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Home maintenance is a big job

A CONTRACTOR LOOKS for the source of an electrical problem in Lindale Manufactured Housing Community in Middlebury.

As fall advances and many of us are thinking about wrapping up our properties for the season ahead. It’s time to put the garden to bed, patch the porch, and repair that piece of trim under the eaves before the wasps move in to overwinter.

At Addison Housing Works (AHW), we’re busy making sure that our housing is not only affordable, but safe, decent, and well-maintained.

Addison Housing Works, formerly known as Addison County Community Trust, is a nonprofit affordable housing trust. We develop, own and manage affordable housing in Addison County, including rental apartments, mobile home parks, single-family homes, and senior housing. As such, the organization has a lot of experience maintaining homes.

Maintenance is important for obvious reasons, like health and safety. Moreover, it supports dignity and pride of place for residents who may experience stigma and even discrimination for having low incomes and residing in affordable housing. Finally, many people may not know that AHW properties are permanently affordable, meaning the organization must maintain them in perpetuity to serve future generations of low- and moderate-income Vermonters in need of affordable housing. We invest significant time and resources making sure our properties are in good condition so they don’t become lost from Addison County’s precious permanently affordable housing stock.

AHW manages and stewards more than 750 permanently affordable homes in Addison County. That includes 14 multifamily properties with 48 buildings and 353 apartments, nine manufactured housing communities (MHCs) with 340 lots for owner-occupied homes, and 75 shared equity single-family homes and condos. In 2023 alone, AHW reinvested more than $1.3 million into regular maintenance for our multifamily family apartment buildings and MHCs — not including a $5 million community septic upgrade at Lindale MHC in Middlebury and a $409,000 water system upgrade at Vaughn Court MHC in Monkton.

How do we do it? We have a dedicated property management and maintenance team as well as trusted local vendors who take on projects ranging from leaky toilets to new curb stops. Read on for a peek at what it’s like to be a maintenance tech with Addison Housing Works.

A Day in the Life of an AHW Maintenance Tech

A day might begin with a resident calling in a toilet that doesn’t flush at Weybridge Street Apartments in Middlebury. Maintenance Supervisor Donnie Wall enters the work order and dispatches Maintenance Tech Ben Kivlen to assess the issue. Arriving at the property, it appears an alarm on the sewer pump station is going off — the pump is jammed! What appeared to be a simple call now requires a call to a licensed professional to fix the pump. Even when a pro is called in, AHW’s maintenance team is there to help, whatever it takes — in this case, it took going headfirst into a sewer pit to investigate a malfunctioning sewer pump!

While it isn’t every day we have to get down and dirty with septic systems (though perhaps more often than you’d think), renovating a unit between tenants is something we do every day — in fact, we did it 35 times in 2023 alone, at an average cost of about $6,000 per unit. A typical turnover at a minimum involves a fresh coat of paint and a deep clean. Often, we replace old carpet with more durable vinyl plank flooring — this comes at a higher up-front cost, but pays off with a longer lifespan and reduced wear and tear. The punch list of a unit turnover also frequently includes things like tub resurfacing, drywall repairs, new stove heating elements, repairing baseboard hot water covers, replacing broken bath fixtures, down to the “Sparkle Inspection” — that’s the thing Alice Quesnel performs before leasing up a new tenant. It includes things like making sure the oven light works and the fans have been dusted.

MAINTENANCE DIRECTOR COLBY Benjamin stands with Director of Property Management Tori Marukelli outside a historic building
on Seminary Street in Middlebury after a fresh coat of paint has been applied.

Preventative maintenance is of course an important focus of the maintenance team as well. For example, every year (and after storms, as needed) we walk properties to identify trees that might be a threat to residents and properties. Given the increasing frequency and severity of storms we’re experiencing due to climate change, this activity is absolutely essential to ensuring safety at our properties. We were very lucky that tree damage from the windstorms this past January mostly missed residents’ homes and cars, but in the wake of that event, we completed $20,000 in tree removal at Lindale and identified $20,000 more in needed tree removal at KTP in Bristol. Otter Creek MHC in Vergennes earlier this year had 97 trees identified for removal; 70 of those were ash trees, which have become blighted by the emerald ash borer.

In addition to preventative maintenance, work orders and unit turnovers, AHW’s maintenance team also handles large capital projects at our properties. In 2023, we completed a nearly $100,000 project at Stone Hill on Court Street in Middlebury to improve drainage around the foundation, which was experiencing significant ice penetration into the garage. This year, we are completing road paving projects in several of our manufactured housing communities (MHCs), including Brookside in Starksboro and Otter Creek in Vergennes.

Finally, some projects go above and beyond the normal scope of maintenance, and require a team of developers and project managers to complete — such as the new Lindale community septic system serving 67 homes in Middlebury, which took more than five years to develop at a cost of over $5 million. The new system improves health and safety at the park, which suffered for years from surfacing effluent, and benefits all of us who live in the Lake Champlain watershed by properly treating discharge before it reaches our waterways.

Our maintenance team gets it all done, providing service 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and they do it with a smile and a kind word for residents. One resident at Pete Coe Village Apartments says, “The Maintenance staff is great, they never make me feel ashamed of my space and never make me feel like I am bothering them.” Even when they’re putting out (sometimes literal) fires, they make time to go the extra mile, helping fill raised beds with topsoil at our community gardens, installing new signs at our properties, sharing a kind word with a resident, and helping set up and take down for our fundraising event every year.

Even if you don’t know how to replace a lightbulb, let alone a smoke detector, kitchen hose or rotten clapboard, you can still get involved with Addison Housing Works and help us provide safe, quality, affordable housing to more than 1,000 of our Addison County friends and neighbors — including families, seniors, children, individuals and their four-legged friends and support animals. For example:

• Join your town’s Housing Committee if they have one, and if not, encourage them to explore creating one.

• Show your support at public hearings for new housing development in your community.

• Join a Planning Commission or Development Review Board in your town.

• Come to AHW’s events, like the 35th Anniversary Celebration we hosted in Bristol this past Sept. 13.

• Become a sustaining donor at www.addisonhousingworks.org/donate where you can help ensure Addison County continues to have a strong local housing trust that cares deeply about our residents and the quality of our properties.

Home Maintenance Pro Tips

•Did you know you can lose 200 gallons of water per day from a running toilet? That’s more than the average three-bedroom home uses in a day! The fix can be as easy as replacing the parts in your toilet tank.

•Cleaning the fins at the back of your fridge can help boost its energy eciency!

•Changing out traditional light bulbs for LEDs is another great way to reduce your electric bills.

Elise Shanbacker is Executive Director of Addison Housing Works.

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