Their apartments had mold, mice and leaky ceilings. But when they were forced to search for new homes, they were denied due to income, credit scores and criminal records — even though it’s illegal in Connecticut to deny housing to someone with a Section 8 voucher.
Hartford residents who have been displaced from formerly federally sponsored housing stood alongside community organizers and elected officials Friday for a news conference at the Christian Activities Council. The nonprofit runs the No More Slumlords campaign, in which current and former residents of Clay Arsenal Renaissance Apartments, Infill 1 and Barbour Gardens have been speaking out for two years against negligent property owners.
Their activism led the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to terminate its contracts with all three Hartford apartment complexes beginning in the spring of 2018 amid allegations the landlords failed to remedy health and safety hazards in more than 300 households. ADAR Hartford Realty, the New York-based limited liability company that owns Barbour Gardens, had its $750,000-a-year Section 8 contract cut in February.
“The day HUD announced they were relocating us, we thought our prayers were answered,” said Joshua Serrano, a No More Slumlords organizer and former CARA resident. “This decision and the relocation benefits were music to our ears. It gave a lot of us hope when for so long we had none, but it has turned out to be false hope.”
Looking for new residences revealed “an invisible wall” for people of color and with low incomes, Serrano said.
The 29 households that left Barbour Gardens on June 5 were supposed to live in hotels for up to a week, paid for by HUD, but many still do almost two months later. And 15 families still lived in the complex as of last week. The Christian Activities Council pushed for HUD to extend the deadline for all displaced Barbour Gardens residents to find new homes, and HUD agreed to extend it from Aug. 19 to Sept. 30.
U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, dubbed “our civil rights fighter” by the Rev. AJ Johnson of the Christian Activities Council, called living conditions at the former Section 8 complexes “deplorable” and “publicly subsidized squalor.”
He promised to send HUD a report on Monday to “demand better,” in collaboration with fellow U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy and U.S. Rep. John Larson, whose district includes Hartford.
‘Nobody gave me a chance’
The mice and mold at Barbour Gardens created an unhealthy environment for Tasha Jordan’s 9-year-old daughter’s allergies, but relocating was “a headache” and “a nightmare from hell” even with vouchers, Jordan said.
“If you don’t have a good credit score, you’re just denied,” she said. “If you had a criminal background that was almost 20 years old, you were denied. Nobody gave me a chance to show them that what I did 20 years ago, I’m not that same person.”
Jordan finally found a place in Vernon three weeks ago, and her daughter will hopefully be taken off several allergy medications as a result, she said.
“My blood pressure, my anxiety, my depression, all that played a major part in this move,” Jordan said. “Those [weeks] of searching and looking and being denied, my blood pressure was off the charts to the point I was ready to commit myself.”
‘They don’t have no help’
Marina Ilarraza and her three children moved Thursday from the a hotel Hartford to another hotel in Manchester as she continues to look for a home. The Hartford hotel was an unfriendly environment for the former Barbour Gardens tenants who lived there, she said.
“Everything that happened in the hotel, they blamed the housing people,” she said.
The mold in Barbour Gardens triggered her son Jammie’s asthma as soon as they moved there in November 2017, and the walls were so flimsy it took very little pressure to poke holes in them, Ilarraza said.
She could not find any three-bedroom apartments in Bloomfield, and some West Hartford landlords did not accept Section 8 vouchers because they did not want to fix rundown units, she said. She also found the amount of her voucher to be too low for some rent prices.
Community activism and the attention of elected officials do not give Ilarraza a great deal of hope, she said.
“I still see people I know going through the same stuff I did [in subsidized housing] and they don’t have no help,” Ilarraza said.
‘Like chickens without heads’
Ashley Matos has experienced “a lot of cruelty” in the 10 years she has lived in Infill 1, she said. Most of the apartment she shares with her three children has not had power since November, and her car has been broken into outside the property, she said.
But relocating isn’t going well for her either. She was recently denied an apartment in Windsor Locks due to her income, and her credit score has been an obstacle as well, she said.
“No one ever gave me a detailed voucher budget, so it’s been very hard,” Matos said. “They gave us two checks of $100 each, one for applications and one for gas, but they failed to realize by not giving us a proper budget amount, they’re just sending us like chickens without heads to get set up. People are going to take our money, but they’re not going to return it from our application fees, knowing that we’re not going to get approved.”
‘Fight for their dignity’
Working the night shift and being a single mother meant Milagros Ortiz already had a lot on her plate before she started working with Serrano and other CARA tenants to oust landlord Emmanuel Ku.
“At 7 in the morning, everybody is tired from working third shift and wants to go home and sleep,” Ortiz said. “But I couldn’t. I had to make sure the kids got to school, then go to city meetings, city council, meet senators and Congress members, go to city hall and fight.”
The tenants succeeded in having CARA’s HUD contract rescinded, but even with a voucher, Ortiz said she had trouble finding an apartment that could accommodate her children, one of whom has special needs, and two service animals. They moved into a place that they had to leave after three months because it failed a health and safety inspection, she said.
“I said to the inspector, ‘How is it failing if you just passed it for me to move in?’ ” Ortiz said.
After three relocations, she joined Serrano and the budding local housing activist movement, and she is passionate about helping other tenants in rough housing situations, she said.
“I’m going to help other people fight for their dignity and speak up for them,” Ortiz said.
Tess Vrbin can be reached at tvrbin@courant.com.
