The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Housing provider back at helm
Jim Paley recovering from stroke, internal bleeding
NEW HAVEN — Jim Paley has returned to his Sherman Avenue office, working as he has since 1980 to bring affordable housing to New Haven’s poorest neighborhoods.
A major stroke on Nov. 10, 2016, and massive internal bleeding from an ulcer in April 2017 threatened that 38-year record of leading Neighborhood Housing Services of New Haven as its founding director, turning more than 250 blighted or newly built houses into homes that not only increase the city’s affordable housing stock but transform neighborhoods into safe, secure communities.
Paley still shows the effects of the stroke. He doesn’t have full function in his right arm and leg. And when he collapsed with a bleeding ulcer at a wedding in Mexico in April, he came close to death. He required a transfusion of 11 pints of blood — more than the eight pints the human body normally carries.
There was no guarantee that his cognitive abilities would return.
“When it happened, I had no language, I had no cognitive skills and they gave me a very poor prognosis,” Paley said last week.
So it was a major event when Paley’s recovery was celebrated at Neighborhood Housing Services’ annual meeting in October at Anthony’s Ocean View.
When the stroke hit, “It was 30 hours after the election of Donald Trump . ... I was very agitated. I had gotten no sleep that night, then I was on a plane to Atlanta that morning,” he said. He was on his way to a meeting of Community Housing Capital, which he serves as board chairman.
That night there was a board dinner. The next day, “It was 9:30 in the morning and I started feeling dizzy and I said, ‘I think I’m having a stroke,’” Paley said.
He was brought to Emory University Hospital, where he spent eight days, followed by a month at the Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine, part of the New York University Langone Health system. Between Dec. 18, 2016, and March 3, 2017, Paley underwent physical therapy at Montowese Health and Rehabilitation Center in North Haven.
New ways
Paley, 71, has learned to adapt to his limited use of his right limbs.
“I’m not able to bend my elbow, my knee . ... The hand is very far behind,” he said. “I used to be a guitar player, a finger-picker, so that’s a big sadness.”
He’s learned to type onehanded and he’s using dictation software.
“You find adaptations that you wouldn’t think it would be possible to make,” he said. He’s even had his car retrofitted “so my gas pedal is to the left of my brake and I drive with my left foot.”
He’s even driven into New York City — “I was formerly a cab driver in New York in my former life,” he said.
“You have to learn how to do things differently. There’s a four-step process to getting into the car. … You learn how to adapt.”
The way back has not been smooth. “I’m not pleased with the progress that I’ve made with walking,” Paley said. “I’m very slow and I’m very dependent on a cane to get around. Very fearful of falling.”
A second life-threatening event
In the midst of rehabilitating from the stroke, Paley suffered a major setback.
“I was at a friend’s daughter’s wedding in Playa del Carmen in Mexico, and right after the wedding I began to spit up blood. They found a huge ulcer,” he said.
Paley said the series of events that followed had to happen exactly the way they did “in order to stay alive. The first thing was I had to be discharged from the hospital in Cancun after four days.” Luckily, “the bleeding had stopped. They made sure my hemoglobin level had come up so they could discharge me and it was barely enough.”
That enabled him to take a 7 a.m. flight back to the United States. That evening, “I told my wife, I said, ‘I feel awful,’ and I basically collapsed and she called an ambulance. They had a difficult time even getting a blood pressure.”
The next morning, “I began to hemorrhage from the ulcer . ... They had to give me 11 pints of blood. They had to put a port in my neck. If I hadn’t been put in the hospital the night before, I wouldn’t have survived an ambulance ride. I would have been DOA.” Coming back wasn’t easy. At first, “I couldn’t remember things,” Jim Paley said. “I couldn’t subtract. I couldn’t access my internet because I couldn’t remember my passwords or anything like that. I was not able to speak. I would use hand signals.”
However, he wasn’t at Montowese more than a week when “the speech pathologist said my speech was fine and they discharged me from speech therapy.”
For Paley, “2017 was a year to remember. 2017 was a rough year for me in many respects and I wasn’t too disappointed to put it in the books and start a new year.” He and his wife, Sharon Paley, spent the new year in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.
“We got home at the stroke of midnight ... and had peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to celebrate the new year,” he said.
Through it all, Paley kept working as much as possible. “I think Jimmy’s really inspiring,” Sharon Paley said. “When Jim was at Rusk at NYU, we worked hard to set up the computers for him to get back to work.”
Sharon Paley said her husband would go to physical therapy in the morning and work in the afternoon.
“We had set up multiple computers at Montowese,” she said.
“He had his staff come to Montowese. He had his managers come to Montowese. He hired somebody” for the agency while a patient, she said.
“I think therapeutically it was inspiring to get back to the parts of his life he could do. Jimmy loves this town and loves what he’s created and it was very important to do,” she said. “We’re used to Jimmy being very active physically and interested in a lot of things. We have a very busy lifestyle always, and I think to slow down was not an easy thing for all of us.
“Yes, it’s been hard. I’d be lying if I said otherwise,” she said. “There’s lots of losses attached. We can’t do hiking, can’t run. We walk slowly. He walks really slowly.” However, their trip to see a show in New York was a positive step. “We’re trying to get our life back in a way.”
Jim Paley considers himself lucky in a way.
“These things just happen,” he said. “It’s not cancer, it’s not Alzheimer’s, the kinds of things that are debilitating in many ways.”
A lack of leadership
Meanwhile, Neighborhood Housing Services kept up its work, but Paley said his absence hurt some.
“I wasn’t able to have a hand on the pulse of what was going on. Looking at things from afar, the organization suffered from a lack of leadership,” he said. However, “the work did not stop. We were treading water, I would say, but the departments did their work. I like to view it as a hiccup or a speed bump.”
The agency only completed four houses in 2017, the lowest number in 20 years, but “the goal is to get that up to nine or 10 in 2018,” he said.
The work has changed over the years, depending on the rise and fall of the housing market and having to assist buyers victimized by “all sorts of unscrupulous lending behaviors going on in the 1980s,” Paley said. “People who had no experience in real estate [were] owning 30 or 40 properties that were basically clustered in lowincome neighborhoods.”
“Speculators would prey on these low-income neighborhoods,” such as Newhallville. In 2017, according to the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council, residents of that area earned just 38.71 percent of the median income for the Greater New Haven area. The city’s population also shrank from more than 160,000 in 1950 to 123,000 in 2000. In the 1990s, then-Mayor John DeStefano Jr. began demolishing blighted housing as prices plummeted.
Things are looking up, though. “The 2010 census showed an uptick to 129,000 and I’m predicting that in the 2020 census we’re going to see between 135,000 and 140,000,” Paley said.
By buying foreclosed houses, “we were able to control those properties and keep them out of the hands of investors who would not be doing the same kind of work on them as we do.” In the 1980s, “We were helping with rehabilitation loans … and we were proud of the fact that we were dealing with low-income people who wanted to stay in their houses but didn’t have the money to fix them up,” he said. “We made people loans so they wouldn’t have to sell their house and figure out what to do with the next stage of their lives.”
The agency also acted as co-developers for new construction, including the 32 Baldwin Court townhouses at Henry and County streets, on the site of the former Baldwin School.
In the 1990s, Neighborhood Housing Services moved more into “gut rehabs” and buying “bundles of houses” in Newhallville and the Hill. “We acquired in Newhallville a total of 42 blighted houses that would be purchased by first-time homebuyers” as a “totally renovated house,” Paley said.
The improvements made a “visible impact to serve as a catalyst for private investors, motivating people to invest in their properties,” he said.
Now, he said, the agency offers “loan funds to make it possible for people to undertake rehab projects that they wouldn’t previously have considered and might not have been able to afford.” And when NHS helps rehab a property, the agency takes into consideration the historical nature of the house, using materials and fixtures that are consistent with the era in which the home was built.
Re-creating historic details
Since Newhallville is a historic district, “We have to be as authentic as possible in re-creating the historic details wherever possible … so they are historic representatives of what these houses looked like when they were built,” Paley said. “We’ll uncover the artificial siding and we’ll uncover the beautiful woodwork that was underneath.”
One house on Beers Street has “beautiful cedar siding with battens ... and they were in pristine condition.” The owner bought the house in 1998 for $85,000 and it now has an appraised value of $225,900. “There is no other house like this in New Haven,” Paley said.
Newhallville is a prime focus, with several houses on Lilac and Newhall streets on the list for rehabilitation. “We have about 20 houses left to do and the goal is to complete them in 2019,” Paley said. The buyer for the latest, at 152 Newhall St., is awaiting mortgage approval.
The goal is “to change the perspective, the psychology of the neighborhood. If people’s perceptions are that the neighborhood is coming back, then the economics will follow suit as translated into property values,” Paley said. “The psychology determines the economics.
“Our mission is to provide high-quality, energyefficient, totally rehabilitated houses to low-income, first-time homebuyers, while stabilizing neighborhoods, preserving values and make them desirable places for people to live and raise their families,” he said.
Paley also wants to launch a real estate agency and lending company, both nonprofit, to better serve the Neighborhood Housing Service’s homebuyers.
Evidence of good work
Paley’s work is widely admired throughout the area.
Bill Casey, executive director of Habitat for Humanity of Greater New Haven, has known Paley since Casey joined Habitat in 1995. “It’s very difficult to run a nonprofit housing organization and to do it as long as he has is remarkable,” Casey said.
“He’s bright, he’s dedicated and he’s also very outspoken in defending Neighborhood Housing Services and the causes they stand for.”
Will Ginsberg, president of the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven , has known and been a friend of Paley since Ginsberg worked as city development administrator in the 1980s.
“The evidence of what Jim has contributed is in Newhallville, it’s in Fair Haven, it’s in all the innercity neighborhoods, and so many families have benefited,” Ginsberg said.
“I think he’s one of the stalwarts of this community and maybe unsung and unappreciated. It’s inspiring the way he’s dealt with these health setbacks … to see him back at work is just a joy for all his friends and admirers in this community.”