It's an oasis of clean and calm inside Benita Christian's one-bedroom apartment on the eighth floor of the A Building at Thames River Apartments in New London.

The kitchen counters are free of crumbs. The stove top is sparkling. The particle board cabinets are spotless, though one is hanging off its hinge. The laminate floors, cracked in places, look freshly mopped.

"My mother always told me: It's not where you live. It's how you live," Christian, a 49-year-old New York City native, said during an interview last week.

But residents say living isn't easy in this 124-unit, low-income, federally subsidized high-rise complex. They complain about people urinating in the elevators, hallways and stairwells. They say they can't get rid of the mice and cockroaches in their apartments, no matter how much they clean. They rarely let their kids outside because, they say, people who don't live there hang out in the courtyard, drinking or doing drugs, and dog owners allow the animals to roam free and don't pick up after them, a violation of the complex's pet policy.

Christian was one of 18 residents at 46-48 Crystal Ave. who signed up to testify about living conditions as part of a class-action lawsuit brought against the New London Housing Authority, which manages the apartments for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

The case was headed for trial last month when the parties agreed to allow Superior Court Judge David M. Sheridan to oversee the redevelopment of the apartments. If the housing authority meets all its deadlines, construction could begin in November 2017.

Christian, who has four grown children and 11 grandchildren, turned to public housing two years ago after realizing she had made a mistake moving in with a man. She'd hoped to get into public housing in Norwich, which she says is better, but in the meantime has made the best of her living situation.

"At least the view is nice," she said, pointing out the window at the Gold Star Memorial Bridge and the Groton shoreline.

Christian said she will be ready to move when the times comes.

"When I first moved in here, they were talking about how it should have been tore down years ago," she said.

Agencies lend a hand

The court-overseen redevelopment project could involve tearing down the apartments and rebuilding on the same 7-acre site or building housing elsewhere. Attorney Robert I. Reardon Jr., a personal injury lawyer who initiated the class action after representing a tenant who slipped on human waste and fractured her arm, said tenants would be able to stay in their homes until new housing is available.

Thames River Apartments is in the shadow of the bridge in an industrial area about a half-mile from downtown New London. Reardon and Sue Shontell, executive director of the housing authority, have each said that the concept of "warehousing" people in high-rise apartments is outdated.

Even though the fate of the buildings may be demolition, the housing authority is continuing to replace stoves and refrigerators in the complex under a capital improvement plan, Shontell said, adding that she has instructed the maintenance staff to fix "right away" anything that they wouldn't leave unfixed if it were her house.

Nancy Anglin, a visiting nurse with Utopia Home Care who goes to Crystal Avenue regularly, said she never sees children playing in the field next to the apartment complex or at the playground across the street.

Tenants don't feel secure, she said, noting that other housing complexes she visits require a key or key fob to gain access. She said no one has ever bothered her at the Thames River Apartments, but it is her company's policy that no one go there alone.

"If they implode it, all well and good," she said. "But it still needs to be managed at the end of the day."

Several agencies are working to improve the lives of tenants.

The Ledge Light Health District, working with the housing authority and other agencies, is trying to revive a tenant committee and has brought into the complex experts on budgeting, interviewing skills and healthy eating.

The district employs a resident health advocate, a tenant, who helps her neighbors get access to services and resolve concerns.

The United Way mobile food pantry makes monthly stops at the complex, and FRESH New London brings its mobile farmers market to Crystal Avenue. The Boys & Girls Club of Southeastern Connecticut operates a center in the C building.

Jennifer Muggeo, supervisor of health education and community outreach for Ledge Light, said it makes sense to take services to some of the region's most vulnerable residents.

"We're working with the situation as it is now," Muggeo said. "Even though they are, as the crow flies, so close to downtown and the rest of the city, they are very much isolated, tucked under the bridge."

Cameras, lights installed

A woman who lives in the C building said she was a teen mother who lived in the homeless shelter with her kids before moving to Crystal Avenue. The father of her oldest children is incarcerated and the father of her other children can only help so much.

"I have no choice but to live here," she said.

She was one of several tenants interviewed by The Day who asked to remain anonymous because, they said, they feared retaliation from management, had nowhere else to live or were involved in rental disputes.

Another single mother said the housing authority gave her a new stove and refrigerator, but the windowsills and walls of her apartment are crumbling.

"We're just barely living in here," she said. "A lot of us do try to clean up and watch our children. Everything falls apart, and if you don't fix it yourself, it won't get fixed."

Christian, who has been sober for 17 years after spending her youth as a crack cocaine addict, said she was not afraid to testify in court or to speak out about problems at the complex.

"With me being in recovery, if you feel something is wrong, you just go ahead and fight it," she said.

The housing authority installed security cameras and high-powered lighting in an effort to eliminate crime, but tenants doubt the cameras work and say there's nobody monitoring them anyway. They say police, who once had foot patrols in the complex, drive through now and then.

Shontell, however, said the complex is safer than it used to be.

"It's not all that dangerous," she said. "When I started here, there were agencies that wouldn't go down there without a police escort."

Even tenants who moved in recently have heard about the two children who were killed at the high-rise 10 years ago. On April 20, 2004, Robert Swain III went on a deadly rampage in what his attorneys said was a drug-induced psychosis. He stabbed his girlfriend and a neighbor, then barricaded himself inside Apartment B74 and killed his 15-month-old son and his girlfriend's 10-year-old sister.

Graffiti, garbage, odors

Thames River tenants pay about 30 percent of their monthly income in rent based on a HUD formula that takes into account other expenses, such as child care and health care. Christian, who earns $13 an hour working full-time as an addiction recovery aide at Stonington Institute, pays $565 a month for a small kitchen/living room, one bedroom and a tiny bathroom. Heat and basic cable TV are included in the rent. She pays for electricity, which runs up to $69 a month when she's using her window-unit air conditioner. Luckily, she has paid off the loan for her car, which she said is still in good running condition.

The nearly 50-year-old brick-faced high-rises are showing their age inside and out, but Christian has made her small living space more pleasant with framed family pictures, prints and other artwork. In the winter, when the heat is on, she said, the cinder-block walls on the back side of her apartment sweat. Year-round, the inside walls shake when somebody closes the door to another apartment. She has kept the mice at bay by keeping the place clean and using the traps provided by the housing authority.

One step outside her apartment, the environment is less inviting. There's black spray-painted graffiti in the stairwell and a 5-gallon bucket of garbage on the landing.

Throughout the buildings, dirt gathers in the seams of the hallway tile despite the best efforts of a maintenance man who patrols with a rolling mop bucket. In the windowless hallways, cooking smells mingle with odor from the garbage chutes, and tenants say the elevators and stairwells often reek of dog and human waste.

The narrow elevators are slow, stuffy and rickety and, Christian said, at night, when she comes home after working second shift, there always seems to be a group of young men who probably don't live there, hanging out, drinking and smoking.

Christian considers herself more middle class than poor and would like to live somewhere else.

"I feel, if I was still living the lifestyle of using, drinking, I wouldn't mind living here," she said. "But I'm not. It feels like a place where people are drinking, using drugs. Poverty, that's what it feels like."

k.florin@theday.com

Twitter: @KFLORIN