NORTHAMPTON — Haywood Sutton is a Cadillac man. His father drove them, and he has two of them.
Late Tuesday morning, he ran a rag across his red 2008 DTS in the lot where he has parked it for the past two years. He won’t park there much longer.
That’s because Northampton Lodging, the affordable housing complex where he lives, is scheduled to be torn down in September. Tenants have been gradually moving out of the 58-unit building this year, a process that is coming to an end.
In its place at 129 Pleasant St. near downtown will be Live 155, a five-story building with a planned mix of affordable and market-price apartments with retail spaces on the ground floor.
HAPHousing, the Springfield nonprofit developing Live 155, has followed through on promises to help tenants find new housing that were made with the demolition announcement two years ago.
“They’ve just about got us all placed,” Sutton said.
And despite the “NO VACANCY” signs on Northampton Lodging’s front door, both Sutton and project manager Peter Serafino said the building is nearly empty.
Only 10 to 15 tenants remain in the building, Serafino said, and all but four or five of those have secured new living arrangements. HAP aims to have the building empty by the first week of September and to close on its financing by the end of the year. It also has received $450,000 in funding from the city.
About 40 people were living in the building when HAP secured state affordable housing resources in March, Serafino said.
“These are all low-income people, people with medical issues and other health issues, so it’s kind of a challenging proposition to find temporary assistance for them,” Serafino said.
He praised the Northampton Housing Authority, which Serafino said placed many of the tenants in new housing. Some residents are also relocating to Amherst, Easthampton, Sunderland and Holyoke.
That does not mean the tenants received preferential treatment over other people applying for public housing, Northampton Housing Authority Executive Director Cara Clifford said. They still had to meet established criteria for public housing, and they may have faced a waiting list.
“If these people applied and met some of these criteria, they may have been allowed to move in here,” she said. “Some of them may have already been on the list.”
Sutton said he was not able to get housing in Northampton. A former “wannabe drug dealer,” as he called himself, he said he served eight years in prison and has been clean since he got out in 2012. He was able to find housing in Amherst, where he will sign a lease Thursday.
“It’s a little rough to be uprooted,” he said. “My girl works down at the Burger King on King Street, so that’s a little distant.”
His girlfriend will have to drive the other Cadillac, a 1998 DeVille, to work.
Someday, though, he may be back in the same location. Forty-seven of Live 155’s 70 studio and one-bedroom apartments will be designated as affordable housing, Serafino said, with preference for former Northampton Lodging tenants.
“Anybody that we’ve moved out that’s a tenant in good standing … will be able to move back into the new building,” he said. “All but one or two of the people who live here now qualify for the (affordable) apartments.”
Sutton said he and his girlfriend have already been invited back. Serafino said the end of construction is projected for the first quarter of 2018. Perhaps then, a year and a half from now, Sutton will once again park his Cadillacs near home on Pleasant Street.