🔒Hartford nonprofits turn to development to strengthen their missions

1 of 2

When Rosanne Haggerty’s Community Solutions nonprofit got involved in redeveloping the historic Swift Factory in Hartford’s North End, she got some sideways glances.

“I think for a long time folks were like, ‘What are you folks who work on homelessness actually doing here?’” said Haggerty, Community Solutions’ president and founder.

For decades, the nonprofit has been building up expertise in creating affordable housing, including the redevelopment of downtown Hartford’s historic Hollander building into apartments.

The disconnect? The plan to redevelop the Swift Factory contains no housing units at all.

“We have two incubator spaces, one for food businesses, another for small businesses generally,” Haggerty said. “The Hartford Public Library branch that’s now on Barbour Street will be moving in; a Chase Community Development Bank branch will be there; a CREC-operated Headstart program is moving in this fall.

“Housing alone is not the answer to homelessness. These other things have to be woven together – access to jobs, access to information, and other kinds of civic infrastructure.”

Community Solutions was approached in 2010 by members of the city’s North East neighborhood revitalization zone and other community leaders, concerned about a plan to demolish the empty M. Swift & Sons Co. gold leafing factory, which dates to the late 1800s.

“The idea of turning the Swift Factory into apartments was explicitly rejected,” said Haggerty. That was because there was already a vacancy issue in the area’s admittedly substandard housing stock.

“We had hundreds of individual meetings with residents,” she said. “Very much, to a person, jobs were foregrounded as what people needed, to create more stability in their lives and what the community needed to really thrive.”

That meant re-imagining the building as a center for entrepreneurship, training and other kinds of economic supports.

“We got involved thinking, we’re not sure what the direct causal relationship looks like between investing in job creation and investments that stabilize a neighborhood, but we know this has got to be part of the end-game of ending homelessness,” said Haggerty.

Learning curve

That focus on wider economic development has meant a learning curve for Community Solutions. It’s one that other Hartford nonprofits are also embarking on. Three miles south in Parkville, Hands On Hartford – a nonprofit that for decades has had a social services focus – now also has its fingers in several economic development projects.

Executive Director Barbara Shaw says her organization’s evolution has been prompted by a desire to address the root causes of poverty.

“We’ve been working for over 50 years with low-income Hartford residents,” said Shaw. “Well, we sure as heck would like to get upstream a little bit more – getting into places around education, job development, job supports. And not just any jobs – career paths with really good pay and really good benefits.”

Hands On Hartford bought property in Parkville some seven years ago. Its first development project was its own home base at 55 Bartholomew Ave., where in addition to offices, the organization created a pay-what-you-can restaurant, food pantry, and base for community initiatives like school backpack distribution. It also built 13 units of supportive housing upstairs in the building for adults with disabilities.

Now Shaw is turning her focus to the second building on Hands On Hartford’s campus, the old, decommissioned power plant that’s sometimes known as the Spaghetti Warehouse because of the restaurant billboard adorning one side.

She has in mind a digital employment training center to help neighborhood residents retrain for higher-skilled work. Hands On Hartford is also partnering with Parkville Market developer Carlos Mouta on a 57-unit affordable housing complex further down Bartholomew Avenue.

“I think there are some fine, community-minded private developers out there,” she said, “but what motivates us is a little different than what typically motivates a private developer.”

Her aims may include guarding against the polarizing “g” word: gentrification.

“How do we make sure that the people who live, work, worship, play, – and sometimes struggle – in Hartford, that we really keep their needs, and the ability for them to contribute, foremost in our minds?” she said. “And if that’s not gentrification, then okay, that’s what we’re about.”

Taking control

For other local nonprofits, getting into real estate has been about trying to close gaps in their core mission.

Chrysalis Center completed its first housing development 12 years ago, and it’s done roughly one project every year since, including apartments in Willimantic and New Britain, and most recently the Clover Gardens development in Hartford.

The center provides services and supportive housing to vulnerable groups including adults with mental illness, dealing with substance use and returning from incarceration. CEO Sharon Castelli says getting into development was about having more control.

“Going out and finding folks that you serve with housing, it’s pretty substandard,” said Castelli. “Either the rents are too high, or if the rents are reasonable, very often the units are not really fit for living. This way we can control our housing.”

Chrysalis now has three separate operations – the original social services nonprofit, a development arm, and a real estate holding corporation.

Castelli says 12 years in, she has a good handle on the development world, but in the early days she relied heavily on consultants.

“I would caution social service providers not to go it alone,” she said, “to make sure that they have the experts that can help them through. It is a different occupation if you will.”

Follow the money

Both Hands On Hartford and Community Solutions say one of the biggest stumbling blocks to getting involved in development is funding.

Haggerty says her organization was used to tapping the low-income housing tax credit as a simple funding tool for affordable housing projects. However, the money for something like the Swift Factory redevelopment had to come from a painstakingly assembled patchwork of public and private sources – one of the reasons the project has taken so long to get off the ground.

“When you look at the sources of financing, it looks like an electrical circuit board,” she laughed. “I think one of the opportunities for government leaders is to make it easier to put the kinds of resources together that would enable something like Swift.”

This type of nonprofit involvement in real estate development and neighborhood revitalization is much more typical in big cities like New York or San Francisco, and is still relatively rare in Connecticut.

Haggerty believes the recent advent of federal American Rescue Plan dollars may spur more interest in developing additional expertise in the nonprofit sector.

“There’s a little bit of a mismatch in some communities between the level of opportunity now with federal recovery dollars and the capacity of the not-for-profit development community,” she said. “You want to use these unusual, one-time financing opportunities to lock in some permanent civic infrastructure, as opposed to commercial development.”