Thomas Breen photos
Tenant leader Bethea: “The first thing I smell in the morning is crack.”
If you could smell this photo of a second-floor hallway at the Robert T. Wolfe Apartments, your nostrils would be hit by the heavy, musty stench of mildew mixed with acrid smoke.
The seniors and disabled who live there have become used to those smells in the hallways and stairwells. They describe their eight-story tower across from Union Station as beset by drug dealers and drug users, homeless people and prostitutes, leaky roofs and public urination.
The 93-unit complex at 49 Union Ave. is owned and run by the city’s public housing authority, Elm City Communities/Housing Authority of New Haven (HANH).
Immediately adjacent to the sprawling, vacant, cracked-asphalt expanse that used to house the Church Street South apartment complex, the Robert T. Wolfe Apartments are occupied primarily by elderly and disabled low-income tenants.
The Robert T. Wolfe Apartments at 49 Union Ave.
Freeman Bethea, the 63-year-old president of Robert T. Wolfe’s Tenant Resident Council (TRC), has lived in a third-floor apartment in the building for the past nine years. Over that time he has become an expert in identifying the odors there.
“The first thing I smell in the morning is crack,” he said in an interview at the complex Monday afternoon. He said he is as qualified as anyone else to identify the smell emanating from his neighbor’s bedroom. After all, Bethea said, several decades ago he himself was a drug dealer.
Looking down the southern stairwell.
A cushion on the stairwell’s fifth-floor landing.
The smoky stench fills the hallway floating past the two elevators (one of which, he and several tenants said, is consistently broken) and down to the southern stairwell.
There, Bethea said, drug dealers routinely set up shop for the day and homeless people routinely lay down cushions for the night.
“Crack bags. Condoms. Bags of food. Crack pipes,” TRC Vice President Alicia Spenser said Tuesday morning as she listed what she routinely finds in the building’s stairwells and hallways. “The stairwells are disgusting.”
“Anybody and everybody comes in and does whatever they want,” said another tenant, eighth-floor resident Theresa Boone (pictured). “It’s terrible. Drug addicts and drug dealers are always coming in the building.”
“This building is gone, man,” added another eighth-floor tenant, who declined to share his name but did say he’s 64 and has lived in the building for 19 years. “This building is shot. If the Health Department come here, they close this building down. It’s that freaking bad.”
“A Vulnerable Population”
HANH President Karen DuBois-Walton (pictured) said the top priority of the housing authority is the security and safety of its buildings and residents.
She said the housing authority has one full-time maintenance staffer and one part-time maintenance staffer service the building on a daily basis. Other support service staff are routinely on site, she said. A city police officer lives full-time in one of the building’s apartments.
“I wish I had unlimited resources,” DuBois-Walton said about having enough maintenance staff to meet demands at all of the housing authority’s buildings across town, including Robert T. Wolfe. The housing authority has engaged an outside consultant to advise on how best to deploy existing staff, she said. “That process is wrapping up this month.”
As for security at the building, DuBois-Walton said that the housing authority did somewhat recently switch from having paid, uniformed security guards working the front desk to having tenants, compensated for their labor during peak morning and evening hours buzzing in visitors and overseeing the front entrance.
That change was motivated in part by cost and efficiency concerns with having uniformed guards on site, as well as by resident dissatisfaction with the security then employed, DuBois-Walton said.
“Security is only as good as the technology in place and the human factor participating,” she said. “We did get concerns about people being let into the building,” and housing authority staff have reached out to tenants and tenant-guard volunteers about not letting in people they don’t know, or people they do know to be trouble.
The building’s front entrance, lobby, common room, and hallways all have security cameras, she said. “We’re exploring whether cameras in stairwells are needed, too,” she added.
Tenants also have screens in their apartments that allow them to see a live camera feed of the front door whenever someone is buzzing to be let in. Maintenance staff check the front and back doors everyday to make sure that no bolts have been cut. And the housing authority does move to evict tenants who endanger their neighbors and whom they find in violation of the terms of their lease.
“We have a vulnerable population,” DuBois-Walton said about the primarily elderly and disabled tenants at Robert T. Wolfe. “People do tend to prey on that population.”
“Like Hell Out Of The Sewer”
Despite these maintenance and security efforts by the housing authority, tenant after tenant after tenant on Monday and Tuesday told the Independent that the building is in wracked by leaks and mildew, is frequented by drug dealers and buyers, and feels generally unsafe and unsanitary for people who have called this complex home for years.
“Their model is pay your rent, shut up, or get out,” said fourth-floor resident Paul Tricaso (pictured above).
He and Spencer said that, when Church Street South was condemned several years ago and finally demolished last year, many of the drug dealers, users, and prostitutes based out of that complex simply moved next door to Robert T. Wolfe.
Looking south from the third floor towards Union Station and Church Street South.
“There was a girl turning tricks in the back hallway” and in the stairwell near his apartment, said Tricaso. “I won’t leave my house after 5 p.m.”
“The residents’ visitors feel like they can come here and do whatever they want,” Spencer added.
Bethea said that people routinely wake him up at two, three, four in the morning by knocking on his door, looking for drugs, mistaking him for a dealer.
“They’re knocking on my door all the time,” said another third-floor tenant who declined to be named out of fear of retaliation.
John Carlson photo
Inside one of Robert T. Wolfe’s stairwells in November 2018.
Sixth-floor tenant Francisco Catala said that, if he ever has to use the stairwell because the elevators are out of service, “I have to cover my nose.”
Why? Because people “come and go in the steps. They pee in the steps.”
“I’ve been living there for five years, and I never had the problems that I have now,” he added.
Some residents were more sanguine about the drug dealing and use they know take place in the building.
“Crack is an epidemic in every building in this city,” said Ken Colucci. “This place isn’t bad. If you stay to yourself, you’re good.”
Thomas Breen photo
Even residents who said they weren’t so bothered by the drug use said the smells at the complex, of mildew and smoke and urine and feces, are unsettling, to the say the least.
“It stinks like hell out of the sewer,” said 61-year-old second-floor tenant Annie Williams (pictured above).
“It Rains In My Apartment”
A cracked roof in the ground-floor community room.
Spencer added that unwelcome visitors aren’t the only problem plaguing tenants at Robert T. Wolfe. There are also cracks, leaks, and mold, especially on the eighth floor, where she currently lives.
“It rains in my apartment,” she said. “Because of the roof. It’s no good.”
She said she is otherwise very happy with her apartment, just as she’s happy with the hard work of the building’s maintenance man. But the latter simply cannot cover as much space as he is required to by the housing authority, she said, and her otherwise hospitable one-bedroom apartment has a hole in the roof.
Many of the residents who spoke to the Independent said that they had heard from housing authority representatives for years that the building was going to be significantly rehabbed. Instead, they said, it’s just continued to deteriorate.
DuBois-Walton said that housing authority has indeed held multiple community meetings with tenants over the years about prospective renovations tied to the Church Street South development next door.
Those major renovations are tied to a competitive $30 million federal Project CHOICE grant that, so far, the city, the housing authority, and the Massachusetts-based Church Street South developer have not been able to secure.
“This is a bit of the development cycle,” DuBois-Walton said about the unintended consequences of getting residents’ hopes high for major renovations that then have to be tempered in the short-term when grants don’t come through.
Nevertheless, she said, “this is definitely one of the buildings” that will be significantly rebuilt as part of whatever comes next to Church Street South.
Until then, Bethea said, federal Housing and Urban Development (HUD) inspectors just keep signing off on the safety and health of the building. Even though he and several fellow tenants strongly disagree.
“They’re not going by HUD rules,” he said.