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Guilford Housing Authority Says Seniors Running Out of Options for Affordable Housing

As the town moves forward with an affordable housing development on the Woodruff property that will be targeted at younger, working class people, there is another population in town that is growing, vulnerable, and in increasingly desperate need of affordable living spaces. According to Guilford Housing Authority (GHA) Executive Director Angela Ross, lower-income seniors in Guilford have essentially run out of options for affordable living spaces, with many people facing homelessness or being forced to leave town.

The GHA is a hybrid governmental and nonprofit organization that operates 131 units of age-restricted, subsidized living spaces in town. It receives no funding from the town, and operates based on the income-based rent paid by its residents, who are disabled or over the age of 62, according to Ross.

Ross said between the three different complexes run by the GHA—Boston Terrace, Guilford Court, and Sachem Hollow—there are about 130 people on a waitlist, many of whom wait “eight years and more” before being housed.

“It’s a lot of people who tell us, ‘Oh I’ve lived in Guilford all my life, I want to stay here, I don’t want to leave.’ We’re always telling people, ‘We’re sorry, we don’t take that into consideration. You have to wait like everyone else.’”

Ross said she regularly has to refer people to other housing complexes outside of town, or even to homeless shelters in more extreme cases.

Ross said that though there has been a steady increase in the number of people in need over the last few years, the problem of affordable housing for seniors is not new. Since around 1998, Ross said the GHA has expanded its offering by only 41 units, which has not kept up with demand.

“We have efficiencies, and we have very small one-bedrooms, and we have no problem filling any of our properties...People are constantly calling us,” she said.

The 32 units at Sachem Hollow, which were built in 2006 and opened in 2007, according to Ross, were made possible when the GHA sold a piece of property that had been gifted to it more than 25 years ago. The money from that sale was used to purchase the land where Sachem Hollow sits now. It took about five years to solicit the various funding sources—mostly from the state—and complete the construction of that development.

The only other expansion in the last quarter-century was nine units being added to Boston Terrace in 2014, which is now at the septic capacity for that property, Ross said.

At this point, Ross said the need is close to a matter of survival for many people that call the GHA.

“People come to us [and say], ‘Oh I’m living in my car...I have nowhere to go, my house has been foreclosed on.’ But we’re not emergency housing. We can’t do anything,” Ross said “Everybody has to wait on the list, they have to wait their turn...I would hope that they find housing in other towns. We steer them that way to apply everywhere they can. We try as hard as we can to give them other alternatives—if they’re homeless, they go to social services.”

Many people “never make it” after being on the list for years, Ross said, and the GHA doesn’t always know whether they found other housing, or what happened to them.

Finding a way to expand the number of available living spaces for seniors is not easy. GHA is barred by law from using the revenue it gets from rent to purchase another property, Ross said, due to the type of grant funding that was used originally to build the structures.

Any grant funding is contingent on already owning a suitable property for a development, according to Ross.

Technically, the GHA could use revenue from managing a new development—the one the town recently approved on the Woodruff property, for example—to fund the purchasing of more land. The town decided to let the developer of that project, NeighborWorks, manage the property, a decision that Ross called “disappointing.”

The only other way for the GHA to expand its offerings is if it is gifted land, either by the town or a private entity. Guilford gifted the Woodruff property land to NeighborWorks as part of an effort to subsidize and encourage more affordable housing in town, for example.

Kral said he was not aware of any properties that might be suitable for the GHA’s purposes, but that it would require a further, more in-depth study to determine for certain whether one existed. He said it was possible some sort of study had been conducted before the Sachem Hollow project was built.

A study of that nature would cost money, and would have to originate with the Board of Selectmen, Kral said.

According to Ross, if the GHA did come into possession of a property, it would take around three years to get a new housing development up and running, including soliciting all the funding and construction.

First Selectman Matt Hoey said that a study would indeed be necessary to identify potential properties for GHA to use. He suggested the GHA would put together a “suggested course of action” that would be used by the Board of Selectmen to get started on a study of properties.

Studies that identified the Woodruff property were paid for by state grants, and amounted to about $70,000.

Hoey said he could not know for certain, but said he thought “we could get a consultant to do something for that amount.”