Looking like an exuberant game show contestant, Celia Rodriguez bounded forward.
It was from a small crowd on New Britain’s Sheffield Street when her name was called in a lottery: She’d won the chance to buy a steeply below-market new house.
“This is my dream, this is my birthday gift,” Rodriguez exclaimed after she hugged Mayor Erin Stewart, who pulled winners’ names from a long list of people vying for a real estate bargain in the city’s East Side.
Rodriguez was one of 11 applicants selected to buy a newly built home partly subsidized by the city’s neighborhood preservation program and state environmental cleanup grants. In all, city leaders estimate that tearing down an old school on the site, doing environmental cleanup, carving out 11 lots and building modest houses on them cost about $6 million.
For the city, it was a way to combat blight, strengthen the neighborhood by beefing up owner-occupied housing, and providing modest-income families with a realistic route to home ownership amid the fiery hot housing market.
New Britain has done similar projects on a much smaller scale, usually targeting just one or two long-blighted, deteriorating one-family houses. When it’s clear the owner will never restore or even stabilize the property, the city acquires the title and either rehabs the building or clears the land before building a new house.
The city’s first-time homebuyer program uses federal Housing and Urban Development aid to pay for the work, and then advertises for potential buyers whose incomes are low enough to essentially exclude them from home ownership — but high enough to cover the mortgage on the kind of small, affordable starter homes that few developers are building.
Prospective buyers must register and get informally cleared for mortgage approval, then enter a lottery. They must be debt-free, certify that they will occupy the home for at least 15 years, and acknowledge that their mortgage will preclude them from withdrawing any equity during that time.
Wednesday’s lottery was the largest ever because New Britain had built an entire new subdivision of small houses all clustered around Kelsey and Sheffield streets, site of the former St. Thomas Aquinas School. The school had stood empty since 1999 and was targeted by squatters, vandals and scrappers, suffering water and fire damage over the years and worrying neighbors.
“We knew the massive impact this site would have. To have 11 new single-family homes and give an opportunioty to people to call New Britain home, this is what community development is all about,” Stewart said. “This is really transformational for a lot of people here today.”
When word of the lottery got out, the city received more than 1,600 inquiries.
Margaret Malinowski, who adminsters the program, said the houses are being sold for $250,000 apiece; the city has appraised their value at $350,000 to $368,000. They are on small lots and have about 1,250 square feet with three and a half bedrooms, one and a half baths, full basements and gas heat.
For Rodriguez and the 10 families that will be her new neighbors, the city’s program provides a way to afford a small house, become part of a neighborhood and gradually build equity. Rodriguez, a nurse and a New Britain High School Class of 1996 member, is excited to be buying her first house.
New Britain’s program to help first-time homebuyers created 11 starter homes on the eastern side of the city. (Don Stacom/The Hartford Courant)
She was accompanied to the auction by her mother, Ana Osorio, who recalled buying her first house at 23.
“You can’t do that today,” Osorio said.
As of Wednesday afternoon, Rodriguez was planning to give the news at dinnertime to her 14-year-old daughter or 19-year-old son.
“October 5 will be my end-of-lease date and it will be month to month after that,” she said. “My landlord is awesome: he really wants me to get a house. He says ‘I don’t want to lose you as a tenant, but I really want you to get a house.’ “
