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10. Brookside Housing Cooperative During the mid-1980s, Connecticut was hit by a speculative real estate boom that dramatically raised rents and house prices. According to the state Department of Housing, the average monthly rent for a two-bedroom apartment in the central Naugatuck Valley region rose by 176 percent, from $176 to $485, between 1980 and 1986.1 Rev. Shepard Parsons of the Naugatuck Valley Project said that seven hundred people applied to the Waterbury Housing Authority for Section 8 subsidized apartments in one day.2 Mike Kearney told Ken Galdston that his brother-in-law was having to move out of Seymour because he couldn’t find housing and that many workers at Seymour Specialty Wire were having trouble finding affordable places to live. Waterbury also saw a flood of new condominiums and conversion of rental housing to condos. I heard Theresa Francis of the NVP quip, “They’re going to stop calling it Waterbury and change the name to Condobury.” Initially, Ken Galdston was wary of NVP involvement with housing issues. “When it was first suggested that the Project do something about housing I know that I was somewhat skeptical or hesitant. I was very concerned about the Project losing its real focus on jobs which is a critical characteristic of this organization.” At the October 1986 NVP convention, two new leaders began pushing for the project to become involved with housing. One was Geraldine Drabek, a Latin teacher at Holy Cross High School who had moved into the valley from elsewhere in Connecticut. The other was Maryann Maloney, another parochial-school teacher whose pastor at St. Vincent Ferrer Church in Naugatuck , Father Edmund Nadolny, was interested in housing. Any delegate to the convention could submit a resolution on anything, so they put in a resolution saying the project should look at housing as an issue. It passed. Ken noted that the proponents were both women, and that they represented a new generation of leaders in the project, but he was still leery. He knew that organizing projects elsewhere had gotten swamped when they tried their hand at housing development. He told Geraldine Drabek, “Let’s put together a housing committee,” but “it was just sort of stall for time until we really got some sense of how are we going to handle this.”3 Drabek began recruiting a housing committee, and Ken began looking through his files for materials on housing. Shamrock Ridge Early in 1987, the NVP got a call from Fred Perella at the Archdiocese Office of Urban Affairs. A developer named Robert Matthews, who had contributed to the archdiocese and was seen as supportive to its work, was involved in a conflict with his tenants at a Waterbury apartment complex known as Summerset Hills. It was originally built in 1941as temporary housing for war workers. With 172 units, it was the last large private development in Waterbury with affordable housing for poor and working people. Matthews had recently bought the development and raised the rents so high that tenants might be forced to leave. The tenants had gone to Green Community Services, a Waterbury social service agency run by Catholic nuns. They had suggested that the tenants form a group and negotiate with Matthews, but he refused to meet with more than one or two at a time and insisted that there be no press. Perella, who knew that the sisters at Green Community Services were experienced with social services but not with organizing, asked if the NVP could become involved. Ken gave some advice, but was reluctant to go further. Matthews reached a tentative agreement with the tenants, then abruptly sold the complex to another developer named Robert Fedak of Stamford, Connecticut, who changed its name to Shamrock Ridge. (Matthews apparently loaned Fedak much of the money for the purchase and remained a player behind the scenes.) The new owner raised rents 100percent and started converting the complex to condominiums. Many tenants left; the rest feared they would lose their homes.4 Of its 172units, only 72were occupied in June 1987. When Perella asked the NVP to come to a meeting to discuss becoming involved, Ken took along Geraldine Drabek and suggested that he go to the development and “see what’s there.” Ken called Evelyn Lush, the identified leader of the tenants, to come out the next day to look around. She asked him if there was anything they should Brookside Housing Cooperative 165 [3.15.229.113] Project MUSE (2024...

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