‘It’s really heartbreaking’
Bridgeport public housing tenants facing wave of evictions
BRIDGEPORT — Approximately a fifth of Park City Communities’ low-income households — about 2,000 tenants — are facing or going through eviction over unpaid rents.
“It’s heartbreaking. It’s really heartbreaking,” said Cowlis Andrews, a member of the mayoralappointed board that helps to manage Park City, the name for Bridgeport’s public housing authority. Carmen Colon, who as vice president of Bridgeport’s YMCA organization works to combat homelessness here, called the situation an “eviction tsunami.” She said the authority is typically a strong partner in helping the YMCA place individuals who need shelter, leaving few to no good options for Park City tenants who cannot even afford to live there.
And the wave of evictions comes as officials and community leaders in Connecticut’s largest municipality have already been grappling with how to address a shortage of affordable units.
The COVID-19 pandemic that struck the state three years ago and is being blamed at least in part for causing Park City’s poorer residents to fall behind on their rents also caused a local real estate boom. Out-of-towners drove up housing prices and developers have been focusing more on building market-rate projects.
According to data provided by Jillian Baldwin, who was hired as the authority’s executive director in mid-2020, 502 out of Park City’s 2,500 households owe back rent totaling $1.5 million. Of those 502 households — about 2,000 people — Baldwin said 362 are in some stage of the eviction process.
“That’s bonkers,” said Greg Kirschner, executive director of the Connecticut Fair Housing
Center in Hartford, whose mission includes fighting housing discrimination statewide. “That just seems very counterproductive to its (Park City’s) mission and community.”
“There’s a lot of questions here about why the (Bridgeport) authority might deem this step necessary,” Kirschner said.
“Those are big, scary numbers,” Baldwin acknowledged. She argued the authority has “gone above and beyond” in trying to help keep tenants from being forced out and, failing that, assisting them with help from City Hall and local nonprofits to seek alternative living arrangements.
“We’re in the business of housing people, not evicting people,” Baldwin said.
The problem, Baldwin and Andrews explained, is that they are continuing to work on shedding the “troubled” status assigned Park City Communities by its chief funding source, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, nearly a decade ago.
Baldwin said there are “good indications” HUD will lift that designation later this year, but rent collection will be a factor.
“We’re at $1.5 million in rental arrearages. It’s not sustainable,” Baldwin said. “We can support a little bit of debt on the books from tenant accounts receivable.”
The housing authority did receive $1 million in state and federal aid during the pandemic which Baldwin said saved about 100 households from eviction. It was generally recognized that the temporary and permanent business closures that occurred during the global health crisis, combined with inflation, particularly hurt lower income people who may already been struggling with their finances before 2020.
“The relief delayed it somewhat,” Andrews said of the evictions. “It could have been significantly worse. But some people just got behind and they just can’t catch up because it snowballs.”
There were also pandemic-related federal and state moratoriums on evictions, but those expired in mid-2021. Andrews suspects some households might have misunderstood that benefit, which caused them to fall further behind in their payments.
“I think that some people thought that there was a rent moratorium,” Andrews said.
Kirschner said having an eviction on one’s record makes it very difficult to find other housing opportunities.
“They may be categorically refused access to other subsidized programs and certainly it will impact their ability to rent anywhere, because landlords do run checks,” he said. “It is really heartbreaking.”
Dione Dwyer is a resident of PT Barnum Apartments, one of Park City Communities’ largest complexes, and president of that site’s resident council.
“There’s many, many reasons why a person might not have been able to pay their rent. Many reasons,” Dwyer said, adding she too sometimes falls behind. “Some people are so far in it, they don’t know how to get themselves out of it. But they still want, they still need somewhere to stay.”
She believes authority management’s position is “they’re not in the business to care.”
“They’re about the bottomline,” Dwyer said.
Baldwin said the authority was “employing every measure in our tool box to help proactively address this before engaging in evictions.”
“We consider our public housing residents to be our neighbors,” she said.
She said the authority has been working to obtain grants for new positions that will proactively help tenants maintain their finances and households and eventually transition out of low-income public housing and pursue homeownership. For example, a year ago she announced Park City had received a threeyear, $491,700 federal grant to reactivate the tenant services coordinator office that shuttered around seven years ago and hire two self-sufficiency counselors..
But Colon said so much more is needed to prevent the pending evictions.
“My message would be twofold,” she said.
The first part is to obtain from the city and/or other sources an emergency infusion of funding. And then, Colon said, there also needs to be money available to create a robust social services department within the authority to further assist these households.
“What are we gonna do with these individuals?” Colon said of the looming evictions. “There’s just no way. No way.”
City Council President Aidee Nieves agreed there is an urgent need to do something.
“We don’t want any of our families to be put out on the street. The authority is one of the most affordable housing providers we have in the city,” she said. “The impact can be detrimental to a family. They won’t be able to find shelter anywhere else.”
She wants to know what the authority has done to assist the tenants, how long the households have been in arrears, which ones fell behind before and during the coronavirus, and who applied for and received the pandemic rent relief.
“We need to sit down with Jillian, the mayor, the (city) office of economic development, and devise a strategic plan,” Nieves said.
Mayor Joe Ganim in a statement meanwhile said “we are and continue to offer to help” though he did not specify what that meant.
He also said his administration continues to have “confidence” in Baldwin “and the job she is doing with the issues she inherited.”