Unit Owners In Decaying, Federally Subsidized 31-Unit Co-Op Suspect Possible Land Grab In Their Management Company's Plans; Suspicious Residents Say Outfit Sent Xmas Gift Baskets As Incentive To Cajole Them Into Signing Management's Self-Serving Petition In Effort To Snatch Complex

In New Haven, Connecticut, the New Haven Independent reports:

• The management company that oversaw the destruction — then partial rebuilding — of Alice Ashe’s apartment complex asked her to sign a petition the other day. She wasn’t buying.
  
  The petition was drawn up by Carabetta Management, the company that runs Antillean Manor, a decaying federally subsidized 31-unit complex on Day Street between Chapel Street and Edgewood Avenue.
  
  The petition calls for the dissolution of a tenant cooperative that has owned the complex since 1984 but hasn’t met in years. The petition also asks that ownership of the property be transferred to Carabetta. Carabetta officials have been circulating the petition to tenants, asking them to sign it.
  
  “I’m not signing no petition!” Ashe declared []. Carabetta let the development continue to fall apart when it took over management in 2011, Ashe said—until this October, when the city issued an emergency order to fix death-defying balcony cracks and mold-producing leaks. Conditions have grown so bad that both the city and Carabetta agree it needs eventually to be torn down. Carabetta responded quickly to the city order, making major repairs, which continue this week.
  
  Meanwhile, the company has been negotiating with the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)—which holds the $759,200 mortgage to the property (pictured), and which subsidizes all the rents through $330,942 in Section 8 payments—on a plan for the property’s future.
  
  Carabetta seeks to buy the property, tear down the existing complex, house tenants at another property (with HUD help), and build a new mixed-income complex on the property. (A similar scenario to Church Street South, another Section 8-subsidized complex where the owner allowed to deteriorate it beyond repair and now hopes to build a more lucrative development there.)
  
  Ashe, a retired food packer at the old Matlaw’s plant in West Haven, has lived at Antillean Manor for over 20 years. She once served on the now-defunct cooperative board, when it functioned. She said that until recently, every time she called about rundown conditions at the complex, she couldn’t get a call back from Carabetta, let alone repairs. But she did hear from them when her check was a little late, she said—she immediately was hit with eviction papers, then charged the cost of the papers and sheriff’s service.
  
  “Why they so kind of all of a sudden?” she said she wondered about Carabetta. The company even sent her a present for Christmas.
  
  “They had nerve sending me a fruit basket. I’m throwing it out,” Ashe said. “They ain’t done nothing for me. I ain’t falling for it. I’m fed up with it.” She spoke inside her second-floor apartment, where she was filling boxes with her belongings. She hopes to move out soon once her son finds a job in Camden, S.C.
  
  Carabetta’s petition drive drew the attention of New Haven Legal Assistance Association,(1) which represents some Antillean tenants in disputes with Carabetta. NHLAA helped the tenants form the coop back in 1984.
  
  “It might be that down the road it makes sense for Carabetta or another developer to buy the property and put something else” up there, NHLAA attorney Shelley White said in a conversation []. But “it’s a big decision” to dissolve the cooperative and turn the property over to Carabetta, she continued. “Tenants should be able to discuss it collectively, not one on one with the entity that wants to be the buyer.”
  
  White made the same argument in a letter sent Monday to HUD officials.
  
  “It is disturbing, to say the least, that the entity seeking to purchase the property would have its employees directly solicit approval of the sale (and dissolution of the tenant cooperative) from tenants whose leases are overseen by Carabetta (several of whom are currently under eviction and trying to work out reinstatement arrangements with Carabetta) and who widely perceive Carabetta as already owning Antillean Manor ...” White wrote to HUD.

Source: Tenants Wooed In Land Grab.

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(1) New Haven Legal Assistance Association provides free legal services to individuals and groups unable to obtain legal services because of limited income, age, disability, discrimination and other barriers.