Eight Hartford homes slated for repairs in annual ‘Rebuilding Day’
Nonprofit hoping to give homeowners ‘sense of community’
HARTFORD — Rebuilding Together Hartford, a nonprofit that offers free repairs for low-income Hartford homeowners, will hold its annual “Rebuilding Day” event on Oct. 1 and Oct. 2 with improvements planned for seven homes in the Parkville neighborhood and one in the South End.
“We really are looking at things that are keeping people in their home and allowing them to safely age in place,” said Sarah Thrall, the organization’s executive director.
Established in 1994, the Hartford branch is one of over 200 affiliates of the national Rebuilding Together organization. Its Rebuilding Day event is typically held the last Saturday in April,
and brings together skilled and unskilled volunteer workers to make various home repairs like fixing broken windows or faulty insulation.
This year’s effort has been dampened slightly by the pandemic:
Thrall said she expects to have about 20 volunteers assigned to each of the eight houses this year, or over 150 in total, compared to over 400 in years past.
This April, the Rebuilding Together team assembled a smaller-than-usual crew of volunteers who worked on improvements for two Parkville homes, and distributed about 100 home safety kits that included items like smoke and carbon monoxide detectors, fire extinguishers and night lights.
Parkville, a small, densely populated neighborhood on the west side of Hartford, has been at the center of local revitalization projects in recent years. Traditional multifamily homes blend with old factories that have been redeveloped into apartments and office space. Real Art Ways, the nonprofit theater and art space on Arbor St., sits in the former Underwood typewriter factory.
The seven Parkville homes slated for repairs sit around the corner from the Parkville Market, located in the old Capitol City Lumber building.
Each home will be assigned a “house captain” who will serve as a de facto general contractor, Thrall explained. The house captain first meets with the homeowner to develop a work scope, and is then tasked with buying the necessary materials. The captain is then tasked with leading the team of other volunteers, and keeping the project on schedule.
It can be particularly challenging for low-income and vulnerable populations to keep up with costly home maintenance expenses, especially with Hartford’s aging housing stock. Seven of the selected homes have residents who are elderly or disabled, Thrall said.
“And sometimes when you’re deferring your home maintenance it’s becoming a little bit worse, and it’s contributing to the blight in the city as well as home abandonment,” Thrall said. “So we really want to try to do our best to keep our homeowners in place.”
Hartford’s homeownership rate is only about 24%, compared to 64% nationwide, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau.
Those numbers place an even greater emphasis on Rebuilding Together’s “rebuild a block” strategy, Thrall said, in which the organization targets low-income households within specific neighborhoods for free repairs.
“You’re really getting that sense of community and reinvestment in the community, if you will, from the homeowners,” Thrall said.