WORCESTER — A decision to include eight basement apartments in an affordable housing complex in one of the city's poorest neighborhoods has ended up costing taxpayers more than $1 million.
In July 2009, raw sewage that flooded into their units forced about 25 low-income residents out of the complex at 9 May St., in the heart of the Main South area.
Last week, workers were digging in the earth behind the building to connect pipe sections to a recently installed main sewer line, finishing up a repair project that has taken two years.
The total cost to fix the problem — which critics say could have been avoided in the first place — and to keep the flooding from happening again, is $1.2 million.
Footing most of the bills for the long-delayed repair are city and state taxpayers, who are splitting $1 million worth of the work. The builder of the 46-unit low-income complex, the Worcester Common Ground community development corporation, is picking up the balance.
Jacqueline Vachon-Jackson, chief of staff of the city's office of economic, neighborhood and community development, said the city essentially had no choice but to shoulder part of the expense of the sewer line replacement because the flooding and sewage problems that erupted in July 2009 had become a public health and humanitarian crisis. Displaced residents had to live in motels for five months.
And, she noted, because the nonprofit developer could not afford the repair, the city and state were obligated to help and also did not want to put their sizable investments in the original $16 million undertaking at risk.
“It was absolutely a stretch for the city to come up with the money, but at the same time there were a lot of people put out of their homes because of the flooding,” Ms. Vachon-Jackson said. “It had also become a homelessness issue.
“The challenge with nonprofits is that it is their responsibility but they didn't have the money to pay it, so it became a community responsibility,” she continued.
The hefty price tag, city officials and some critics of the affordable housing developer say, is especially frustrating because city officials warned the CDC that the historic former organ factory was in a flood zone and basement units would almost certainly be prone to flooding.
Robert L. Moylan Jr., the city's public works commissioner, says the building met code and there was nothing the city could do to block the inclusion of eight basement units in the complex.
Common Ground officials say their engineers assured them the basement apartments would be safe, and maintain that the city never put anything in writing about risks associated with the basement units.
However, some who live and work in the neighborhood say the area is well-known for flooding and that the former factory, which later became a furniture warehouse, often took on water in the basement after heavy rains.
“All they had to do is ask anyone in the area. It's very obvious that that building sits in a bowl,” said Arthur Mooradian, a real estate developer and landlord with an office a few blocks away. “If all they did was not put basement apartments in there they would have avoided the whole fiasco. It was all about stuffing in as many apartments as they could.”
But Stephen T. Patton, executive director of Common Ground, said the basement units were an essential part of the development and that sewage backflow preventers were in place but failed.
“The units are beautiful. The demand was there. It hadn't flooded in the past,” he said.
Mr. Patton added that rather than a lower-cost solution that would have involved a full-time pump, he believes that the new sewer main that now runs through the busy Main Street intersection and up Main Street will benefit the entire neighborhood and will give the Common Ground housing complex security from future disasters.
“I think it was necessary. Hopefully it will benefit a number of other users in the future,” Mr. Patton said.
As for the sluggish pace of the sewer work, Mr. Patton said the delays were an unavoidable byproduct of planning and financing a complex project, the challenges of digging at times 30 feet into the ground, and bad weather.
After the rains of the summer of 2009, “the winter came and we had to wait for funding,” Mr. Patton said. Temporary pumps and a temporary sewer line were installed. Work finally started in fall 2010, and then the heavy snows of last winter hit, slowing the project at the outset. Then spring and its seemingly constant rains arrived, Mr. Patton added.
Now, the fix is almost complete. The hookup to the apartment complex is nearly finished and the bumpy, hastily resurfaced intersection of Main and May streets is slated for finish work soon, Mr. Patton and city officials said.
“We're in the driveway and we're almost home,” Mr. Patton said. “I think it was a good investment in the long run.”
For some residents of the once flood-prone basement apartments of 9 May St., though, the prospect of a more secure future provides little solace for the indignities and inconvenience of the last two years.
Timothy A. Niles, 43, who lives on government disability checks because he is partially deaf and blind, said he lost his computer and living room and bedroom furniture to flooding and sewage damage, and had to spend $4,000 on food because he couldn't cook during his nearly half a year in motels in 2009.
More recently, over the past year, Mr. Niles has had to put up with frequent noise and the presence of construction workers inches outside his eye-level living room windows.
“Two years is ridiculous,” he said. “I've never seen a project take this long. I think it's the neighborhood. They think we're poor people. If the job was done right from the beginning, we wouldn't have been flooded and we wouldn't have lost anything.”
