They Became Number 1,000

Eder Errechin and Robert Bienstock knew they’d found the dream house that would keep them in the city. They didn’t know they’d also crossed a threshold for one of New Haven’s most successful neighborhood-strengthening efforts.

They became the 1,000th ​“Yale homebuyers.”

Newlyweds Errechien and Bienstock had given up on living in their favorite neighborhood, Beaver Hills. They started looking at houses in North Haven. In Wallingford. In (gasp) Woodbridge.

Then they came across the perfect home, on Colony Road near Southern Connecticut State University. They snapped it up — with the help of a $30,000 promise from Bienstock’s employer, Yale, as part of a heralded university program aimed at enabling employees to buy in the city and stabilize neighborhoods in the process.

Yale announced Tuesday that it has crossed the 1,000 threshold in the number of employees it has helped buy city homes. (In fact, the number is 1,103.)

Yale President Rick Levin launched the program in 1994 as part of a new commitment to help develop New Haven. From early on the program was hailed nationally as an innovative way for a university to play a constructive role as an urban citizen. It offers anyone from custodians to professors $5,000 down and $2,500 a year for ten years if they buy a home within designated parts of the city and stay there. Qualifying neighborhoods: Wooster Square, the eastern part of East Rock, Beaver Hills, Newhallville, Dixwell, Dwight, Fair Haven, the Hill, Newhallville, and West Hills. Less than 20 percent of people who have bought homes under the program over the past decade have moved out, according to Yale’s Michael Morand, director of metro, state and alumni communications.

A Yale release claimed that the program covers more area and offers more money to homebuyers than any other of its kind. Employees across Yale’s workforce have participated, according to the university’s statistics: 29 percent of the 1,103 are faculty members, 27 percent managers or ​“professional staff,” 31 percent clerical and technical workers, 13 percent service and maintenance workers.

Laurie Kennington works for Local 34 UNITE HERE, which represents that 13 percent. Yale agreed to expand the homebuyer program into Fair Haven as part of the 2002 contract negotiation process. Kennington and her husband, then a union member, subsequently bought a place on Chambers Street.

Kennington called the 1,000 milestone ​“terrific news.”

“We hope there’s a thousand more soon. This is exactly the kind of thing Yale should be doing for our community,” she said. ​“For most of our members it has made a huge difference.”

It has made a difference in Beaver Hills, a tree-lined middle-class neighborhood between Whalley Avenue and Crescent Street. Some 153 employees have bought homes there, according to Morand.

Errechin and Bienstock, who got married last September and were living downtown in the Eli apartments, had their eye on Beaver Hills from the start. Bienstock, a 55-year-old associate general counsel at Yale specializing in research and technology, spoke of the neighborhood’s permanent, as opposed to transitional, diversity. In other words, people from lots of racial and ethnic and religious backgrounds live there, but there’s not one group moving out and another moving in.

“We loved the [large] houses. We loved the neighbors,” Bienstock recalled. ​“But the lots were too small.”

So after a while, they reluctantly broadened their search to the suburbs. They preferred to stay in town, close to their jobs, close to West Rock, where Bienstock likes to ride his bike.

Then one day Errechin noticed the 1936 Tudor home on Colony Road listed on the Zillow real estate website. It looked bigger. He wanted to check it out.

The realtor discouraged him. He insisted.

“I’m budgeting you ten minutes,” she told Errechin and Bienstock.

The first minutes weren’t so promising. An elderly couple had lived in the house for years; it had declined somewhat. Overgrown bushes blocked sunlight from entering the windows. The old floor-to-floor carpeting didn’t impress them.

But Errechin, a 28-year-old wedding designer (he specializes in chuppas, Jewish wedding canopies; and floral arrangements) who was born in Mexico, saw possibilities. Like the big living room. ​“We can have a big table out here for 30 people for Passover,” he said. Like the ​“scallop built-ins” in the dining room (pictured). The carpet could always come up.

Bienstock liked the fact that the house sat on a double lot, extended to Bellevue Road. He liked the swimming pool out and the patio out back. Perfect for parties.

The 2,700-square-foot home had four listed bedrooms, plus another finished room in the attic. Lots of space for friends to stay over.

“By the time we walked out,” Bienstock recalled, ​“he had already redesigned it in his head.”

The couple plunked down $275,000 and snagged the house. As for the $30,000 promised by Yale, Bienstock said, he felt as though ​“we’re getting [a big chunk] of our down payment back over 10 years.”

Errechin and his brothers had the carpet pulled up within two days. Soon the floors were restored to their natural beauty. Plenty of projects remain.

Meanwhile, an elaborate holiday display, with a central menorah, is up on the front lawn. Neighbors #1,000 have put down roots.