‘WE DON’T HAVE ANYTHING RIGHT NOW’
Ida wrecked their apartments, but residents say they can’t afford a new place in Stamford
STAMFORD — The apartment building at 85 Cove Road shows few signs of life: Only a smattering of cars remain in the parking lot in company with a big white van for electricians busy working in the back.
The repairmen filter in and out of the building’s dark, damp basement, where the floor still glistens from last week’s storm. The fetid stench of flooding — the kind of smell that remains even after the water is gone — emanates from everywhere. Occasionally, the handymen in the basement are illuminated by light bulbs flickering on and off as they labor.
The destruction from Tropical Storm Ida displaced all the tenants of the Cove Road building. Flooding destroyed the infrastructure on the property, leaving residents in all 30 apartments without electricity and basement boilers waterlogged, leaving families searching for new homes in a notoriously cutthroat housing market.
“My husband wants to move to New York,” Junie Michel said from her car, which sat, trunk up while she unpacked boxes, in the lot in front of the apartment. Jayda, her 3-year-old daughter, gleefully circled the car with a magenta suitcase in hand, a smiling Minnie Mouse emblazoned on the front.
Michel returned to retrieve some of her belongings from their former home, but the future still looked uncertain for them. She said the family is posted up in a hotel, and they have no idea where they’ll end up next.
Not Stamford, though, she quipped while trying to stop Jayda from running. The apartments in the city are out of her price range, she said.
“What makes this even worse, frankly, is that 85 Cove Road is probably the most informally affordable housing building in the whole city,” Garden Homes Management President Richard Freedman said. Garden Homes specializes in affordable housing in Connecticut and throughout the East Coast.
Freedman said that tenants at 85 Cove Road pay between $1,100 and $1,200 a month for their units, which are all one-bedrooms or studios. In stark contrast, real estate rental site Zumper estimates that the average one-bedroom apartment in Stamford rents for $1,995 a month as of early September. Even in the Cove, the average apartment rents for $1,400 a month, the site states.
Because of the damage — a list that includes problems with the electrical system, the boilers and the laundry machines — Freedman’s company told residents that “the building is closed and cannot be occupied until further notice.” To ease the blow of losing their homes, Garden Homes offered residents “a payment of $5,000 provided (they) sign a lease termination agreement,” and will be allowed to keep their belonging in the apartments.
The money has helped Sheila Vazquez, who has lived on Cove Road for three years, stay afloat, but she’s going through it quickly, she said. Like Junie Michel, she and her partner are staying in a hotel while they figure out their next moves. Since they left the apartment, Vazquez said they’ve run through about $800 dollars while paying for food and a room.
“We don’t have anything right now,” Vazquez said in Spanish.
It didn’t help that disaster struck right before Labor Day weekend, either. Banks and leasing offices closed for the holiday while she scrambled to devise a plan. Vazquez couldn’t start making headway on finding a new home until Tuesday, she said.
Though the $5,000 has been instrumental to tenants who ended their leases at 85 Cove Road, not every Stamfordite displaced by the storm will see similar payouts.
“This was caused by an act of God, a natural disaster, not due to code enforcement,” Sharona Cowan, Director of Mandated Services for Stamford.
Mandated services, as laid out in the Connecticut General Statutes, are a response to building code violations caused by negligence from a property owner. Stamford Director of Public Safety told The Stamford Advocate that environmental inspectors found nothing that suggested code violations.
That observation makes one thing clear: If a resident doesn’t have a flood insurance policy, the chances they’ll get help or money are slim. The money provided by Garden Homes Management to tenants was given out at the landlord’s discretion.
City officials are eyeing another recourse to help pay for some of the storm damage throughout the city. Stamford is working with the state Division of Emergency Management and Homeland Security on an Initial Damage Assessment following Tropical Storm Henri and the remnants of Hurricane Ida. If the damage rises to a certain threshold, impacted residents could reap financial assistance from FEMA.
But until a final assessment is reached, there’s little to do but wait.