The Hill? Or Fair Haven? ROOF, the group heading up New Haven’s response to the foreclosure crisis, is crunching numbers to decide which parts of town would benefit most from a new $3.2 million neighborhood stabilization effort.
Crunching those numbers is Jude Wu, a second-year Yale Forestry School student. She reported her preliminary findings Tuesday at a gathering at the Graduate Club.
Wu is helping out Real Options, Overcoming Foreclosures (ROOF), the public-private rescue squad formed a year ago to try to keep families in their homes or take control of properties abandoned by distant lenders. (Wu is at left in the photo beside ROOF organizer Sameera Fazili at Tuesday’s event.)
Foreclosures soared 700 percent over the past two years. The number of abandoned buildings — often the catalyst for a stable neighborhood degenerating into chaos — has likewise leaped from 300 to 800.
ROOF is preparing its first systematic neighborhood-stabilization drive with the help of a $3.2 million federal grant to buy, rehabilitate and sell abandoned homes.
The problem is: That will fund the restoration of only 25 units of housing at first, with perhaps 60 to 100 units leveraged over time.
That 25 can go only so far.
“It’s wonderful that we’re getting the money. It doesn’t go very far when you’re trying to stabilize a whole city,” Greater New Haven Community Loan Fund (GNHCLF) chief Carl Weil, a prime mover behind ROOF, said at Tuesday’s breakfast discussion (GNHCLF organized the event as part of an ongoing monthly civic discussion series funded by TDBank.)
So, while it awaits what might be a second infusion of dough under President Obama’s stimulus plan, ROOF is figuring out how to make the biggest impact.
It has Jude Wu analyzing census data, foreclosure numbers, community investment, and others factors that make sub-neighborhoods qualify as “stable,” “distressed,” or at an in-between “tipping point.”
The idea is that the $3.2 million will make the most difference at those tipping points, where the abandonment of a cluster of homes can reverse a whole neighborhood’s fortunes.
Wu showed slides giving examples of her preliminary research. She stressed that ROOF hasn’t yet gotten to the point of deciding which neighborhoods qualify under each of those categories.
She showed Census Tract 1410, the area of Westville around Edgewood School, as an example of a “stable” area not needing the emergency help. The area has far fewer foreclosures than the rest of the city, less crime and blight, less poverty, strong institutions like the school and churches and synagogues. It ranks lower than the city average in only one relevant category, the median number of days bank-owned properties remain on the market.
Census Tract 1424 was Wu’s example of a “distressed” area so badly battered that it might need to wait until a second phase of the effort to get the help. (Again, ROOF hasn’t definitively made such determinations yet.) The tract covers the northwest stretch of Fair Haven leading from Ferry Street toward downtown, including Fillmore, Monroe and Market. You might call that area ground zero of the foreclosure crisis, produce a map bullet-riddled with rundown homes abandoned by speculators and other absentee owners who looked for a quick buck during the real-estate boom.
Wu contrasted that area with Census Tract 1406 in the Hill, where Davenport, Congress and Washington stream toward the border of Yale-New Haven Hospital’s booming district. Speculation and the foreclosure crisis have battered that area as well, but not quite as hard, Wu reported — it has 45 vacant parcels of land compared to the Fair Haven stretch’s 86. Also, projects like the new Smilow cancer hospital are acting as stabilizing forces, especially on real estate values.
That all may make the district qualify as at a “tipping point” rather than “distressed” — and therefore a better bet for the modest first injection of stabilization money.
After Wu spoke, a city neighborhood worker, Elaine Braffman, offered a suggestion based on the rounds she makes responding to citizen complaints rather than number-crunching.
“Sherman Avenue from Whalley to Goffe,” said Braffman, a tireless worker for the Liveable City Initiative (LCI). Those two blocks featured rows of beautiful old homes that in many cases were rescued and renovated by Neighborhood Housing Services (NHS), which then helped working-class families buy them and live in them. Now some of those buildings are being lost again in the foreclosure crisis, and the neighborhood appears on the brink of decline. On Monday, NHS brought U.S. housing Secretary Shaun Donovan and U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd to the block for a look. NHS chief James Paley described how a speculator outbid NHS for one of the abandoned properties. He appealed for stimulus money for not-for-profits like his to buy properties.
“It’s clearly a problem getting worse,” Braffman reported to the Graduate Club audience Tuesday. “Let’s stop it now.”
Another audience member, Alan Plattus, cautioned against marking neighborhoods as unreachable through number-crunching like Wu’s. That in itself could push them past the tipping point, he said. Plattus directs the Yale Urban Design Workshop.
“Perception has a way of disseminating into the bloodstream,” Plattus said. He noted how within neighborhoods conditions vary widely. Right by that stretch of Fair Haven, for instance, the mini-neighborhood of Chatham Square has undergone a revival.
Click here to view a neighborhood-by-neighborhood map of bank-owned properties in New Haven. ROOF and the Greater New Haven Community Loan Fund put it together.
Previous Independent coverage of New Haven’s foreclosure crisis:
• Flippers Get 2nd Shot At Fixer-Upper
• Suburban Cop Finds A City Steal
• Absentee Banklords Thwart Foreclosure Sales
• Donovan: “Help Is On The Way”
• Judge Forces WPCA To Give Mom A Chance
• WPCA Uproots Tenants, Too
• Home-Rescue Squad Ignores WPCA
• Sewer Agency Unloads House
• Foreclosure Evictions Halted
• Let The Bank Have It, This Time
• Hazel St. Sale Reflects Economic Climate
• Hill Foreclosure Triggers Memories, & Prayers
• Foreclosure Fee-Slashing Judge Leaves Town
• She’ll Be Watching Deutsche Bank
• A Last Pre-Foreclosure Look At A Lifetime Past
• New Yorker Snags Foreclosed-Upon Gem
• Foreclosure Dream Goes Sour
• Judge Slashes Foreclosure Bounty
• Tax Break Saves Woman’s House
• Bank Replaces “Gunshot Alley” Landlord
• Foreclosure Bill OK’d
• Singh Seeks Home For A Song
• Foreclosure’s Neighbor Worries More About Speeding
• Networking Replaces Foreclosure at Christy’s
• Foreclosure Bargain — & Renewal — Jeopardized
• Bank Outbids Akbar; Family May Keep Home
• “So Don’t Worry About Pablo”
• Bankruptcy Postpones Foreclosure
• Next-Door Foreclosures, 53 Years Apart
• They Met On Foreclosure Way
• Little Garage Draws Big Bids
• A 2nd Chance on Lewis Street
• Foreclosure Attracts New Breed of “Specialist”
• In Foreclosures, Judge’s Hands Tied
• Home Saved From Foreclosure. Cycle, Too
• A House For Precious?
• Deutsche Bank Grabs Dixwell Condo
• Reluctant Bidder Snags F. Haven Bargain
• Well, There’s Always Powerball
• Neighbors Retrieve Home From Bank
• Somebody Has Plans For Bassett Street
• Foreclosed, the Khennavongs Leave the Santanas
• Foreclosure Steal May Be Too Good
• 2nd Foreclosure in 3 Months Dims Bright St.
• After Foreclosure, W’ville Owner Still Hopes To Sell
• He’s Not Buying, Yet
• Quiet Foreclosure on Porter Street
• 3 Minutes Too Late
• Historic Gambardella Property Foreclosed
•2 Homes Lost, 1 Gained
• “Everybody’s Got To Eat”
• More Foreclosures, More Signs
• Foreclosure Sale Benefits Archie Moore’s
• Rescue Squad Swings Into Action
• A Bidder Shows Up
• Bank Beats Tanya’s Bid
• Westville Auction Draws A Crowd
• DeStefano: Foreclosure Plan Ready
• Can They Help?
• “We Should Over-Regulate These Bastards”
• Rosa Hears of Rescues
• WPCA Grilled on Foreclosures
• WPCA’s Targets Struggle To Dig Out
• Sue The Subprimers?
• WPCA Hearing Delayed
• 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
• Renters Caught In Foreclosure King’s Fall
• She’s One Of 1,150 In The Foreclosure Mill
• Foreclosures Threaten Perrotti’s Empire
•“I’m Not Going To Lay Down And Let Them Take My House”
• Struggling Couple Sues Over “Scam”
To learn about the ROOF Project, a community-wide effort to help New Haveners navigate the foreclosure crisis, click here.
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.