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02/22/2016 11:00 PMThere was an older woman in a wheelchair. There was a young senator, shaking hands. There was a man with a sticker on his shirt and a woman with a laptop. Many people in the room knew one another. Some had never met.
Everyone knew Alice.
For some of the men and women gathered around the table, Alice was a sister or a neighbor. She was the woman in the coffee shop or the clerk in the shoe store. For a few, she was the face in the mirror.
“Growing up,” said Ed Bonilla, “my whole family was Alice.”
Bonilla, senior director of community resources for Middlesex United Way, is one of several housing advocates who attended the Shoreline Basic Needs Task Force (SBNTF) public potluck dinner and conversation on Feb. 4, at Andrews Memorial Town Hall.
Founded in 2012, SBNTF is a collaboration of community groups and citizens whose goal is to increase self-sufficiency among vulnerable individuals and families along the Connecticut shoreline. They focus on issues such as housing, income and wages, and food insecurity.
SBNTF’s dinner meeting included representatives from The Connection, HOPE Partnership, Middlesex Habitat for Humanity, Clinton Youth & Family Services, and members of the community. The evening’s topic was affordable housing: What’s needed, and what are Clinton’s options? How many residents are working full-time and struggling to make ends meet? Of the people we encounter every day around town, how many are Alice?
Who Is Alice?
Alice, Bonilla explained, is anyone who is “Asset Limited, Income Constrained, and Employed”—the population often referred to as the working poor. These community members operate on a tight “survival budget” for food, housing, childcare, transportation, healthcare, and taxes, and they have trouble making ends meet.
Households operating below a basic cost-of-living threshold—hundreds of thousands of “Alice” households in Connecticut—represent about 25 percent of all households in the state. Combined with the additional 10 percent of households officially living in poverty, these struggling families make up more than a third of the state’s population. And in spite of the shoreline’s enduring charm and wealth, Alice lives here, too.
“Most people who make communities go are Alice,” Bonilla said. They might work two or three jobs—”piecemealing it”—and while they don’t fall under the official Federal Poverty Level (FLP), their income falls short of what allows them to afford basic necessities, including decent housing.
SBNTF member and retired children’s librarian Lynn Hidek recalled, during her days at the Henry Carter Hull Library, meeting “increasing numbers of people who were struggling, spending too much of their paychecks on housing.
“Rents are high,” especially on the shoreline, she said. “There is little opportunity to save for a down payment on a home, and those ‘starter homes’ are priced well over $200,000.”
Lauren Ashe, executive director of the nonprofit HOPE Partnership, confirmed that not only are rentals pricey and scarce, but that developers—especially along the shoreline—are no longer building starter homes.
HOPE Partnership was formed in 2003 in response to an affordable housing crisis in Old Saybrook, when it was discovered that many families were living in motels. The partnership’s board of directors includes human service providers, financial services professionals, elected officials, engineers, architects, developers, and land use attorneys.
“We work with town government, land owners, real estate developers, and others to create a continuum of affordable housing options in the shoreline towns,” said Ashe.
Like Middlesex Habitat for Humanity, HOPE Partnership’s goal is to create sustainable local housing that’s attractive and appropriate to the surrounding neighborhoods. Some of its recent projects are Ferry Crossing, a 16-unit mixed-income development in Old Saybrook with townhouses and garden apartments ranging from one to three bedrooms, and College Point, a renovated, historic two-family home between Old Saybrook’s North and South coves that comprises an affordable unit as well as one rented at the market rate. To see these properties and meet the people who call them home, visit www.hope-ct.org and click “Meet the Faces of Hope.”
“We want to make sure people aren’t scared of affordable housing,” said Ashe, adding that families who need it are people residents connect with every day: childcare workers, nursing aides, cashiers, landscapers, hairdressers, assemblers, and food service workers.
Too many people whose jobs are in Clinton are priced out of the very communities in which they work, according to Sarah J. Bird, executive director of Middlesex Habitat for Humanity, which is part of the SBNTF Affordable Housing Committee.
“We hope to bring more awareness to the need for affordable housing—safe, decent, affordable homes for people of the shoreline communities,” she said.
Middlesex Habitat for Humanity builds, renovates, and repairs “simple, decent, affordable homes” together with partner families, who help in the construction and repair of their homes. The group’s stated aim is to “eliminate substandard housing in Middlesex County, one house, one family at a time.”
‘No One Solution’
Solutions for Alice need to be collaborative—the combined efforts of the nonprofit, business, and government sectors, Bonilla said—and they have to focus on root causes, such as employment practices, the cost and availability of workforce training and education, access to childcare and transportation, and lack of affordable housing.
According to the United Way, housing is the single largest and least flexible expense in most family budgets. As a general rule, housing should cost no more than 30 to 33 percent of a household’s income. Many Connecticut families, however, have to spend as much as 50 percent of their income on housing, leaving too few dollars for other basic needs. In Middlesex County, 22 percent of homeowners and 40 percent of renters are under extreme housing burden, meaning they pay more than 35 percent of their income on housing.
“There’s no one solution,” Bonilla said. “We need help from legislators, but also from communities.”
Hidek says SBNTF hopes to incentivize the development of affordable apartments in Clinton and encourage those who own small parcels of land to donate them to an organization like HOPE Partnership. Other ideas that emerged from the dinner meeting included working with banks to secure gap funding for good mortgage candidates who cannot pay the full asking price on a property; using Main Street grants to reconstruct commercial spaces downtown and build affordable housing over them; and deed-restricted home ownership, which could allow owners to designate their property as affordable housing and keep it that way. Deed-restricted housing has its critics, however, who argue that in distressed areas, it can result in a concentration of poverty and that it limits the wealth and equity that low-income homeowners can build up.
Dawn Parker, project manager at The Connection, a social services nonprofit, said it’s important to look at the whole picture and take into consideration preservation of existing affordable housing, reusing existing underutilized housing that could be affordable, integrating affordability into all new developments, and recapitalizing on options that aren’t being maximized—like building apartments over commercial downtowns. She also encourages communities to rethink the way they look at housing. For example, shared housing—often with many generations under the same roof—is the norm in many cultures and carries a number of benefits. But here it can also carry a stigma.
Solutions to affordable housing problems can also be found in cases like Ryder Woods, a 174-unit mobile home park in Milford, Parker said.
As is the case with many mobile home parks, Ryder Woods residents originally owned their homes, but not the land on which they lived; for that, they paid rent and additional fees. In 1998, the park’s landowner sold the property, then distributed eviction notices to residents—violating Connecticut laws that require advance notice of the pending sale and right of first refusal to purchase the land. Ryder Woods had an active homeowners association, and their case went to trial in the state’s highest court, prompting the buyer to sell the property to a second developer.
In an unprecedented deal, and as part of the court settlement, the second developer bought a second piece of land a mile from the original parcel, completely rebuilt the community there, purchased 174 new mobile homes, and sold them to Ryder Woods residents at significantly reduced prices with mortgage terms more favorable than those available in the conventional financing market. He built a community center and a pond and, as required by their agreement, provided residents the opportunity to form a cooperative and buy the land—which they did in 2009 with $5.4 million in financing.
The former Ryder Woods site now houses a Walmart.
Studies have shown that resident-owned communities such as Ryder Woods often result in stabilized rental costs, improved park infrastructure, and better financing options. While it’s unclear whether an outcome like this is feasible for Clinton’s trailer park communities—with a steady stream of rental income, park owners may be reluctant to sell, and finding a property for a new mobile home park could prove challenging—participants in SBNTF’s dinner meeting agreed that there are model parks in town, and there are those that need remediation.
“There are water and septic issues that are costly to solve,” one participant said. “Even when people are living in truly substandard conditions, regulations are not enforced because we have no other places available where they could live.”
A Community Issue
The advantages of affordable housing for Alice are obvious. But there are broader benefits, said Bonilla, that affect all residents in a community.
“Alices are our customers. The better these families do financially, the more they have to invest in our local economy,” Bonilla said.
The United Way also emphasizes that affordable housing promotes social and economic integration and, when designed to fit with the character of the neighborhood, can revitalize a distressed area. A former brownfield, Old Saybrook’s Ferry Crossing is now a town asset.
Hidek closed the dinner meeting with suggestions for ways community members could promote affordable housing. “The Shoreline Basic Needs Task Force is online. Like us on Facebook. Volunteer for one of our task force agencies, which include SBNTF (cbellerjeau@shorelinesoupkitchens.org), HOPE Partnership (www.hope-ct.org), Middlesex Habitat for Humanity (www.habitatmiddlesex.org), The Connection (www.theconnectioninc.org), and Middlesex United Way (www.middlesexunitedway.org). Join one of our three committees: food security, household income, or housing. Write a letter of support to the editor or the Planning and Zoning Commission when an affordable housing development is being discussed in town. Attend a public hearing and support the positive impact of affordable housing.”