New Haven's Public Housing Vacancy Problem

Public housing apartments are breaking faster than New Haven can repair them.
Thursday, November 15, 2007
By Betsy Yagla

Motasha Leaks's home at Westville Manor is surrounded by vacant apartments. That's frustrating because Leaks, a mother of four, has been waiting for months to move into a different apartment in the same public housing complex.

Leaks, 31, can't get to her upstairs bedroom and bathroom since suffering from a stroke in September. A hospital bed takes up most of her living room. Plus, two of her four kids have disabilities: Her son needs a liver replacement and her daughter has bad asthma, but Housing Authority of New Haven (HANH) regulations won't allow an air conditioner in her one-window bedroom.

"She needs that air conditioner," says Leaks. Leaks needs a new apartment.

The Housing Authority wants to give her one, but can't offer one in Westville Manor. Leaks was offered a "tiny" apartment at Essex Townhouses on Quinnipiac Avenue, on the other side of town, but Leaks has come to depend on her neighbors in Westville, and doesn't want to leave. "If I can't get my kids to the school bus, my neighbors will. They all know me and they help me—they know I had a stroke," she says.

Of the 151 units there, at least 22 are boarded up. Citywide, there are 383 vacant HANH units awaiting repairs. Leaks lives between three boarded up units.

HANH's "vacancy team" is charged with turning over 20 units each month, says HANH chief operating officer Karen Dubois-Walton. In addition, units are put into the capital improvement plan—homes needing new kitchens, bathrooms or asbestos tiles removed—"when there's money appropriated for that project," says Dubois-Walton. "There's always more needs than funding available."

At Westville Manor, some units have been vacant for months; another has been empty for at least three years, say neighbors. That's not to say there's no activity there: Five units are being fixed up under HANH's partnership with a city program training HANH residents in the construction trade.

It's not moving fast enough for Leaks and her family. Also impatient is HANH watchdog Shelley White, a New Haven Legal Assistance Association lawyer who is pressuring HANH to build and buy more properties to house more families. "There's a financial cost to vacancies," says White.

She's talking about the $50,000 HANH is paying Vacant Property Systems for perforated steel window and door covers for vacant Westville Manor properties. Apartments not being fixed up are shuttered with plywood; those being repaired get the anti-burglary VPS covers. Westville Manor is the Housing Authority's only property using VPS covers meant to keep out vandals.

"It's partly because of how removed and remote the location is—Westville has much more vandalism into vacant properties," says Dubois-Walton. To illustrate her point, she adds: "One unit has become a poster child for this problem. Staff has turned over the unit six times. They go in, do all the work, put wooden boards up and within days folks have come in and damaged the unit."

Vacancies frustrate HANH, too. While HANH is paying and re-paying for units to be fixed, people like Leaks wait. New Haven has the distinction of having more subsidized housing units (about a third of all homes) than any city in the state, and its portfolio of housing projects, though far smaller than it once was, is still almost 2,000 units. But with so many units offline for redevelopment or repair, it's not uncommon to spend a year on a waiting list to get into a family development unit, says Dubois-Walton.

"There's a human cost [to vacancies]," says attorney White. "There are people who need to move in because they're under-housed or they need a more appropriate-sized unit and there are people on the waiting list."

Aside from units sitting vacant, HANH has taken hundreds of units "offline," transferring residents because their homes will eventually be torn down and rebuilt. Eastview Terrace, a 142-unit family development in Fair Haven Heights, was taken offline six years ago, displacing dozens of families. Last week, HANH broke ground for a new Eastview Terrace with plans to build and redo 127 units in addition to a meeting room, recreation space and learning center. The new Eastview is due to be done in 18 months, and should free up units for people on HANH's long waiting list. But that's come at a high cost too: The price of construction has more than tripled from $13 million in 2003 to $44 million.