’s public housing authority since the second Bush administration.

DuBois-Walton, 53, is currently challenging first-term incumbent Elicker for the Democratic nomination for mayor.

As in any race involving an incumbent, both the mayor and his challengers have focused on the mayor’s record in steering the city through public-health, criminal justice, and other challenges the past two years.

DuBois-Walton’s own decades-long career as a New Haven government official adds her own record to the mix.

On the campaign trail, she has frequently pointed to her 14-year tenure at the helm of the city’s public housing authority, Housing Authority of New Haven (HANH)/ Elm City Communities, as evidence of her ability to lead a large and complex municipal bureaucracy that directly affects the day-to-day lives of thousands of New Haveners.

She has also framed her career in local public housing as offering a model example of the creativity, vision, collaboration, and principled perseverance she can bring to bettering the lives of the city’s highest-need and most vulnerable residents. As a testament to her commitment to explicitly anti-racist, ​“equity”-focused work geared towards ​“how to change systems.”

The city’s public housing authority currently employs around 150 people, and serves roughly 6,100 low-income families — comprising over 14,000 individuals — through public housing-owned properties and the Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher program.

DuBois-Walton said she quickly realized upon coming to the city’s public housing authority in 2007 that its aging and decrepit housing stock was in desperate need of rebuilding, and that the money needed to make such a transformation possible was scarce.

Fourteen years later, much of the mayoral candidate’s legacy from her prior public role is tied up in the successful redevelopment of 2,000 public housing units across the city — as well as in the condition of those properties still yet to receive a major overhaul.

Interviews with DuBois-Walton, public housing tenants, a legal aid lawyer, and reviews of dozens of articles and annual reports about housing authority operations over the past decade cast light on the role DuBois-Walton has played in rehabilitating, rebuilding, and defending a part of the public safety net that has long been marred by federal disinvestment and racialized, politicized disdain.

Rebuilt Complexes Citywide

The showpieces of DuBois-Walton’s tenure are transformed public-housing complexes. HANH and its nonprofit development arm the Glendower Group have been busy for the past 14 years.

Under DuBois-Walton, the city’s housing authority:

• Built 444 units of affordable and market rate rental housing on the far west side of town through multi-phase redevelopments of Brookside, Rockview, Ribicoff Cottages (now called Twin Brook), and Wilmont Crossing. A rundown isolated neighborhood on the outskirts of town became a modern landscape connected through a reopening to Hamden.

• Demolished and rebuilt the mid-century Farnam Courts complex with 228 affordable and market rate units at the new Mill River Crossing (with the latter stage of that redevelopment still under construction).

• Relocated tenants for a soon-to-begin redevelopment of 150 affordable apartments at Westville Manor. It also launched major rehabs already completed or currently underway at Eastview Terrace, Quinnipiac Terrace, William T. Rowe, Fair Haven at Chatham, McQueeney Towers, and Celentano Towers.

Meanwhile, the housing authority brought in a community health clinic and a corner market to the rebuilt senior housing complex at 122 Wilmot Rd. Helped tear down a ​“Berlin Wall” that separated west side public housing from a recalcitrant suburban neighbor. Spearheaded community partnerships to make it easier for people returning from prison to access public housing. Boosted tenant access to the Internet, backpacks, and other back-to-school supplies. Helped teenage tenants get summer jobs during the pandemic. Provided funds to public housing residents looking to start their own businesses. And canceled rent for one month of the pandemic.

Overall, the housing authority’s nonprofit development agency, the Glendower Group, tapped into $650 million in public and private capital-improvement dollars to redevelop over 2,000 units of public housing, almost all of which was done during DuBois-Walton’s time leading Elm City Communities.

Two major public housing redevelopments preceded DuBois-Walton’s tenure: the transformation of the old Elm Haven development into Monterey Place and the first half of the rebuilding of Quinnipiac Terrace.

HANH and Glendower did much of that rebuilding work by cobbling together funding through an Obama-era initiative called the Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD) program, which DuBois-Walton and her colleagues identified early on as a critical tool for leveraging public tax credits to attract private investment into making high-quality new housing available for the poorest New Haveners.

“It’s the experience of having run a large public organization,” DuBois-Walton said in a recent interview with the Independent about how her career at Elm City Communities has informed her candidacy for mayor.

“The experience of putting our residents first and what the residents’ needs are first in decision making. The sense of urgency that comes from solving these issues. The experience of dealing with people who have had so many strikes against them and knowing that the last thing they need is some bureaucracy from us.”

“It’s being able to make decisions that actually shift power,” she continued, ​“that actually shift resources, that actually center people. I’ve got experience doing that.”

Some of the people she worked closest with during her time at the housing authority offer praise for her tenure.

In July 2020, after the housing authority’s board unanimously voted to renew DuBois-Walton’s contract for another three years, board chair (and now DuBois-Walton mayoral campaign supporter) Erik Clemons praised DuBois-Walton’s ​“trailblazing and nimble leadership” of the agency.

“You are the finest organizational leader in this city, especially as to the Covid and now the racial issues too,” Clemons said at the time. ​“I appreciate and want to honor you especially this year.”

Elm City Communities Interim President Shenae Draughn agreed. In the meeting minutes for May’s meeting of the housing authority Board of Commissioners, Draughn is quoted as saying, ​“Under Dr. DuBois‐Walton’s leadership, we set the course to change the landscape of affordable housing, create opportunity and advance equity. … During my parting words for Dr. Karen DuBois‐Walton I quoted, ​‘What you do is your history. What you set in motion is your legacy.’ ECC is ​‘One Team, Meeting Expectations,’ and shall continue the legacy. We pay homage to Karen’s legacy.”

Legal Aid Att’y: KDW Rebuilt Housing That Could Have Been Lost

New Haven Legal Assistance Association (NHLAA) Director of Litigation Shelley White has faced off against DuBois-Walton and HANH often over the past decade inside and outside of court over living conditions at its properties.

Asked about DuBois-Walton’s tenure, White offered a laudatory appraisal.

When DuBois-Walton came to the job in 2007 after serving in City Hall as former Mayor John DeStefano’s chief administrative officer and then as his chief of staff, ​“I was skeptical. I was very skeptical,” White recalled. She remembered being impressed with her academic background and personal and professional smarts, but wary of her lack of experience in the world of public housing.

“She proved me terribly wrong. I think she did a good job. While it isn’t a perfect job, I never questioned her competency.”

While White and her colleagues at legal aid butted heads with the housing authority over mold and leaking roof problems at older complexes like Westville Manor, White said, she associates DuBois-Walton’s tenure at the housing authority most with the massive, large-scale redevelopment of properties.

“I think at a time when public housing had essentially been defunded by Congress in the early 1990s, and then you fast-forward to RAD, [DuBois-Walton] saw the importance of that early on,” she said.

She said RAD isn’t lacking in controversy. It does shift ownership of dedicated affordable apartments from a public housing authority to public-private partnerships through the use of project-based Section 8 subsidies.

Nevertheless, ​“I do think she systematically redeveloped and recreated all of these developments that would otherwise have been simply demolished and not replaced.”

“What was the alternative?” White asked. ​“Was it nothing, and have no public housing?”

That’s what DuBois-Walton has done — and, largely, done successfully — during her 14 years at the helm of the housing authority. ​“Systematically demolishing” and rebuilding properties for New Haven’s neediest tenants.

Search For A New Money Spigot

DuBois-Walton started at the housing authority in 2007 as the agency’s deputy director of operations. She rose to the rank of executive director and president one year later.

When she first came to the job, she recalled, she found an agency that was then 70 years old and that had infrastructure dating back decades. The buildings had been ​“underresourced and neglected, not for lack of passion and interest of staff, but for lack of resources.”

“I found communities that I was not able to say proudly that this represents what we should be offering to families,” she continued. ​“I looked and I said, ​‘We could rebuild this whole portfolio.’”

When DuBois-Walton arrived, the housing authority had already completed its first major redevelopment project: knocking down the crumbling old Elm Haven projects in Dixwell and rebuilding them as Monterey Place. It has also already begun on the redevelopment of the first half of Quinnipiac Terrace.

Both of those overhauls were funded through federal Hope VI grants, she said. That Clinton-era program provides a lot of money for public housing rehab, she said, but is also highly competitive.

Upon taking over the agency, she said, she knew the odds were slim that the housing authority would be able to get another Hope VI grant — let alone many more — to undertake the comprehensive redo of public housing properties across the city that she hoped to accomplish.

Then, in 2012, Congress passed and President Obama signed into law the RAD program.

Since the inception of federal public housing in the 1930s, DuBois-Walton said, upkeep has relied entirely on the rent that agencies collect from low-income tenants and on direct aid provided by the federal government. Local agencies are not allowed to mortgage, or leverage, public housing authority-owned properties to raise large amounts of cash to fund capital improvements.

Over the decades, as the federal government has prioritized subsidizing homeownership in the suburbs for predominantly white middle-class people, it has also pulled direct funding for public housing, which have disproportionately come to house poor, Black and Hispanic city residents.

The RAD program does not provide a direct infusion of cash to public housing agencies, DuBois-Walton explained. Instead, it allows agencies to transfer ownership of their properties to private entities, change the federal subsidy structure for those affordable units to Section 8, and then borrow against those newly-transferred properties and use federal tax credits attract private investors to help fund major capital improvements.

“We had to figure out how to stay in business as a company. We had to diversify our funding sources,” DuBois-Walton said.

So the city’s housing authority formed the Glendower Group, which took the lead in redeveloping public housing authority properties under the RAD program — and in attracting hundreds of millions of dollars in private investment along the way.

A RAD conversion ​“should be seamless to the residents,” she said. ​“They shouldn’t feel any differences in terms of the amount of rent they pay [when shifted] from public housing to Section 8. What they should experience is the benefit of a hugely improved development.”

Those residents in RAD-redeveloped properties still pay no more than 30 percent of their monthly income on rent, she said. They retain the same rights as public housing tenants around grievance processes, public notices, and self-governance through Tenant Resident Councils (TRCs).

The way that the housing authority went about redeveloping west-side projects like Brookside and Rockview, DuBois-Walton said, prioritized the voices and input of actual residents through the creation of a West Rock Implementation Committee where resident representation outnumbered government officials.

Those committees made decisions about design, layout, who the architects and developers would be, what the residents rights’ would be during the development.

“They hammered it out in the most passionate ways, but in ways that really modeled what a good sense of community involvement could be and that transferred power to the residents,” DuBois-Walton said.

“To me, that’s what equity really means. Until we get to that place of shifting power and resources, everything else is nice words and window dressing. But it doesn’t actually change systems.”

DuBois-Walton was asked her view of how finished redevelopments like Rockview, Brookside, and Wilmont Crossing turned out.

“It’s so beautiful. I think it does exactly what I wanted to do,” she said. ​“To make people know that we believe in them, that we believe in their humanity, that we believe in them as people and they deserve the very best, whether they are paying us $50 a month for that unit or $1,000 a month. … They are a part of a community where everyone should have an opportunity and access to things of value.”

What About That Per-Unit Cost?

One criticism, at least from some New Haven Independent commenters, has centered on the cost per unit for these public housing redevelopments.

One of the more frequent criticisms leveled by commenters over the years under stories about these major DuBois-Walton-led rebuilds has been their expense in relation to the construction costs of other, non-government-backed housing.

“By accepting federal dollars and then overpaying for construction (to the tune of a half million dollars per unit) HAHN has single handedly overinflated construction prices in NHV,” reads one such comment from 2017. ​“They are hurting far more people than they are helping.”

DuBois-Walton countered that per-unit redevelopment costs for projects she’s worked on have actually been in the range of $200,000 to $300,000, not the half-million alleged by critics. She said the critics throw in area infrastructure expenses that aren’t added into calculated into the per-unit costs for the private builds used as comparisons.

The lowest per-unit redevelopment cost was for Brookside Phase 2, which came in at around $198,000, she said. In 2015, the Farnam/Mill River Crossing redevelopment cost per unit was $334,000.

“Usually what people are looking at, they’re looking at a number that includes the new sewers and the new roads. They’re bundling all of that into the cost of the unit, which is not the way it’s calculated in the field,” DuBois-Walton said. ​“It’s not a fair comparison.”

For those who say that $200,000 to $300,000 per unit is still too high, DuBois-Walton offered a few other rebuttals.

First of all, she said, ​“I will always push back on people who say that poor people don’t deserve anything good. I start from a place where we need to build things that any of us would be proud to live in.”

Secondly, she said, ​“we’re building quality housing that is energy efficient, that is going to last. The proof is in the pudding.”

Monterey Place has been up now for two decades, she said. ​“Drive through it. It still looks like a community that is worthy of people living there. We’re building stuff that is lasting. It’s a good investment of public dollars.”

Finally, she said, when you look at, say, the $334,000 per unit cost for Mill River Crossing, not all of that redevelopment cost is borne by public dollars.

“Our leverage is something like three to one, private dollars to public dollars,” she said. ​“We’ve been able to take public dollars [and, through the RAD program], use it to leverage private investment. The private investor gets the benefit of a tax break. And we’re getting investment of their dollars to build housing that is going to last.”

“I think that’s a really smart use of public resources, and I think that’s what public safety net programs should be invested in.”

Maintenance & Security: ​“I Will Always Be Accountable”

Another source of debate has centered on living conditions at properties that have not received major capital improvements and redevelopment overhauls.

Over the years, tenants, alders, and legal aid attorneys have frequently spoken up about unsafe living conditions and delayed maintenance at properties like Robert T. Wolfe Apartments, Westville Manor, and Newhall Gardens. (Click on the video above to watch tenants and lawyers describe water problems at Westville Manor in 2013.)

DuBois-Walton said that her top priority when running the housing authority was to ​“make sure that people have safe and decent housing.”

She never wanted to get a call that people’s needs have not been attended to. But, given the size of the agency and the age of some of the properties, that did happen.

“We try to prevent it from happening by regular and managed and supervised preventative maintenance schedules and inspection schedules and regular reporting on conditions and” an easy-to-use and responsive work order system, she said.

Anytime the housing authority fell short, she said, was an opportunity to ​“first, fix the issue. Fix it in a timely and responsible way. Then figure out: What did we do wrong? What do we put in place to make sure this isn’t a repetitive issue?”

“I will never hide from it,” she continued. ​“I will always be accountable for it. I will always be responsive for it. I will get it addressed and put the steps in place to try to not have it be recurring. And I’d work like heck” to make sure the fixes weren’t band aids, but long-lasting.

As for concerns expressed by tenants about public safety at housing authority properties, DuBois-Walton said, she said the agency under her leadership prioritized putting in new lighting and cameras at older properties like Robert T. Wolfe, redesigning the rebuilt Farnam Courts/Mill River Crossing to create a layout that increased visibility and decreased hidden corners, and — in emergency situations — relocating tenants to new properties, or even out of the city, if they were in danger of imminent harm.

Tenant Takes: The Good, The Bad, & The ​“I Don’t Mess With” Voting

In recent interviews outside of housing authority-owned properties across the city, current public housing residents offered a generally positive take on their experiences living in Elm City Communities properties — with one key, unwaveringly critical exception from a current tenant at perennially plagued Robert T. Wolfe.

Tenants interviewed by the Independent also had mixed-to-ambivalent takes on DuBois-Walton’s run for mayor.

Glynnis Terry and Bruce Gatlin have lived at Charles McQueeney Towers at 360 Orange St. downtown for 12 years and 10 years respectively.

Both said their experiences have been overall positive living at the housing authority flagship building, which has the agency’s headquarters on the ground floor. Terry said that the work order system for apartment repairs ​“takes forever,” and that she’d appreciate more security guards on site.

Gatlin said he’ll likely vote for DuBois-Walton for mayor, and might even help fellow tenants get to the polls to support here. ​“Why not? Everybody deserves a chance,” he said.

Terry was more ambivalent. ​“My mind’s made up. I’m not gonna vote.” Whoever’s mayor doesn’t make a difference to her, she said.

Outside of Mill River Crossing on Grand Avenue, Fay Waldron (pictured) said she will definitely support DuBois-Walton for mayor.

“I don’t miss any voting,” she said. ​“I’m gonna give her that chance.”

She said she’ll support DuBois-Walton even though she’s had some maintenance trouble at her new Mill River Crossing apartment, which she said recently sprung a leak from the kitchen sink that took too long for the housing authority maintenance crew to fix. Those delays weren’t a problem at her previous housing authority-owned apartment on Shelton Avenue, she said. ​“That was excellent. Something scratch, they send somebody right away.”

So why support DuBois-Walton for mayor? ​“She’s OK,” Waldron said. ​“I believe in fair dealing, giving everybody a chance to improve.”

Sitting on benches in the shade outside of the entrance to Wilmont Crossing (pictured) in West Rock, TRC President Willard Ford and fellow tenants Ronnie and Mary were on the fence as to whom they’ll be supporting for mayor.

“It’s a toss up,” Ford said. ​“I don’t know.”

On the one hand, the three all enjoy living in the decade-old Wilmont Crossing property, even though all three said the property feels less safe now that it’s open not just to low-income seniors, but also to younger families.

“I feel like she’s really good,” Ford said about DuBois-Walton. But Mayor Elicker has also done a good job, and has had to focus almost entirely on, responding to the Covid-19 pandemic during his first term, all three said. They said they’re interested in seeing what he can do when directing his attention to other critical issues — like the increase in violent crime citywide, and ​“the principal issue” at Brennan-Rogers School.

A Westville Manor tenant named Lisette said she has ​“no complaints” about the 10 years she has lived at that housing authority-owned property.

“When something needs to be done” regarding maintenance at her building, she said, the housing authority maintenance crew is usually prompt.

She said she knew little about DuBois-Walton, but was wary of voting for her solely based on her experience running the housing authority. ​“Those are two different arenas,” she said. ​“When you become mayor, you’re dealing with a bigger area.”

She also said she had seen Elicker show up on television news to the scene of a shooting and talk with police and nearby residents. He struck her as empathetic, Lisette said. ​“He seems like he really cared.”

Outside of Robert T. Wolfe Apartments, on Union Avenue, Bert Person (pictured) was unequivocal in not supporting DuBois-Walton for mayor.

How does he think the housing authority has been run under DuBois-Walton’s leadership, based on his experience at Robert T. Wolfe over the past year and a half? (He lived in a housing authority-owned property on Ferry Street in Fair Haven before that, he said.)

“I don’t see it being run well at all,” he said. ​“It’s being run. But not well.” He said the elevator is frequently broken, tenants buy and sell drugs in the open, and he doesn’t feel safe at the property.

That doesn’t mean Person will be voting for Elicker. He told the Independent that he won’t be voting at all in the mayor’s race.

“I don’t mess with that,” he said with dismay. ​“It’s all a bunch of bullshit.”