The Next Church Street South?

The city has ordered that families be moved out of — and emergency repairs made to — moldy apartments in a crumbling federally subsidized cinderblock-and-concrete apartment complex … that is not Church Street South.

The four-story complex is Antillean Manor. It contains 31 apartments, only 22 of which are occupied, along a block of Day Street stretching from Chapel Street to Edgewood Avenue.

The complex’s staircases and second-story balcony walkway are cracked and falling apart. Water leaks into apartments when it rains, leaving behind mold after the puddles get cleaned up. Ceilings fall apart. Residents want out.

City Building Official Jim Turcio issued an emergency order on Wednesday to Carabetta Management, the company that runs the complex, to make emergency repairs within 10 days. The order demands repairs for deteriorating ​“concrete balconies and walkways throughout the building,” broken guard rails, and reinforcement rods that ​“have rusted out causing severe spalling of the masonry block.”

Turcio acted after his deputy Daniel O’Neil inspected the property at the request of Rick Mazzadra of city government’s anti-blight agency, the Livable City Initiative (LCI).

Turcio’s order dealt with the complex’s exterior. Last month LCI’s Mark Stroud inspected the insides of two apartments, where he found enough mold to condemn the units. LCI ordered Carabetta to move the occupants out immediately. It moved one family to a hotel room overnight, then to a vacant Antillean Manor apartment. It moved the other unit’s family as well to a vacant apartment on the premises.

It’s unclear who owns the building. Carabetta manages the complex on behalf of a residents’ association that appears not to have functioned or truly existed for years. Carabetta was in talks this week with the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), which pays the rental subsidies for Antillean Manor, about a long-term solution. A Carabetta vice president Friday told the Independent that the complex is too structurally shot to save. He promised to make the swift repairs the city required while pursuing a plan with HUD to raze the complex and build one, or maybe two, new complexes.

The Sequel

Other residents told the Independent Thursday of years-long battles to get management to fix broken doors, collapsing ceilings, cracked doors, and rampant rodent infestation.

All this might sound familiar to people following the crisis at another complex in town, Church Street South, where LCI has condemned some 50 apartments and 55 families are living in hotels while the city and the owner work to find permanent new homes for all 288 families affected.

One Antillean Manor resident Thursday pointed to the cracked concrete second-floor walkway (pictured above) where her 1‑year-old son fell and bruised his hand.

“My nieces live at Church Street South,” she said. ​“I thought [the apartments there] were better than this!”

After meeting a second-floor resident at the complex this week, Turcio was stunned at the condition of the walkway. ​“How could this woman walk up that walkway in the wintertime?” he said.

Concrete is missing from a section of the roof hanging over the driveway into the complex from Day Street.

“One night I came home and that fell down,” one resident said, pointing to the missing concrete. The resident identified herself by her nickname, ​“China”; like several of her neighbors she declined to give her full name or to be photographed for fear of retribution by Carabetta.

“Another piece is coming off now!” she noted, pointing again to the crumbling structure.

The woman, who was on her way to work during the discussion, said she grew up in the neighborhood and remembered Antillean Manor as ​“a beautiful place.” She moved in over a year ago with her children. They have battled mice and water ever since.

“Every time it rains it leaks in my daughter’s room,” she said. ​“Just because you live in subsidized housing, it doesn’t mean you should have to live in substandard ways. We still pay rent. I think they need to tear [the complex] down and relocate everybody.”

Another resident brought a reporter inside her second-floor apartment, pointing to a hole in the ceiling. A leaking shower above it caused the hole, she said.

“The bathrooms don’t have vents,” she added. ​“The mold builds up. We have mice. Everybody’s got mice.” Her front door was ​“split wide open” for months, she said, until Carabetta finally fixed it last Friday. Her front doorknob was broken for a year and a half; she used just a deadbolt the company installed.

Gregchelle Griffin (pictured) pointed to the soggy ceiling where she said rain streams in during rainstorms. It used to be her daughter’s room; now her daughter doubles up with a sister in another bedroom. Griffin said she puts down buckets to capture the rain.

She can’t do much about the baseboards.

Griffin, a phlebotomist with three children, has lived at Antillean Manor for about a decade, she said. Carabetta already moved her family from a different moldy apartment in the complex, she said. In that one, she said, ​“I had cabinets with holes in them where the mice were eating the kids’ snacks.” She kept all the food in bins. (A 2014 city Building Department inspection ordered Carabetta to rid the complex of mice.)

The mice, sometimes in groups of four or five, roamed through this apartment, too, she said. She called her current apartment ​“a living hell,” where it took months to get management to fix a broken front-door lock. ​“My ex-boyfriend was able to break in and attack my current boyfriend because of the door and almost kill him,” she said.

Griffin’s grandmother used to live at Church Street South. ​“I know how bad conditions were there. I’m glad the city is starting to move people,” she said. ​“This should have happened here too. We all shouldn’t have to live like this.”

Who’s In Charge?

As at Church Street South, all the Antillean Manor (pictured) families have their rent paid by HUD Section 8 subsidies that are tied to the apartments. That means the residents can’t just take those subsidies elsewhere. They’re stuck.

In each case HUD continued to pay a private company for years — Northland at Church Street South, Carabetta at Antillean Manor — while the company let the complex fall apart. A file at the building department shows that inspections have found similar problems at Antillean Manor for 20 years, with similar emergency orders issued.

“Every ten to twelve years it’s the same order. This time they’re going to fix it or vacate it,” Turcio vowed.

But there’s one difference: Northland owns Church Street South, while no one is quite sure who truly owns Antillean Manor.

According to land records, the families who live there technically own it. The complex opened as a cooperative in 1972, one of a half-dozen or so sprinkled across the city, almost all of which have failed in recent years. (Right around the corner from Antillean Manor sits Dwight Gardens, the former Dwight Co-ops, which a private developer has just now gotten to work rebuilding.) The owner of record is Antillean Manor Cooperative.

But HUD doesn’t pay the subsidies to the cooperative. The cooperative defaulted on its $759,200 mortgage in 1984 and was foreclosed on. The federal government had guaranteed the mortgage; in 1984 the mortgage was assigned to HUD in a legal transaction.

Officials at the city’s building department and LCI haven’t been able to reach the people listed as cooperative representatives. Residents and city officials and Carabetta also said there’s no evidence the cooperative association has met for years. Carabetta gets rent checks directly from HUD and the residents. Then Carabetta forwards the mortgage payments to HUD out of those subsidies. Those payments are current, according to HUD spokeswoman Rhonda Siciliano.

“We’ve pulled the old records. All the numbers [of association members] have changed,” said LCI Executive Director Serena Neal-Sanjurjo. ​“That’s the biggest issue of the last four to five days.” She said a city attorney has spent ​“the past five days” trying to find responsible parties.

“it is clearly one of our concerns,” Neal-Sanjurjo said of Antillean Manor. ​“We are working to get to the bottom of it. We’re going to keep at it until we find a resolution.”

Residents interviewed this week said they didn’t know about the existence of a cooperative association. They consider Carabetta the outfit in charge. And they complained that it takes months for repairs, if repairs get made at all.

In an interview, HUD’s regional field office director, Suzanne Piacentini (pictured meeting last month with Church Street South families), urged Antillean Manor residents to report problems in their apartments directly to HUD by calling 860 – 240-9720.

What Next?

Carabetta was brought in to manage the rundown complex in 2011.

“We only became involved in the property because the prior management was having difficulty keeping the building from completely falling apart,” Carabetta Senior Vice-President William Stetson said in an interview Friday. ​“HUD realized something needs to be done to at least hold it together while a permanent plan could be prepared and implemented.”

Stetson said the firm has poured money into the complex to try to keep up with never-ending repairs in a structure that was doomed from the start.

“The design of the structure was horrible. The boiler, for example, is on the second floor of the back building, only accessible through the roof. You have to climb on the roof and open a hatch to get down to the boiler. The electric service is underground in a vault. It has nothing but water in it,” Stetson said.

“Our goal is to give somebody a home they can be proud of. Antillean is not that. They [the residents] know that it’s terrible.”

Meanwhile, Stetson said, Carabetta has spent ​“a good couple of hundred thousand dollars” drawing up long-term plans.

One idea: Buy and fix up a nearby building where they can move all the remaining 22 families for good. Carabetta has spoken with HUD about allowing the project-based Section 8 rental subsidies, which currently must be used at Antillean Manor, to be used at that new location under Section 8(bb)(1) of the U.S. Housing Act of 1937.

Another idea: Move half the complex residents to another temporary location. Tear down that half of the complex. Build half a new complex there. Move the remaining residents there. Knock down the other half of the complex. Build the rest of the new complex there. Move back the original families.

Either plan would require years and millions of dollars. In the meantime, Antillean Manor, like Church Street South, will keep city and federal officials scrambling to keep families housed and safe.