New Haven Independent

Ramos, deputy director of New Haven government’s Livable City Initiative (LCI), swings into action when temperatures hit single digits. Tenants flood LCI all night with complaints about shivering with no heat and no response from out-of-town landlords. The latest wave of calls began in the middle of this week as overnight temperatures dropped below 10 degrees.

One of the calls Thursday morning came from the Carriage Hill complex at the corner of Whalley and Boulevard. Jessica Cepeda (pictured) was using the oven to keep her and her two boys warm. She said she kept calling her landlord, who she claimed would cut her off and refuse to fix a broken heating system.

LCI called the landlord, Tom Yang of Verbank, N.Y., 20 miles east of Poughkeepsie. Yang owns 13 of the condos at Carriage Hill and rents them out. According to Ramos, Yang warned an LCI staffer not to enter the premises or else he’d call the cops on him. LCI responded: We’re coming anyway. Maybe you’d like to be there.

At 3 p.m., Yang arrived in New Haven, at Carriage Hill. He and Ramos walked into Cepeda’s second-floor apartment to investigate. (Click on play arrow.)

The apartment was warm. Cepeda had had the oven on since the previous night. (Click on play arrow.) She said she knows it’s not safe. The heat hasn’t worked right since last year, she said. Since December, when it got cold, she and her boys have driven to her mom’s East Haven home daily in order to shower, because it was too cold in the apartment when they’d leave the bathroom.

Ramos and landlord Yang checked the thermostat. They turned it to 80 degrees, then 85, then 87, to try to get the heat to kick in. It didn’t. Then they switched the thermostat from an automatic to manual setting. It turned on.

Cepeda said she hadn’t used the manual setting, for several reasons. The automatic was broken. When she tried using the manual setting, it would turn on the heat — but when she tried to turn it off, she couldn’t. She claimed that she kept calling Yang to fix the automatic setting, but he refused, cut her off, and told her to use the manual.

Yang offered a different version: that tenant Cepeda was using the heat complaint as an excuse not to pay rent. He’s trying to evict her; the matter’s in housing court. “This is harassment,” Yang said.

Cepeda claimed she has been paying her rent. She maintained that Yang has returned the checks and wants to evict her to punish her for complaining.

The eviction wasn’t Ramos’s concern Thursday afternoon. The heat was. Ramos and Yang walked down the hallway to the furnace. Yang fiddled with it. He closed a panel and locked it. According to Ramos, that was one root of the problem: In order for a manual setting to be turned off, that panel needs to be closed and locked. Yang had opened it previously and never closed it. He has the key, but Cepeda doesn’t.

It emerged that there were two bigger problems: The wiring was broken in thermostat. And when it gets fixed, it’s confusing to learn how to program the thermostat. (“It takes me hours at home to figure out mine,” Ramos said. “I still don’t understand it.”)

Ramos insisted that Yang hire an electrician to fix the wiring, program the thermostat and explain the process to Cepeda. Yang argued, repeatedly interrupting Ramos.

Finally, Ramos told him, “You have six hours.” Yang pulled out his cell phone and called his local electrician.

Meanwhile, Ramos checked out the smoke detector in one of the bedrooms. It was broken.

He put in a new battery. Still broken. He told Yang he needed to fix the wiring.

“I go to Home Depot,” Yang said. He said he’d buy a new detector. Ramos insisted an electrician needed to look at it, because it was a hard-wired unit. They argued back and forth.

“It’s not a big deal,” Yang insisted. “Trust me. I go to Home Depot.”

“Today,” Ramos said.

“Today.”

“I’m going to have someone come check it out” that evening, Ramos vowed. He was referring to the fire marshal.

The two men left the apartment on friendlier terms. They joked about fixing the “Feng Shui” of the apartment.

“I evicted four people in four years from this unit,” Yang told Ramos.

“You think it’s the people,” Ramos asked, “or the unit?”

“The unit,” Yang said.

Ramos drove off to his next cold-weather stop. Yang drove off to Home Depot.

Ramos checked back hours later. The repairs were done. “I’m so happy,” Cepeda said Friday morning. “It was so good to wake up to the warm air.”