When Joanne Cassamajor left Brooklyn for New Hampshire 12 years ago, she was looking for a quieter life.

After moving into the Bronstein Apartments a year ago, she’s not convinced her family is ever going to find that in the public housing complex.

Still, the idea of losing the only home she can currently afford is frightening, and Cassamajor isn’t sure what she’ll do if the city’s plan to raze the public housing units is approved by the federal government.

“I was kind of shocked,” she said of hearing of the plans, just months after she moved into the apartments. “I wonder where they’re going to put all the people.”

Yet, Cassamajor hopes she is able to use this as an opportunity to get out of public housing.

Cassamajor’s biggest concern is that the Housing Authority will wait too long to help residents plan for their housing future.

“I just hope they don’t wait until the last minute to move people,” she said. “That’s bad for the kids here.”

Cassamajor is a single mother of five children: Curtis, 18, Brendan, 17, 13-year-old twins Abigail and Annabelle, and Joshua, 6.

Originally from Haiti, Cassamajor moved to Brooklyn as a teenager and lived there with her ex-husband and children for many years. She grew tired of hearing gunshots, she said, and wanted to be closer to her family, who live in Nashua, Manchester and Milford.

Cassamajor first moved to Manchester and then to Nashua about seven years ago. She’s lived in various places throughout the city, including Kessler Farms and even a single-family home with a big yard that she and her family remembers fondly.

After she and her husband divorced a few years ago, however, Cassamajor had to work harder to support her five children.

She did so as a cashier at Sears for many years, but she lost that job in April. Since then, Cassamajor has been looking for other work, a task made more difficult by the fact that she does not own a car.

Moving into public housing was a tough transition to make for herself and her children, Cassamajor said, but one that was necessary financially.

Before moving to Bronstein, Cassamajor had only heard bad things about the complex. A year after moving in, she still worries about her children growing up there.

“We don’t feel safe over here,” she said. “We always see police going by, almost every day.”

Her children Curtis and Brendan agreed. While the teens maintained they were not afraid of anything, and certainly not an apartment complex, they said they feel no connection to Bronstein.

“I don’t mind it here, but I would be happy to move,” Curtis said.

Cassamajor said she doesn’t allow her children to hang out on the basketball courts or playgrounds at the Bronsteins. Instead, she does her best to keep them inside the house or outside the complex all together, at a park or the YMCA.

Curtis and Brendan said they used to spend much of their free time riding around the city on their bicycles, visiting friends or just getting away from the house.

But on New Year’s Day this year, their bikes were stolen from outside their apartment, and the family does not have the money to replace them.

Stuck inside their new home more often, Cassamajor’s children, who have always enjoyed art, have started spending hours drawing.

Abigail and Annabelle favor anime-style pictures, often drawing their own comics complete with dialogue and elaborate settings.

Brendan draws cityscapes and mansions, designing the buildings he’d like to live or work in one day. His dream is to become an architect, and he plans to take computer programming classes at Nashua High School North to bring him closer to that goal.

“I love drawing buildings,” he said, flipping through a sketch pad full of colorful cityscapes and sketches of airplanes. As he showed off his work, he explained the inspiration behind each picture, describing mansions with high-tech features and skyscrapers complete with helipads and roof-top living areas.

Curtis is more focused on cooking and learning about ethnic cuisines. He is attending Nashua Community College’s culinary program this fall.

He said he hopes to one day travel throughout Asia, exploring its food and cooking techniques and bringing what he learns back to his own kitchen, or maybe, his own restaurant.

In the meantime, he eats as much as he can in the area. So far, he’s tried Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese and Thai food. Topping his list of cuisines left to try: Cambodian and Korean.

Cassamajor, meanwhile, said she is happy to see that her children have dreams and goals but is concerned about her ability to fund those dreams.

She wants to keep her children in Nashua, she said, to let them follow their dreams and keep them in the schools they love, but with the future of the Bronsteins uncertain, her family’s future is just as up in the air.

So far, she’s heard little concrete information about what will happen to her home.

Cassamajor said she is interested in doing whatever will get her family a new home the quickest. While the options of getting a Section 8 voucher or participating in a rent-to-own housing program sound appealing, they also sound expensive, she said.

And even though Cassamajor is worried about her family’s future housing, she said even if the Bronsteins were not demolished, she would not want to keep her family there for long.

The apartments are a stepping stone, she said, to help her take care of her family until they are more financially stable.

Danielle Curtis can be reached at 594-6557 or dcurtis@nashua
telegraph.com. Also follow Curtis on Twitter (Telegraph_DC).