THE DEATH OF THE LIVABLE CITY

Thomas Birmingham

Photos by Lukas Flippo

On the wall inside the Livable City Initiative (LCI) office in New Haven City Hall, there is a sign boasting a picture-perfect family of black silhouettes. The parents, tall and thin, hold hands as they watch their daughter bike down a paved, pristine street. Freshly cut grass, blooming trees and shiny, modern buildings surround them.

This fantasy is the Initiative’s unmet promise.

Because in New Haven, the vast majority of the residents represented in those black silhouettes are renters. According to DataHaven’s 2021 New Haven Equity Profile, 72% of the city’s 49,000 households are rentals, double the national average of 36%. The rapidly increasing median gross rent–now over $1,200 a month–is also higher than the national average.

As rents rise, LCI’s website promises that they will “enhance the experience” of Elm City renters. Following the flight of thousands from New Haven and soaring vacancy rates in the ‘90s, a 1996 ordinance created the Initiative as a replacement for the Office of Housing and Neighborhood Development. According to LCI Executive Director Arlevia Samuel, one of the Initiative’s primary functions is to be a source of redress for renters whose landlords force them to live in unsatisfactory or hazardous conditions. This comes in the form of inspections, fines, and licensing regulations.

“LCI is extremely effective in the city,” Samuel said in an interview. “We do a very good job of what we do.”

But city records from over 320 addresses, numerous unresolved violations against landlords, and testimonials from 11 New Haven tenants paint a very different picture to Samuel’s promise of LCI’s effectiveness, and seem a world away from the family of black silhouettes. For over a year, Patricia Ramos tried to stop mold from overtaking her home while her ceiling collapsed. A water leak caused Robyn Otei-Ntiri’s bathroom to flood for the fourth time. Jessica Stamp, along with the many residents of Elizabeth Apartments in West Rock, have contended with inadequate heating, unsafe wiring, and a lack of smoke detectors. The tenants had to endure without help from New Haven or LCI.

Of the 11 New Haven tenants, 10 did not believe LCI fulfilled its responsibility to them or the people of New Haven. The 11th had never heard of it.

2,471 Violations: “It’s a Pattern”

“Watch your step,” Jessica Stamp, an Ocean Management tenant of four years, advised as she walked through the hallway outside her apartment.

She pointed out a collection of large, sharp screws which she said that building maintenance staff had left in the walkway when they replaced a light fixture. As she walked through the 70-unit, Ocean Management-owned Elizabeth Apartments, those screws proved to be just one example of an extended pattern of neglect.

A tour of the complex of graying red bricks revealed basements without smoke detectors, laundry rooms without lights and dryers without vents. According to Stamp, the basement room for storage units had an illegal electrical system with extension cords protruding from one outlet and wires stapled to the ceiling. At the base of one entryway’s staircase was a foot-deep hole in the pavement.

“When we were purchased by Ocean, everything went downhill,” Stamp explained. “They make it very, very uncomfortable for us.”

Ocean Management, founded in 2009 by Shmulik Aizenberg, did not respond to multiple emails and phone calls, including to Aizenberg directly, regarding matters detailed in this story.

The conditions inside residential units, which rent for as much as $1,600 a month for one bedroom, are even worse than those in the common spaces. In addition to a widespread mouse infestation and faulty thermostats, one elderly tenant had her water turned to 140 degrees. Another tenant reported going over a week without heat. Stamp said that when tenants tried to call Ocean Management, they were brushed off or outright ignored.

In fact, Stamp alleged that when she and other tenants submit a maintenance request on Ocean Management’s resident portal, the request is often automatically closed minutes later. One of Stamp’s requests regarding the laundry room, submitted at 6:18 PM on Oct. 29, was closed when she checked it 13 minutes later.

“It’s been ridiculous,” Stamp said with an exasperated laugh. “How does [Ocean] still have a license to be a landlord?”

Elizabeth Apartments is not an outlier among the roughly 1,400 units in Ocean Management’s New Haven portfolio. I conducted a public records search of 320 Ocean Management-owned addresses encompassing 1,002 units. My search found that housing code complaints have been filed in 71% of those buildings since 2015. Tenants have sent in at least 721 complaints, and roughly three complaints were filed per building. Elizabeth Apartments had four.

Of those properties with complaints, LCI recorded that 84% violated the housing code and that most had more than one violation. Over half of Ocean Management’s properties contributed to 2,471 violations. That’s a new housing violation almost every day since 2015.

“If you walk around New Haven, it’s obvious that housing code violations are rampant,” said Alex Speiser, who leads a weekly canvas for the Connecticut Tenants Union. “Literally the naked eye can see that. It’s a pattern.”

Ocean Management tenants Patricia Ramos and Robyn Otei-Ntiri echoed the Elizabeth Apartments tenants’ description of Ocean Management’s consistent failure to respond. Jeannie Ferraro of Platt Street said Ocean Management did address a water leak in her pantry by sending a maintenance worker to fix it. But a week later, the leak started again – and has continued for four years with no response.

Stamp said the volume of problems at Elizabeth Apartments has become almost consuming.

“Our question has been ‘Where is LCI?’” Stamp said.

“That’s How Our Processes Go”

New Haven created LCI to attempt to formalize the process for holding landlords accountable. The city’s 1996 ordinance states that “the bureau is authorized to en- gage in any and all activities authorized by law which are related to the elimination and prevention of blight.” Those activities include “housing code enforcement in accordance with applicable law.”

Almost three decades later, New Haven tenants have been thrust into a bureaucratic nightmare.

Take the missing smoke detectors in the basement of the Elizabeth Apartments. It’s a severe safety hazard: a fire killed two New Haven tenants in a building with broken smoke detectors in 2019. New Haven housing code says that concerned tenants should first contact LCI to file a complaint. If the violation is urgent an LCI inspector should show up at the tenant’s door within 24 hours. The inspector is expected to record the violation and contact the landlord to demand that they fix the problem. Usually, landlords are given up to 21 days to respond. For most violations, however, this process can take weeks. LCI still sends letters by physical mail.

“That’s our process,” Samuel said when asked why physical mail is still used. “That’s how our processes go.”

Filing a complaint is just the first step. If Ocean Management fails LCI’s reinspection, the agency is supposed to seek an arrest warrant against the landlord in Connecticut housing court. If the judge approves their application, LCI is required to re-inspect the property within the week. But if Ocean Management fixed the detector by then the charges would be waived, even though the issue likely would have persisted well over a month since a tenant like Stamp would have first reported it.

“These things take a lot of time,” New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker said in an interview. “We’ll continue to work to improve accountability.”

City data confirms Elicker’s description of consistent delays. A Freedom of Information Act request revealed that as of Dec. 5, 2022, the agency received 1,541 complaints since the start of the year. 68% of violation cases the city found are still open, some dating back to early February.

At Elizabeth Apartments, Stamp says the situation is even worse than these statistics suggest. In the building’s most recent effort for relief, they have struggled to advance through the process at all.

On Nov. 23, Stamp led another tour of the complex, this time with LCI housing inspector Nicholas Caprio. He saw all of it, she said: the piled-up garbage, the illegal outlets, the holes in the stairs, the decrepit dryers and furnaces and the missing smoke detectors. Public records confirm an inspection on that date, along with the result: “Failed.”

For weeks, nothing happened.

On Dec. 7, she called LCI during her own teaching hours at Platt Technical High School in Milford to figure out what was going on. She spoke with William Banks, an LCI administrative assistant, who, af- ter pulling up the building’s file, told her three things. First, LCI didn’t postmark a letter to Ocean Management listing the violations until Nov. 29, six days after the inspection. Second, LCI can’t start the clock on Ocean Management’s timeline to fix the problem until they receive the letter. And third, for reasons that weren’t explained to her, the letter might not get to Ocean Management for three to four weeks. Banks brushed off Stamp’s concern about the urgency of getting the smoke detector fixed.

“I mean, that’s insane!” Stamp shouted. More weeks passed. Still nothing.

On Dec. 23, Caprio returned again to Stamp’s home for a reinspection, which was confirmed by Elicker’s Director of Communications Lenny Speiller in an email. After seeing the same unventilated dryers, missing smoke detectors and even more garbage piling up around untended dumpsters, Stamp said Caprio “threatened” Ocean Management’s Renovation Manager Jake Paps with a warrant.

Paps responded by saying Ocean Management never got a letter from LCI. Stamp repeated this over and over a few times, as though she herself still couldn’t believe what she was saying. Per Connecticut law, the agency is not allowed to seek a warrant against a landlord until they have already notified them of a violation and allowed them time to fix it.

Whether or not Paps was telling the truth, Stamp said it didn’t matter. What mattered, and still matters, was the safety of her apartment. But as of Jan. 30, Stamp said the vast majority of the issues were just the same as when LCI first inspected the complex, more than two months before.

When asked for permission to speak to LCI staff members such as Caprio and Banks to confirm these events, Samuel responded, “My housing inspectors don’t do interviews.” She asserted, “I follow the rules, and my team does too.”

Elicker stressed that for more immediate dangers like missing smoke detectors, LCI “has a hotline” and “will respond immediately.” Calling the line, however, leads people to the fire department, who, as Stamp found out when she tried to call, are often dealing with more immediate emergencies.

Faced with the fact that the city is unlikely to hold Ocean Management accountable, tenants are furious.

“Who’s really responsible for the problem?” Stamp asked. “Is it the landlord, or is it LCI who’s just sitting on the issues? Every time Ocean steps out of bounds, LCI should be there to stop them.”

“That’s Kind of a Joke”

Mayor Elicker acknowledges that LCI has faced “challenges.”

He believes, however, that the state–not his administration–is to blame. Connecticut statute 7-148o limits the fines landlords can receive to $250 for each inspection demonstrating “that the blight- ed conditions continued to exist after written notice to the owner or occupant, and the expiration of a reasonable opportunity to remediate.” Elicker said these fines should be increased, but didn’t say by how much.

He claimed that LCI is trying to be more proactive about bringing landlords to court. Thanks to LCI inspections, Ocean, for example, has paid $13,000 in fines at four separate court visits since October of 2021.

“As landlords understand that we will follow through on accountability, they're going to be more likely to follow rules,” Elicker said.

Still, these fines amount to little for a property empire of Ocean Management’s size. A 70-unit building like Elizabeth Apartments, where people pay over $1,000 in monthly rent, can bring in over $100,000 each month. Even if the fines LCI managed to levy against Ocean Management last year were quadrupled, it would only be roughly half of what the company re- ceives from one address in a single month.

Elicker also raised that there is no state system in place to scale punishment appropriately for “repeat offenders.” Right now, Ocean’s 2,472nd violation must be treated the exact same as another property owner’s first.

But Samuel, who Elicker appointed to lead LCI back in 2020, took the opposite stance. When asked if she believed landlords with many violations and landlords with none should be treated equally, she said, “I don’t understand your question. We are unbiased. We have large landlords, we have small landlords, we have in between. Everyone is treated the exact same way.” LCI believes it is antithetical to their mission to show “bias” toward a landlord that disproportionately causes the problems the agency is explicitly charged with addressing.

When asked if, for a landlord with Ocean’s level of misconduct, his administration has considered stronger measures such as reviewing Ocean’s licensing rights to prohibit the company from owning

New Haven property, Elicker’s response was simple. “I hadn’t considered that,” he said. “We very much want to make sure people are living in safe environments.”

These responses come as the Elicker Administration plans to pay Aizenberg’s company $1.3 million to take possession of debilitated properties on Dixwell Avenue in an attempt to convert them into affordable housing. Ocean Management is charging $350,000 over the appraised value of the properties in the deal. All the while, Ocean tenants continue to beg for a modicum of aid and are left unsatisfied. Patricia Ramos, a disabled former property manager whose Ocean-managed apartment’s roof caved in, said it was more than a year and a half from the time an LCI complaint was filed to the time Ocean Management got fined for those violations in 2021. For a year and a half of persistent mold in her own home, which she said the company only fixed once the case was being disputed in court, Ocean Management paid only a $250 fine. Communications director Speiller confirmed these events in an email by writing “A warrant was issued in 2021 and the case was satisfied in court.”

Then there are tenants like Jeannie Ferraro, a renter who has lived in the city for over 40 years, whose apartment has been plagued by a persistent water leak. When asked if she’d spoken with LCI to push Ocean Management to address the constant drip in her kitchen, she gave a confused look. “I’m sorry, I don’t know who that is,” Ferraro said.

Stamp had never heard of LCI either until 2022. She said she wondered how many of LCI’s problems can be attributed to a lack of resources. After all, LCI employs only 12 housing inspectors for New Haven’s 49,000 households, leaving over 4,000 for every inspector to manage. To inspect each property once in a typical work year would require 80 inspections a week. Since 2019, LCI’s general funds budget from the city has increased by only $17,000, while New Haven’s police budget has increased by $7 million in the same period, for comparison. LCI is far from the city’s highest budgetary priority. But Stamp’s willingness to give any benefit of the doubt is fading fast.

“I don’t want to throw people under the bus, but I think [LCI] is set up to fail,” Stamp said. “Either they don’t have proper training, proper technology, or adequate staff. Because when there are conditions like these, it doesn’t mean you just accept it.”

For years, LCI has failed to intervene on the behalf of New Haven tenants battling against one of New Haven’s most powerful corporations to fix emergency conditions in their apartments.

Samuel, though, does not see any issues in LCI’s operation. When asked if she thought average New Haven residents would agree with her stance, if the 11 tenants were merely outliers in an otherwise successful agency, she dismissed them.

“I don’t know what anyone else thinks,” Samuel said. “I would hope [New Haven residents] know what we do. Those that don’t will soon learn. But you want to interview me to analyze our efficiency? That's kind of a joke. I don’t need a reporter trying to poke holes in what we do or how we do it.”

“We Had No Idea How Broken It All Was”

As Stamp tries to maintain a 70-unit building without help from its owners or her city, every day brings a new disaster. While giving the tour of the premises,

Stamp stopped to briefly check in with one of her neighbors, Sarah Giovanniello. Giovanniello, appearing at the door pajama-clad, pointed out the razor blade by Stamp’s feet. She had found it that morning along with another lying on the steps. As the two spoke about the disarray their home had fallen into, an elderly woman in a blue bathrobe – Mrs. Cooper – began to slowly descend the stairs. When she reached the pair, she tapped Giovanneillo on the shoulder and asked if she wanted to see her broken sink faucet.

Stamp sighed.

“If I hit 27 people with my car, I should not have a license anymore,” Stamp said. “The same should apply to Ocean.”

“What’s really scary is when you think about people like Mrs. Cooper who are in their 90s,” Giovanniello added. “What are they going to do against a corporation who doesn’t care about anything but profits?”

Stamp sighed again.

Tenants aren’t giving up yet, though. Stamp and Giovanniello are currently leading a tenants union that Giovanniello formed within the complex. At an upcoming Fair Rent Commission hearing, they plan to help represent the woman with scalding water in her apartment. A good result could lower her rent, but won’t guarantee any safety net to prevent future issues. But nonetheless, she said that simply trying to keep herself and her fellow tenants in her building safe has been killing the optimism she once had that New Haven is with them in their fight.

Now, almost none of that optimism is left.

“For a while, I thought we could work with [Ocean] and get things done,” Stamp said. “But they weren’t responding. Then we thought, okay, now we go straight to LCI. But the more information we’ve gotten, we’ve had to realize it’s not working. It’s just not. We had no idea how broken it all was.”