Charter Oak Communities in Stamford has taken the critics”™ swords that for decades poked at assisted housing with insults, even expletives, and beat them into a quantifiable success story of mixed-income communities.
The Stamford Housing Authority celebrates 75 years this year. For the past seven years it has done business as Charter Oak Communities. It is classified a quasi-governmental organization with a mayor-appointed (and thereafter independent) board of directors.
Charter Oak owns, manages or administers 3,575 housing units in Stamford across more than 20 sites. It owns 757 units, manages 357, handles the assets of 1,011 and facilitates the Section 8 voucher program for another 1,450 units. But it also does more, assisting residents in arenas that include school, health care and employment with a designated staff of 10 “service coordinators.”
The coordinators are part of a 10-year collaboration between Charter Oak and Greenwich-based and century-old Family Centers. Said Charter Oak CEO Vin Tufo, 61, “They develop a path between resident and community to connect the resident with resources. In the old days, residents were not connected to resources.” In time, he said, good begets good: “It”™s incredibly gratifying now to see residents helping neighbors, dealing with nagging issues, presenting resident-led initiatives. It leads to safety and vitality on the streets.”
The 24 units at 25 Taylor St. ”” the Taylor Street Apartments ”” offer a snapshot of Charter Oak activity. Opened in 2007, Taylor Street is termed a “mixed-tenure building,” consisting of eight owner-occupied condominiums and 16 rental apartments. The condos are owned by moderate-income, first-time homebuyers. The apartments are partly funded by the federal low-income housing tax credit and provide supportive services. The apartments house elderly, nonelderly and disabled residents. And like nearly every Charter Oak unit, they are occupied, “about 100 percent,” said Tufo.
The 204 units at Lawnhill Terrace on Custer Street were built in 1968 to be fully affordable. Now, after a $19 million ongoing remake, they will feature mixed-income and affordable units together, with no full-market component. Rent will be “moderate.”
Tufo”™s professional background ”” “critical to the job,” as he put it ”” is real estate development and construction, both of which are Charter Oak hallmarks. His doctorate is in anthropology from the University of Michigan, and a conversation with him touches upon social awareness of the sort that makes solid neighborhoods when successful, and bad neighborhoods, as in the 1960s, when it fails.
“It is a thing of the past to think that able-bodied persons are living in this housing and not working,” he said. “That is not a survivable strategy here or anywhere. As public housing failed in the past, it became homogeneous, without the ability to break out and see other behaviors ”” negative reinforcement.”
Gone by design for new construction are what Tufo called “out-of-context properties,” those that separate residents from their neighbors. Such housing historically denied tenants a sense of personal space to protect and keep up, termed “defensible space.” Tufo said that when people are invested in the neighborhood and care for the distance between the street and the front door, the results are tangible.
Housing of this sort is embodied by the under-construction Greenfield development on Merrell Avenue, a 45-unit, mixed-income development to be completed this fall.
In the red-white-and-bluest tradition of equality, Greenfield will feature janitors and executives living side by side. “The sociological or anthropological approach says sustainability equals diversity,” Tufo said. “We try to diversify income status. But I also feel there”™s a social currency. Diversity is healthy when everybody has great roof over their heads and with similar opportunities, feeling safe.
“It all helps inform what we do here,” he said. “We are all about communities.”
The rising $450 million Stamford Hospital is part of the Charter Oak equation. The hospital”™s façade will eventually front a remade world of housing, businesses and a large urban garden ”” the three-years-running Fairgate Farm on Stillwater ”” to the west. In that Stillwater Avenue neighborhood, which had been separate from the current hospital, Tufo described a previously descending spiral of behavior typified by a local parking lot: first fences, then locked gates and finally guard towers. A computer rendering highlights a much sunnier potential for Stillwater. The hospital is due for completion in 2016.
Charter Oak is on pace to assist 50 to 100 people per year in the coming years. All its leases are for one year, and it fields as many as 600 referrals per month. Between rents, grants and vouchers, Charter Oak”™s annual revenue stream is about $100 million. It employs 85.
Tufo said the feedback for Charter Oak activity is positive. “Residents don”™t want to go back to the old ways. At that critical moment when they are handed the keys to their new apartment, many break down and cry.”
