House rules

The drugs and violence at Advent Apartments have taken a toll on tenants. As they struggle to remain clean and sober, the residents also must contend with Ferland Property Management's debilitating tactics

by Jody Ericson

The day the old Gemini Hotel in Providence was given new life started with a snip of the scissors by Rhode Island's finest. Providence Mayor Vincent "Buddy" Cianci, Jr. was there, along with US Senator John Chafee and higher-ups from various city and state housing agencies. Gathering just down the road from the blinking neon lights of the Club Fantasies strip joint on Dean Street, those who attended the ceremony gave the impression they were severing more than a ribbon. Indeed, as they celebrated the grand opening of Advent Apartments, local politicos seemed to be saying farewell to the Gemini's past as one of Providence's most infamous houses of ill repute.

But in its new incarnation as a 57-unit apartment complex for once-homeless residents, the building, despite its shiny new appearance, still has a bad rep, although for different reasons. Housing many former clients of Advent House, a church-supported nonprofit group that works with homeless people, particularly those with substance-abuse or mental-health problems, Advent Apartments has turned into a nightmare for its tenants. According to several who contacted the Phoenix out of fear and frustration, drugs and violence have overtaken the building, creating an unsafe and unhealthy environment for the people who live there.

Indeed, not long after the building's grand opening, one resident reportedly died from an overdose, while tenants say that another had a sort of McDonald's drive-through window on the first floor for people walking past and looking to buy drugs. But most disturbing is the fact that clients who have tried to remain clean and sober have fallen off the wagon, the availability of drugs and alcohol in the building too great a temptation.

"During my time at Advent House, the Advent Apartments were like this sunrise in the distance. It was a real goal," says Bill Harrison (the name has been changed for privacy reasons), a resident. "But then after we moved in, some people from Advent House began to pick up again, and there were people in the corridors with bright red faces, as if they'd been on a toot the night before. Others were staggering around or walking across the street with bags of six-packs. It was really discouraging, because a relapse can be deadly."

But even more depressing for Harrison and other tenants was the way the company managing the building, Ferland Property Management of Pawtucket, went about fixing the problem. While they did attempt to deal directly with some of the issues, they also apparently tried to strip the tenants of their rights and railroad them into agreeing to new house rules that bordered on byzantine. "What Ferland's doing is illegal and unconstitutional," says Steven Fischbach, who works in the housing unit of Rhode Island Legal Services.

One of the most aggravating rules that Ed Mulholland, who manages the apartments for Ferland and refused comment for this story ("nothing personal, I just don't talk to reporters," he says), tried to enforce was no visitors in the apartments -- a stipulation which one resident says jeopardized his visitation rights with his children. The rule also meant that counselors or AA sponsors visiting tenants had to meet in the common area, often under the watchful gaze of a security guard.

Overall, the feeling that washed over the building was humiliation. The tenants, the majority of whose rent is federally subsidized through the Providence Housing Authority, know they are responsible for their actions and for addressing problems that crop up in their living space. In this case, they say, they would've been glad to sit down with Ferland to try to work on a solution. But the management company didn't give them the opportunity before imposing new rules -- a tactic, the residents say, that treated them, as a whole, like criminals.

In doing so, Ferland probably banked on the fact that the residents would be too ashamed of their past -- or not organized or savvy enough -- to publicly take on a giant like Ferland, says Harrison. "I'm embarrassed I lost everything because of my drinking. So a lot of people were upset, but we had to swallow our pride," he explains. "Everyone felt like David versus Goliath, because Ferland was like, `Go ahead and take us to court. You won't win. ' "

And that type of attitude, says Harrison, hurts the tenants more than anyone can imagine, making recovery -- and the self-empowerment that goes with it -- all the harder.

At a tenants' meeting with Ferland on Thursday, November 19, the two sides did finally sit down and try to address their differences. And, in fact, Ferland agreed to suspend the no visitors rule and replace it with a 2 a.m. visitors' curfew until January 1, when a committee made up of residents and management officials will unveil a new set of rules for the building.

Still, Mulholland's tone with the residents at Thursday's meeting was condescending, signaling a shift in strategy only and not attitude. Several times he threatened to leave if the residents didn't quiet down. And while he accused them of being combative, the red-faced Mulholland whipped up the crowd himself with comments like "Fine, I tried" and "We're gonna settle it, or we're not gonna settle it; I don't care."

Even worse, Ferland did not say what would happen if the rules committee did not come to a consensus in January -- or if tenants refused to sign the new regs -- making the whole plan seem for show. "We're going to have this committee, and we'll make a decision from there," said Paul Ragosta, an attorney for Ferland, after the meeting. "Ultimately, it's a management decision; we make the rules."

At the core of the problem is just who is ultimately responsible for the tenants of Advent Apartments -- who hired Ferland in the first place and who has the authority to fire them if things get any worse. The reason why this question is so complicated has to do with the way the $4.1 million project was funded.

According to Chris Barnett, spokesman for Rhode Island Housing and Mortgage Finance Corporation (RIHMFC), Advent House, for all purposes, owns the building. But his group, which is best known for providing low-income mortgages to first-time home buyers, put up half the financing, while the rest came from the sale of federal low-income housing tax credits to the Enterprise Social Investment Corporation, a Maryland-based investment fund.

As a major investor, then, RIHMFC oversees the management of the building, says Barnett, who cites two reasons for why they'd want to do so: "to protect our investment . . . and to comply with our mandate to provide safe and decent affordable housing." And in this dual role, RIHMFC demanded that Advent House hire a professional management company to run Advent Apartments. "We gave them a list of 50 names to choose from, but we didn't tell them who to hire," says Barnett.

But that's not the way Deborah Gray-Clukey, Advent House's executive director, remembers it. "Rhode Island Housing felt that Ferland should manage it," she says. A politically connected operation, Ferland already handles what Barnett estimates to be 1000 RIHMFC-financed units, an enormous task that has given the management company a take-no-crap edge over the years. In some cases, this approach has been effective, but clearly not with Advent Apartments.

Although the housing complex is private and meant to foster independent living among its tenants, many people there are living on their own for the first time, creating a host of social concerns that would be better addressed by an agency like Advent. "Advent House did not get into the business to become a housing developer," says Clukey. "If we were for-profit, all we'd care about is filling the building and having people pay the rent. But we feel the quality of life is what counts."

Charles Hilton

Indeed, says 25-year-old Charles Hilton, who moved into Advent Apartments after losing his home and job a year and a half ago, Ferland's approach seems to be " `Can you pay the rent? Yes? Then you're in.' " And the result of this lax screening process is a building full of highly unstable tenants, he says.

According to Fischbach, this is not the first time Ferland has been criticized for its management policies. "From our experience, Ferland is not tenant-friendly. They constantly bring evictions that have no basis in law," he says. For instance, one of their most notorious tactics is to try to evict tenants for not paying $10 or $15 in late charges. "At University Heights [in Providence], they've brought such charges against people who have lived there for more than a quarter of a century. They do it routinely," says Fischbach. "They don't care about maintaining the stability of a community."

At Advent Apartments, Ferland also slid a clause into the lease that Fischbach claims is blatantly illegal -- essentially, it gives Ferland carte blanche to change the rules at any time. But Ragosta, Ferland's attorney, says that many leases have clauses like the one in Advent Apartments'.

The real issue, he says, is what type of rules a management company or landlord is allowed to adopt. Even though Advent Apartments is private, its federal funding means that the building falls under federal regulations, which state that new rules can be made if they're "reasonable" and/or for security reasons, says Ragosta.

"The thing that's driving these rules is that there have been problems," he told the tenants at last Thursday's meeting. "We're not putting in rules to hurt people."

But Fischbach says the no visitors rule is so ridiculous -- and so out of the ballpark of what the federal regs are meant to address -- that "it would be like saying a tenant has to cut his or her arm off to live there.

"I've never heard of subsidized housing that doesn't allow visitors," he says. "It's outrageous, it's patronizing, and what could be more disruptive for a family that's been separated and is trying to reunite?"

"You can't just arbitrarily paste a note on a wall and adopt new rules. That's not how you treat people," adds Clukey, who has hired an attorney to study Advent House's one-year contract with Ferland to see what can be done. Clukey mentions how Ferland has banned drinking in the building. "If I wanted the building to be alcohol-free, I'd sit down with the residents on each floor and say why," says Clukey. "That takes work, that takes meetings. But I believe I could convince people that it was the thing to do."

Indeed, at the meeting on Thursday, tenants seemed to object more to how Ferland went about changing the rules than the rules themselves. Gathered in the common area, the 20 or so residents assembled were clearly angry at the management company for tricking them into signing a lease with so many loopholes. As Harrison says, with nowhere else to go, many felt they had no choice but to sign what was put in front of them last June, no matter what the document said.

"Man, I got to be told when I gotta have visitors? I had more visitors in jail," said one man in the back at Thursday's meeting.

"When I signed my lease, I signed to an apartment building, not a shelter," added another.

Then, when informed that Ferland would make an exception and allow visitors on Thanksgiving, the audience groaned at the double standard. "What, are the kooks going to behave themselves on Thanksgiving?" asked one resident.

"I'm not worried about the holidays," added another. "I'm worried about my rights."

But despite all that had taken place, something positive happened in the room that Thursday. As several residents remarked later, the people of Advent Apartments stood up to Ferland -- and Ferland backed down, agreeing to the 2 a.m. curfew for now.

"My residents are used to me solving everything for them," says Clukey. But this time, they took matters into their own hands, reading up on the law and contacting a reporter prior to the meeting. They saw that they had the power to change things, that their past was, well, in the past. They were not prisoners or charity cases, they insisted, but people with a binding contract and the same rights as everyone else.

But that doesn't mean everyone is willing to give them their due. Indeed, even Thomas Hogan, a highly visible board member at Advent House who was president until this year, wouldn't comment for this story. Profiled on the front page of the Providence Journal last November for his annual good deed of putting on a Thanksgiving meal for Advent House clients, Hogan, an attorney at Tillinghast Licht & Semenoff in Providence, at first didn't respond to a Phoenix inquiry about Advent Apartments. When finally reached at his office, Hogan said he didn't have time to talk because he was catching a flight in an hour. Pressed and told of the nature of the story, he did not offer to call back at a later time.

So who's responsible for the tenants at Advent Apartments? The tenants are. But that doesn't mean that all the players involved shouldn't sit down together and figure out just what went so wrong.