Should CT's Oldest Public Housing Spot Be Razed?

Update 10:26 a.m.:

Washington Village, the oldest public housing complex in Connecticut, occupies a prime location: On one side, yachts are docked in Norwalk Harbor, just across Water Street; in the other direction, the South Norwalk train station is a short walk away.

With these facts in mind, together with the hope that the zone of redevelopment in South Norwalk will continue to expand around Washington Village, the Norwalk Housing Authority has won a federal grant to plan for demolishing the housing project and replacing it with mixed-income housing.

On Thursday evening, federal and local housing officials held a meeting in the Washington Village community room to explain their plans and ask residents of the 136 apartments of the complex what they think of the idea and to answer any questions they have.

The city has received a grant of more than half a million dollars to help plan a new housing complex on the site of the present one, which lies between Water, Concord, Day and Raymond streets, three to four blocks south of Washington Street.

The grant is supposed to pay for planning and further grant applications for construction. It may take anywhere from two to four years for construction to start on the site, said Gayle Epp, a consultant with EJP Consulting Group of Boston.

One woman said she worried that the program would remove low-income people, mostly minorities, from the neighborhood in order to make way for wealthier people, mostly white, to take advantage of the location.

"We're very aware that this is a neighborhood where a lot of rich white people would like to swoop in and live," said Jennifer Cribbs, a Housing and Urban Development Department official from Washington, D.C. "What Choice Neighborhoods is designed to do is to keep neighborhoods like this as mixed-income, so that that does not happen."

The complex, built in the early 1940s, is old, but doesn't appear to be run down. While residents say they like the place, no one objected to replacing it.

Officials repeatedly said that any residents who continued to meet housing requirements could stay in whatever development that replaces Washington Village, and under the same or very similar rules for subsidized rental rates.

Those who needed to move out while the buildings were torn down and replaced would get subsidized housing elsewhere, perhaps with a Section 8 voucher good anywhere in the United States, officials said. Moving expenses would also be subsidized for anyone moving within 50 miles of Norwalk.

Asked what kinds of improvements they would like in a new housing project, residents came up with several ideas. One man asked that vents be installed above stoves. A woman said residents should have their own gardens.

A woman said: "The living rooms are too small. There's just not enough space. You can't even move."

Three components of the Choice Neighborhoods program are making improvements in housing, in people's lives and in the surrounding neighborhood, said Carolyn Clayton, another H.U.D. official from Washington, D.C.

To help in those three areas, a series of meetings will be held for residents of Washington Village and South Norwalk, Clayton said.

Jennifer Moriarty, a supportive housing manager for Family & Children's Agency of Norwalk, said her group will conduct a door-to-door survey of all Washington Village residents in order to get more ideas about what they want in new housing and how they might be helped to get other housing when the project is under construction. The survey will likely start in late August, she said.

The survey-takers will also help residents with identifying social services needs, she said.

Editor's note: This article has been updated with the names of two Housing and Urban Development officials now added. The officials had initially refused to give their names, citing department policy. On Friday morning a spokeswoman for the department provided their names because the officials spoke at a public forum. Their exact titles were not provided.