The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Historic house gets new life as home for marginalized
A stack of phone books on the porch of a century-old home, freshly refurbished for new inhabitants, is among the relics of bygone times on a street on the West Side of Stamford.
The house, erected in 1920 and meticulously renewed to its Victorian style and painted in pastels of red-orange, lilac and seafoam green, is now easily the most attractive on the block. But it carries none of the rarefied air of a restoration project of the wealthy. In fact, the nine new residents slated to move in next month are anything but.
The home is an example of so-called deeply affordable housing — costing a maximum of 30 percent of your income — and is the third such project by nonprofit Pacific House, which seeks to mend the affordability gap by giving the homeless and working poor a leg up in a city where rent often exceeds $2,000 a month.
The three units behind a fresh coat of bluepainted doors will soon house the most at risk residents, some of them coming off the streets, according to Executive Director Rafael Pagan, Jr.
“I grew up in New York and you go to what we call the projects — everything looks institutional, you feel like you’re in an institution,” Pagan said. “None of our buildings will look like an institution.”
Pacific House in recent years has embraced a new model blending two notions often held at opposite ends of the affordable housing spectrum — historic preservation and the pressure to build high-density to meet the need for volume.
Fights between advocates of the two concepts are commonplace across the country, especially in West Coast cities such as Seattle, Wa. and San Fransisco, Calif., where longtime residents decry new affordable developments and density and push back — thus constraining the supply of units and pushing rents up.
Oddly, Pagan said, it was the urge to “maximize the amount of units” in city duplexes that led Pacific House to some of the oldest homes in the city. Stamford’s zoning code gives a density bonus to historic preservation projects, which means one more bed, “one less person without a home.”
The West Side project is “the crown jewel” of the nonprofit’s preservation work, Pagan said, and was crafted by local architect Elena Kalman, who is behind the nonprofit’s other gut renovations.
Kalman said the project gives a window into the lives of the past residents who left “utiliarian” marks on the home since 1920.
“It was disfigured beyond recognition,” she said.
Each generation seemingly tried to expand living space, moving windows, reconfiguring layouts and propping up slapshot additions, one made of what appeared to be “leftover lumber,” she said.
These homes “have been remodeled so many times,” Kalman said.
With little to go on, Kalman and Renee Kahn, founder of the city’s Historic Neighborhood Preservation Program, cobbled together pieces of the building’s past and the era’s stylings.
“It was all carefully researched and carefully replicated,” she said. “What kind of windows would be there? What kind of porch columns?”
Soon another slate of residents will call the historic house home, but they likely won’t stay long — the average stay in similar homes is 2.5 years, Pagan said.
“We really belive people deserve a decent place,” he said. “If they live in a place they are proud of, their life trajectory ticks up ... they can actually get a leg up.”