Hartford Land Bank Invests in Human Infrastructure

Boarded-up properties in Hartford, CT. (Source: Author.)

If you walked up Eighth Avenue from Central Park in the early 1980s, some of the storefronts and brownstones on Harlem’s side streets looked like they’d recently been hit by a bomb or natural disaster. Windows were boarded up, fires smoldered, debris lay piled up on lots, and broken glass crunched under your feet. 

It might have seemed to people living outside the neighborhood like no one wanted to live there anymore, especially if you were reading the New York Times. A July 1981 Times article said the city owned 60 percent of the area’s residential properties, most acquired through tax liens. This foreclosed portfolio included 300 brownstones and townhouses and 1,308 multifamily units. The city also owned one of every seven commercial properties and vacant lots. 

Things changed a lot in Harlem in the next three decades. When I lived there in 2013, my neighbor told me one day he was thinking over a $2.3 million offer for the brownstone he bought off the foreclosure rolls for $35,000 in 1985. I asked him if he was going to take it. “Where would I live?” he asked with a wry laugh. He often told stories about the children and grandchildren he had raised in his home on 122nd Street. 

Many of my former neighbors’ friends and family members in Harlem had different outcomes by the time I lived there. They were no longer vested in the neighborhood when the formerly boarded-up brownstones of Harlem were worth more than $2 million and two-bedroom apartments rented for $3,200 per month. Priced out by re-development and capital from afar, they were now in outer Brooklyn or the South Bronx or further, unable to build on and enjoy generational wealth in their homes, like my former neighbor.

One state away and just up the Connecticut River from where the brownstone was quarried to cover the eponymous brick row houses in New York City, you’ll find the North End neighborhood of Hartford. It’s one of the many urban communities in the capital city of Hartford where city leaders are working to move boarded-up properties off the foreclosure rolls. 

The North End isn’t Harlem in the 1980s, but it has similar challenges. It was cut off from downtown Hartford by interstate highways built in the post-WWII Suburban Experiment. Surface parking lots and empty homes are common. There are few grocery stores and lots of liquor stores. Instead of banks and credit unions, there are check cashing and paycheck loan storefronts. Some schools are closed and others are only partially occupied because many neighborhood children attend better schools in the suburbs, getting up in the very early morning hours and coming home late in the day to do so.

(Source: Author.)

However, things are changing. Boosted in part by a pandemic influx of new residents and the increased buying power available from historically low interest rates, it’s a seller’s market in Connecticut—even in the urban areas which have seen population declines in recent decades. 

If you are in the market, you’ll find the odds are good, but the goods are a little odd. Many of the properties require extensive renovations and since these neighborhoods aren’t, like West Harlem, one express subway stop from Columbus Circle in New York City, there isn’t a line of cash-flush developers ready to tear houses down to studs and brick and rebuild them. 

So even with a surplus of foreclosed properties, there aren’t many opportunities to buy an affordable, turnkey home in the City of Hartford. Would-be buyers willing to put in some sweat equity are repelled by a second major obstacle: financing. It’s often prohibitively expensive or unavailable for small developers seeking to renovate blighted properties.

Solving these problems is front of mind for Arunan Arulampalam, the newly hired director of the city’s fledgling Hartford Land Bank. A Los Angeles native, he married a Connecticut girl and did a stint working for the state as a deputy commissioner in the Consumer Protection Division. 

Arulampalam and his wife now live with five children in the Frog Hollow/South Green neighborhood, one of many underdeveloped communities like the North End that seem ripe for investment, like Harlem in the 1980s and 1990s. 

Arunan Arulampalam. (Source: Author.)

Faced with few solutions, Arulampalam did the only thing he could do to find developers for the land bank portfolio. He turned to the community, assessed available resources, and started innovating. 

What he came up with is among a first wave of developer training programs in the country. A December cohort of 20 developer trainees were selected from a pool of more than 300 applicants. 

“There were so many great applicants that I ended up calling people who weren’t selected and asking them to hold on, to wait for the next training, because I didn’t want to lose them,” he told me recently while we walked around one of the land bank’s North End properties. 

Training new small-scale developers. (Source: Hartford Land Bank.)

The two-week December program was free and included child care for participants with children. It covered how to build a budget, identify and use different sources of funding, order materials, track costs, work with city government, build a strategy and a team, and form a limited liability corporation. The December developers cohort included a diverse mix of ages and abilities, some with experience in the trades, but not necessarily as licensed and bonded contractors. It was made up primarily of people of color with local ties to the community. 

The non-profit Hartford Community Loan Fund is a partner in the program, providing $1 million in low-interest loans through a revolving fund so the trainees can purchase and renovate homes from the land bank. The city of Hartford owns dozens more vacant, blighted residential and commercial properties which could eventually be moved into the portfolio of the land bank.

Non-profit land trusts are common in other cities, but the Hartford Land Bank is the first of its kind in Connecticut, according to the Hartford Courant newspaper. The first group of single- and multi-family homes were transferred to the land bank last year and the nonprofit is fixing up some of the properties and choosing local developers to restore others with its modest operating support from part of a $5 million state grant. 

In order to take over more city properties, the land bank needs to find more local construction and project managers to invest in them. 

“I think the potential—not just for redeveloping properties that have been a real issue in communities and neighborhoods for a while—but building wealth in our neighborhoods in Hartford is tremendous, and something that’s really exciting for me,” Arulampalam told the Hartford Courant. 

In Harlem in the 1980s and 1990s, some of the properties came off the tax rolls and into the hands of local residents who had a lottery preference. But most were auctioned to developers from outside the neighborhood who ripped the 19th-century brownstones down to brick and then sold or rented them as multi-family renovations, like the one my family lived in there. 

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The historic places of the Harlem Renaissance began to change dramatically as community leaders and council members debated how to manage the influx of new families who were, like my family, seeking more affordable places to live. 

Sure to spark a fight, the idea of gentrification—as Strong Towns has noted—is complex and can mean many different things to different stakeholders. Lance Freeman and Frank Braconi’s landmark 2004 analysis indicates that “rather than speeding up the departure of low-income residents through displacement, neighborhood gentrification in New York City was actually associated with a lower propensity of disadvantaged households to move.”

A 2015 CityLab article casts gentrification and displacement as symptoms of the scarcity of quality urbanism. 

“The driving force behind both is the far larger process of spiky reurbanization—itself propelled by large-scale public and private investment in everything from transit, schools, and parks to private research institutions and housing redevelopment,” wrote Richard Florida. “All of which points to the biggest, most crucial task ahead: creating more inclusive cities and neighborhoods that can meet the needs of all urbanites.”

Across the Harlem River in the South Bronx, community leader and urban revitalization consultant Majora Carter has spent 20 years or more navigating these complexities. Carter has talked about “self-gentrification” as work a “low-status” community does to invest in itself instead of measuring success by how far people can get away from their communities.

Carter told an interviewer in 2016 the million-dollar question is how to make a neighborhood better for the people that live there “because…people in our community want[ed] to have the same kind of wonderful communities that anybody else had. And that is one way to instill pride of place in a community. You tell folks, early on, that you deserve to have a great space to live as well.”

Human infrastructure is a term often used by transportation and mobility rights scholar Dr. Adonia Lugo to describe the set of personal relations that help keep communities strong. Sometimes, Lugo argues, supporting human infrastructure is more important than physical infrastructure in creating strong, resilient communities. 

Arulampalam, at the Hartford Land Bank, is investing in people first. It’s a key Strong Towns value, one that Carter amplifies in the South Bronx when she tells low-status community residents their vision and their participation is crucial: “Your involvement here, both investment-wise and also just in terms of how you use these communities, is important, and is valuable.” 

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