Amid Destruction, Last Tenant Holds On

by Paul Bass | May 9, 2018 3:10 pm

Delores Robinson waits for word outside her apartment. Below: Abcon crew gutting Church Street South.

Delores Robinson doesn’t find it eerie to live in the last occupied Church Street South apartment while a work crew rips apart all the buildings around her.

She’s not scared sleeping there alone with her 18-year-old granddaughter.

But when she’s not home — the thought of thieves coming back to steal her stuff and her plumbing … that’s unnerving.

Or the idea of staying in a fleabag temporary hotel room, or moving out in “the woods,” like in the Brookside public-housing development on the far west side of town — that, too, unsettles her.

So while men maneuver Bobcats and backhoes to gut and tear apart the concrete village she has called home for the past 27 years, where she raised her four children, where she spent her own teenage years as well back in the 1970s, Robinson waits for word about when she, too, will finally leave.

Not that she’s eager to.

“I really don’t want to leave,” she said Tuesday afternoon while sitting outside her apartment with her cellphone out, anticipating a call about possible new apartments. “I know I have to. I’m going like everybody else.”

“Everybody else” once occupied 301 apartments in the 22-building federally subsidized apartment complex across from Union Station. Then, at the behest of New Haven Legal Assistance attorneys, government inspectors discovered mold problems that had been neglected for decades, crumbling roofs and porches, and other dangerous conditions that coincided with rampant asthma. Officials declared that everyone needed to be moved out and the complex torn down.

That was years ago. Officials originally promised to relocate all families by Christmas 2015. Finding new homes for all the families has proved harder than promised.

Now the complex’s owner, Massachusetts-based Northland Investment Corp., has begun in earnest dismantling the buildings.

The company is “doing ‘pre demo” work, which includes interior demo and abatement,” Chairman Larry Gottesdiener reported in an email message. Abcon Abatement & Demolition is overseeing the removal of asbestos, the current phase of the work, and then the demolition. Its crew was hard at work Tuesday on buildings in the northern half of the complex. The areas are now fenced off to the public, eliminating popular shortcuts from the train station to downtown.

“The [demolition] project is going to be a year and a half to get it down and cleaned up and everything else,” said Abcon Director Dan Masto.

City Building Official Jim Turcio said he expects to issue a permit for the full demolition later this week, once Abcon finishes with the asbestos. “It’s in the floors. It’s in the walls,” he said. Meanwhile, the city is working with Northland to secure financing for a 1,000-unit mixed-income complex that would include 300 “affordable” apartments.

Josephine Falcon, who has lived in the neighboring subsidized Robert T. Wolfe apartments for the past four years, said Tuesday that she is happy to see the work moving forward.

“I used to look out my window,” she said, “and I’d see kids with no parents wandering around, and drug dealers in the back.” She said that she saw drug dealers working the back courtyard even after almost all of the tenants at the apartment complex had been relocated.

“Not everyone low income is bad,” she said. “People need to know that. But I would love to see New Haven get bigger and property values go up.”

The relocation of tenants has created a ghost town feel at Church Street South. Except at Jose Marti Court section nearest to the train station, which remains open, and where Delores Robinson remains with her granddaughter in a first-floor apartment.

Good Memories

Robinson, who fondly remembered living in Church Street South as a teen, moved back there in the early 1990s from Florida. The murderous Jungle Boys drug-dealing gang ruled the complex back then.

“I prayed and prayed,” she recalled. And her prayers came true: “My children never got involved in that.”

“I raised four children here,” said Robinson, who is 63. “They’ve all become productive citizens.”

When Northland and HANH’s development and management arm, the Glendower Group, started moving her neighbors out, Robinson wasn’t in a rush. She’s comfortable at Church Street South. She likes being on a bus line because she doesn’t drive. She likes living on the first floor because she has weak knees that need replacements.

Some of her neighbors went to live temporarily in hotels before finding new apartments. She heard horror stories from them, so she wouldn’t accept offers to do the same. “I’m so nervous about roaches and bedbugs,” she said. Plus, “I only want to move one time. I’m too old. I work 12-hour days.”

Complicating her move was her decision not to accept a portable federal Section 8 rental voucher that she could take to any participating landlord’s apartment in town. Most Church Street South families did take those vouchers. Twelve opted instead to move into projects that have subsidies directly attached to them (rather than to tenants) under Section 8(bb)(1) of the U.S. Housing Act of 1937. Robinson said she had heard too many horror stories about Section 8 landlords who rushed families out of apartments to make way for relatives, or who live far away and allow conditions to deteriorate.

But it proved hard to find owners of larger complexes to make apartments available under that program for Church Street South tenants. Eventually, the Glendower Group convinced most of the 12 families to accept Section 8 vouchers, according to Senior Vice-President Shenae Draughn.

Robinson remained a hold-out. She looked at some apartments. But she felt she needed one on the first floor. She wanted a city-style neighborhood, not the remote Brookside development behind West Rock. “I don’t like the woods. That’s creepy. I’d rather be here.” She wants to move to a complex like, say, Monterey Place in Dixwell or the newly rebuilt Farnam Courts at Grand Avenue and Hamilton Avenue.

“They have a right to say yea or nay whether or not we think it’s suitable,” Draughn said of the tenants to whom she shows potential apartments.

So Robinson continues going to work for 12-hour shifts at Medtronic medical-device factory off I‑91 Exit 8, then coming home to an otherwise abandoned Church Street South. At home, she feels safe. But she feels nervous while at work — because of the thieves who continually break into other apartments to steal the pipes. She had to ask management to replace her own doorknob after thieves tried unsuccessfully to break in. Several times her apartment flooded after thieves made off with the pipes in neighboring apartments.

Now Robinson has accepted fate: She told Glendower she’ll agree to a Section 8 voucher. She’s in the process of completing the paperwork to qualify. “If that’s what it takes for me to get out of here,” she said.

But the story may end with good news for her. Draughn said it’s looking like an apartment will be available at either Farnam (where the first rebuilt wing opened last week) or Monterey. “She’s in the process of completing paperwork,” Draughn said. She predicted that Robinson will be out of Church Street South — which will then be completely empty of tenants — within two weeks, assuming Robinson’s paperwork clears.

And assuming Robinson OKs the apartment. She said she wants to make sure she doesn’t need to ride an elevator to an upper floor. “I get creeped out” by elevators, she said.

“They have ground floors at Monterey Place?”

Thomas Breen contributed reporting.

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Amid Destruction, Last Tenant Holds On

Good Memories

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