West River

Homeownership

Campaign

New Haven,

Connecticut

Introduction

The Developer

Tour the Site (Video)

The Member

The Resident (Video)

The Numbers

The Developer: Neighborhood
Housing Services of New Haven

House restored and sold to a first-time buyer as part of the West River initiative.

Thea Buxbaum was senior resource development and community affairs specialist at Neighborhood Housing Services of New Haven (NHS) during the development of the West River Homeownership Campaign.

West River is a very engaged neighborhood. The leadership of the West River Neighborhood Association came to us and said we want to partner with your organization to increase homeownership in our neighborhood. NHS will work in any city neighborhood but only if we are invited.

West River had suffered during the redevelopment era because it flanked the Route 34 urban development corridor. An entire neighborhood was demolished in the 1950s to make way for a planned superhighway. The highway wasn’t built for environmental reasons, but the demolition severed the guts of the neighborhood.

West River has this magnificent historic housing stock and a mix of longtime residents and new residents. The homeownership rate — as in so many urban neighborhoods during that period — had plummeted. The number of absentee landlords increased and stability diminished. A neighborhood group rose up in the mid 1990s to promote stable homeownership and rental housing.

NHS was founded in 1979 with a mission to stabilize and revitalize neighborhoods by increasing homeownership. We have been doing houses since the early 1980s, but have focused on the West River neighborhood for the last eight to 10 years. We have done over 20 houses in that neighborhood over the last decade. NHS develops about 12 to 15 homeownership houses a year.

We opened the New Haven Homeownership Center in 2001. We recognized that we could get multigenerational renters into ownership houses but to make it work we needed to provide them with more counseling. We now have group counseling, one-on-one sessions, and individual credit counseling to help people become mortgage ready.

Entrance to a restored West River house.

We also have post-purchase education, including a hands-on home-improvement lab, which has been incredibly successful. In our post-purchase classes, we discovered that a homeowner might pay a plumber a whole day’s salary just to repair a toilet. The job would cost the homeowner only about $9 if he knew how to do it himself. This was what motivated us to develop our home-improvement and energy-conservation laboratory.

If someone buys a house with rental units they must take our landlord class, which is open to the public. We also screen tenants and do credit checks for people who purchase our multifamily homes. We do this at the request of the home owners.

The AHP Application
The West River Homeownership Campaign was a seven-house application. We served mixed-income families with incomes ranging from 50 to more than 80 percent of the area median income. We intentionally made it a mixed-income development because the neighborhood had such a strong low-income base. We felt strongly that this was the time to help diversify the income of the neighborhood. Our general philosophy is that neighborhoods are much healthier if there is income diversity.

The families who benefited included couples, single heads of households, families with kids, and people of diverse ages. Our home buyers were predominately African American and Hispanic — groups that make up 90 percent of our customer base. People who buy our houses are for the most part in the service sector, but police officers and teachers also buy our houses. The two largest employees in New Haven are Yale University and Yale New Haven Hospital.

Pre-restoration view of a West River neighborhood house.

New Haven is approximately one-third white, one-third black, and one-third Latino. All of the neighborhoods in New Haven are racially mixed, some more so than others. We have immigrant communities here  from Africa, the Caribbean islands, South America, and Central America. There are also large Puerto Rican and Mexican populations as well as a large, growing Eastern European population.

We have helped political refugees from a couple of African countries and Eastern Europe. We are working with a family of political refuges from Afghanistan right now. We serve a lot of longtime generational renters – some from public housing.

Some of the houses we rehabbed were acquired through the City of New Haven, some through HUD. We also received one vacant parcel as a donation. A multigenerational family inherited the property and gave us the land to develop houses. The West River initiative involved six gut rehabs and one piece of new construction, which we did in partnership with the Yale School of Architecture.

We market our houses to people who graduate from our home-buyer program. If someone is interested in one of our houses they go on a waiting list. Every house in our inventory has an extensive waiting list. People like to wait for a gut-rehabbed house because there is nothing really comparable on the market. The buyers come to our home-buyer education program through our partnerships with other nonprofits, the city’s housing authority, other agencies, realtors, lenders, and hospitals.

A West River neighborhood house under renovation by Neighborhood Housing Services of New Haven.

To finance the rehab of our houses, we count on the sale price, credit lines with lenders, funding from the Connecticut Housing Tax Credit program, the Historic Homes Tax Credit program, the Community Development Block Grant program, and the Federal Home Loan Bank of Boston’s Affordable Housing Program (AHP).

The AHP was one of our critical sources for funding. The total award was for $210,000, an average of $30,000 per house. It was very, very exciting to get that award. We couldn’t have done it without that funding. The AHP was a critical piece at a time of rising housing costs and increasingly unaffordable housing for first-time moderate- and low-income home buyers — our predominant customer base. We have so far won two AHP awards.

Preserving Historic Detail
NHS strongly believes the historic housing stock should be restored to preserve the fabric of the neighborhoods. We’ve restored houses built of chestnut that have been abandoned to the weather for 20 years and are still solid. It’s quite remarkable.

Our restoration per square foot tends to be less costly than new construction. We also strongly believe — and this is something you don’t see a lot of nonprofits doing as far as I can tell  — that historic ornament and detail isn’t only for the rich. We believe that our home buyers should have the same amenities when they invest in a house as wealthier people. Rather than stripping these houses of everything that makes them unique, we try to retain detail when we can, which also increases the resale value of the houses. You see quite a bit of this in the West River Homeownership Campaign. The city is filled with gorgeous historic housing.

House restored and sold to a first-time buyer as part of the West River initiative.

Working with these houses is amazing. The houses are beautiful. It’s also satisfying to work for families who work so hard to save money to get into a house. They often live paycheck to paycheck when they come to us. They work so hard to save money to get into their own house, which often represents a change in economic status and the potential to leave something to their kids. It’s unbelievable. My grandfather came to this country and worked so hard to be able to put my father’s generation into a house. So to help other families do that is fantastic. The people we serve are some of the most inspiring, strong-willed people I have ever met. They’re just fantastic. So it’s great work.

If you love old architecture, working for a nonprofit that preserves it instead of tearing it down or covering it up with vinyl siding or doing something unspeakable to the historic integrity of a house is very satisfying. Also satisfying is the high quality of our rehabilitations. Last year, we received Home Depot’s first-ever green-building award for renovating our houses to higher energy-efficiency standards than required by the code.

Over the last 30 years, New Haven — like so many old industrial cities that tore down neighborhoods during the urban redevelopment era of the late 1950s — experienced middle-class flight to the suburbs. The city experienced high vacancy rates, low homeownership rates, a decline in economic diversity, disinvestments from tenants and absentee landlords, and increasing instability.
 
One of the benefits of being in a town with an Ivy League university is that you have some really great minds. But one of the downsides is that you become the experiment for a lot of great ideas that may not be the right ideas. New Haven has experienced waves of fabulous, challenging programs with complex consequences, which in turn create new challenges.

Thea Buxbaum (right) visits first-time home buyer Kimberly Turner in her restored West River multifamily house.

In the 1980s, New Haven experienced one of the largest plummets in housing values of any city in the country. Housing values went down everywhere and New Haven just experienced a more extreme slide. A lot of people left the city. This was when NHS started acquiring houses and doing gut rehabs. We did this because we were able to acquire many houses at affordable rates.

But that period is over. Housing values have increased. You can’t get into the housing market if you’re a low-income client who has to buy a house for $140,000 and then invest another $100,000 to insulate it and make other needed repairs.

Underwriting ratios have also increased. We’re finding that more of the people we serve are getting into houses but at greater risk because they are putting a higher percentage of their salaries into housing costs. And with utility costs going up the way they are, we are concerned, which is another reason we have the home-improvement and energy-conservation lab. We are concerned that you can’t factor utility costs into underwriting ratios. Some people will be experiencing operating costs that are far higher than they anticipated when they were getting into a house.