Successful communities are composed of a diversity of building types, uses and people. Common Ground has put this diversity principle to use in a series of successful transformations of historic buildings over the course of our 13-year history. We have created more than 1,300 apartments in New York City and demonstrated that individual buildings can contribute to meeting a range of community needs.

Hartford, like so many cities, struggles with the challenges of creating an economically vital center city; with attracting investment; with job creation; with creating a 24-hour residential community to support a broad business base; with finding viable uses for historic buildings; with providing affordable housing for working people; and with finding genuine solutions that offer the homeless a way back to stable and purposeful lives.

Initiatives that respond to all these demands in single projects are what cities need.

Common Ground's plan for 410 Asylum St. represents such a multi-layered response to many of Hartford's dilemmas and downtown development goals.

In what has been an empty office building for seven years, we plan a full historic restoration that will create a 120-unit mixed-use, mixed-income rental apartment building with ground floor retail space.

The city's Greenberg plan calls for this use. What's equally significant, though, is who will live there. Half of the apartments - all of them efficiency style - will be rented to working individuals earning less than $27,960 per year. They are people who work in the city's hotels and schools, artists, office workers and those in service and entry level jobs who struggle to secure safe and affordable housing. The other 60 apartments will be for those selected from Hartford's overflowing shelters - people who show the strongest motivation to get back on their feet, re-enter the workforce and make good use of a second chance.

Funding for the project available through a combination of sources, particularly the low-income and historic rehabilitation tax credit programs, will enable us to bring new investment capital to Hartford.

Can this be done?

Thirteen years ago when Common Ground began its first project, the restoration of the crumbling Times Square Hotel at 43rd Street and 8th Avenue in Manhattan, that neighborhood was a symbol of urban blight. Crime, decaying buildings and the absence of legitimate retail businesses or a residential community characterized the area.

Collaborating with the newly formed Times Square Business Improvement District and with government officials overseeing redevelopment plans for the 42nd Street area, Common Ground converted the hotel into permanent housing for the homeless and low-income workers and thus became part of a stunning urban success story.

The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Some 652 affordable efficiency apartments were created for an equal number of homeless adults and lower-income working people. The ground floor attracted retail tenants such as Ben & Jerry's and Starbucks, which hired tenants returning to the workforce. Social service agencies worked with us to provide residents with the assistance they needed to become and remain responsible, financially self-sufficient tenants and neighbors. Nearby businesses offered jobs to our formerly homeless tenants, and referred their employees to us for safe and affordable housing.

Times Square is now a thriving business and tourist district. Our building is surrounded by new market rate housing, a recently opened Westin Hotel and some of the most expensive commercial real estate in the world.

Our longtime neighbors take pride in the area's inclusiveness, as well as its new prosperity, and that a mixed-income apartment building helped establish the momentum that so dramatically improved our community. We're told that newcomers to the neighborhood, or those who know our building by its appearance alone, are convinced that it's an exclusive hotel or market-rate housing.

What makes our buildings, all of which serve the homeless and low-income people, such exceptional contributors to neighborhood redevelopment is our commitment to good design; a thoughtful approach to tenant selection; appropriate support services; and strong on-site property management to tie everything together and ensure quality and accountability.

Our success rests, as well, on recognizing the important tradition of providing affordable housing for single people in downtown communities.

When I was growing up in West Hartford, my family became friendly with many of the residents of downtown hotels who, like us, attended Sunday Mass at St. Patrick and St. Anthony's at Church and Ann streets. In times of prosperity and decline, residential hotels like The Hartford, The Garde, The Thomas Hooker and many smaller rooming houses were a quiet but essential part of the downtown fabric, offering modest accommodations to low-wage workers and those on fixed incomes.

Spurred by urban renewal and other forces, most of these buildings were demolished by the end of the 1980s. In Hartford and other cities, the implications of the loss of residential hotels weren't recognized at the time. Not until more and more single people with limited incomes became homeless did the importance of such housing become clear.

Common Ground and other organizations have revived the concept of affordable housing designed for single people, while adding the services and attentive management that was often missing in the old commercial hotels. This has proved to be an effective answer to homelessness - permanent, cost effective and respectful of individuals and communities.

Yet it is not yet widely known that such a practical solution exists, and that such buildings have contributed so importantly to urban redevelopment efforts.

Common Ground's plan for 410 Asylum St. addresses several of the city's needs in one project in a way designed to complement other downtown development efforts. It offers a proven strategy. Our organization's record of success will help create the vital and inclusive downtown community Hartford aspires to have.

Rosanne Haggerty is president and founder of Common Ground, a nonprofit organization in New York City.
Copyright 2003, Hartford Courant