Hartford Land Bank’s 1st director leaving state
Laura Settlemyer spent 4 years battling blight
HARTFORD — The first executive director of the Hartford Land Bank is leaving her role, and Connecticut, just as the gears started turning at the nonprofit corporation, which she spearheaded to address the city’s scourge of blighted, abandoned properties.
Laura Settlemyer, who was also the founding chairperson of the land bank and before that the city’s director of blight remediation and housing code enforcement, announced her resignation Tuesday. She plans to practice law in New Orleans, where she previously worked as a city attorney specializing in code enforcement, housing and community development.
The land bank’s board of directors said it will begin a search for a new director later this winter.
In the interim, it will be headed by another New Orleans-transplant, Carey Shea, an active resident of Hartford’s Frog Hollow neighborhood with more than 30 years of experience in community development.
Before her retirement, Shea worked primarily in New York City and post-Katrina New Orleans, and knew Settlemyer from their work in the same field, said Melvyn Colón, the land bank’s board chair.
“I think we’ve been very fortunate having Laura as director of the land bank and in many ways it’s her land bank, her creation, she brought us into this effort,” Colón said Tuesday. “And, we’re very fortunate in having Carey as someone who can guide a lot of the important initiatives we’re doing right now while we look for another executive director.”
Shea, who starts Feb. 1, serves on the board for Center for Community Progress, a nonprofit based in Flint, Michigan, that helps communities across the country revitalize vacant, abandoned and deteriorating properties. Shea is also the founder of a coalition pushing for the creation of a Neighborhood Homes Investment Act, which would create tax credits to spur community rehabilitation.
Locally, she is a board member of the Frog Hollow NRZ and Hartford Next — the city’s coalition of NRZs
— and a founder of the Friends of Zion Hill Cemetery. Shea is also an alternate commissioner on Hartford’s Historic Properties and Preservation Commission.
Colón said Shea’s work — which includes directing multimillion-dollar housing programs — will be valuable as the nonprofit looks for new, permanent leadership and begins rehabilitating the first batch of properties in its portfolio.
Shea has also served on two of the land bank’s committees.
That, and her prior skillset, will ensure the land bank’s progress doesn’t slow too much during this transition, Colón said.
“She herself has a very ambitious sense of what the land bank can do and has been discussing ideas with me for additional properties,” he said.
The land bank launched in 2020 after four years of development. The first of its kind in Connecticut, it’s seeded with $5 million in state funding, which it will use to either take on full-scale renovations itself and sell the finished products, or sell them as-is to individuals who are vetted by the community nonprofit leaders who sit on the bank’s board of directors.
In late December, the entity officially acquired its first seven properties from the city of Hartford, all of them located in Clay Arsenal, Upper Albany and the North End.
The city acquired five of them from an auction of tax-delinquent properties last April, and two from previous tax deed sales in 2013 and 2015. At least one of the properties was boarded up for a decade, property records show.
Shea will now develop the land bank’s general policy on dealing with the properties it acquires, and a specific plan for the seven it currently owns, according to Colón, who is also executive director of the Southside Institutions Neighborhood Alliance (SINA).
Settlemyer served as Hartford’s first blight remediation officer from 2016 to early 2020, working methodically to take stock of every blighted property in the city, from vacant, overgrown lots and crumbling factory buildings to owner-occupied homes in need of TLC.
The city has been working its way down the list since, with a goal of addressing at least 100 cases of blight per year.