Melissa Bailey Photo
Former tenant Percy Pell is suing over alleged CO poisoning.
A broken front door led to corridors of black mold, urine, and crack bags. Is that the landlord’s fault? And does it matter in the mayor’s race?
Those questions emerged from a nighttime visit Tuesday to Robeson Elderly Housing, a low-income elderly complex at 91 Rosette St. in the Hill.
The visit took place soon after the completion of a heated mayoral debate earlier in the evening among the five Democratic candidates for mayor.
During that debate, one of the candidates, Hillhouse High School Principal Kermit Carolina, called the family of one of his opponents, state Sen. Toni Harp, one of the biggest “slumlords” in town. He challenged any disbelievers to follow him to Rosette Street after the debate so he could prove his point. The Independent took him up on his offer.
The Rosette Street property Carolina visited is owned by a company run by Harp’s son, Matthew Harp.
Three tenants interviewed during Tuesday’s visit cited numerous concerns about drugs, mold, safety and sanitation.
In an interview Wednesday, Matthew Harp acknowledged the building has problems. He said those problems reflect the challenges of being an urban landlord, fighting drug-dealers and intruders. He outlined moves he has made to improve the building, including renovating four of the 22 apartments, and allowing cops to set up a mini-headquarters there. And he noted that Robeson scored an 89 out of 100 on its latest federal inspection.
“It’s not a slum property,” Matthew Harp said.
Toni Harp couldn’t be reached be reached for comment Wednesday. During Tuesday’s debate, she said, “All I can say is I didn’t have anything to do with my husband’s business or my son’s business.” She has sought to establish that distance throughout the campaign, in the face of news that Renaissance Management, the business her son inherited from her late husband, Wendell Harp, owes $1.1 million in delinquent sales tax, making it number one on the state’s list of 100 delinquent businesses.
“I think it’s a cheap shot,” Harp said. “I’m really ashamed of him,” meaning Carolina, for attacking her like this.
“I’ll take you to a number of those homes. I’ll let you speak to a number of residents of those streets. We’ll start with Rosette Street,” Carolina replied.
“What About Our Safety”?
Carolina pulled up to the Robeson Elderly Housing complex on Rosette around 9:20 p.m. Tuesday in his 2007 Lexus SUV, accompanied by Percy Pell (pictured at the top of this story), a former tenant there. Pell, who suffers from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and emphysema, showed up with a small oxygen tank in tow.
As they got out of the car, they encountered three people sitting on the steps of the complex who appeared to be drunk or high. Pell, a former tenant who stays in touch with tenants in the building, called out a cheerful hello.
The three-story, 22-unit building is a former elementary school dating back to 1888. A rock propped open the outermost door, which had a large crack across the glass. The three people, who looked like they were in their 40s, don’t live there; they were just hanging out, according to Pell.
A man at the building let them inside to see the conditions — conditions that Pell said forced him to flee the home in 2009.
To get inside, you didn’t need a key: The security system was down, and the door opened with an easy tug.
The basement, where Pell used to live, had black mold on the ceiling.
A half-dozen dime bags, of the kind typically used for crack cocaine, were scattered on the floor.
The two apartments in the basement are currently vacant.
“They have sex down here. I’m getting out of here!” said the tenant who had led the visitors to the basement. The tour continued upstairs.
One stairwell reeked of urine. The smell appeared to be emanating from the floor, as well as from a vodka bottle, which had been emptied and replenished with yellow liquid.
Carolina and Penn met with two elderly tenants, veterans of the Korean War and World War II.
One tenant, who declined to give his name for fear of eviction, said the front door has been broken for two weeks. “It don’t lock,” he said. “You can shake it and come in.”
“What about our safety here, when the door is wide open?” he said. He said “outside people” roam the halls.
“People sleep in the hallway” and “pee in the elevator,” he said. They do drugs and sell drugs, too, he said.
The tenant said there is no management on-premises. The laundry in the basement is broken, so tenants have to go to a laundromat. “The light in the back is bad,” he added, referring to a dark parking lot in the rear of the building.
The tenants interviewed said they did not feel comfortable having their names published.
After hearing the tenants’ pleas, Carolina (pictured) vowed to “keep the pressure up” on the landlord.
“I’m running because I want to fight for folks like you,” he told them.
Lt. Joe Witkowski, the neighborhood’s top cop, later confirmed there has been “low-key but chronic” criminal behavior at 91 Rosette.
“All it takes is one or two building who are letting somebody else in. That creates issues of drug use, prostitution,” Witkowski said. “That’s what we’re dealing with.”
Witkowski said police “have an assigned patrol just to stop in there and be a presence” at the complex. “Our officers do stop in there a lot.”
“Dangerous To Human Life”
Penn said the poor conditions in the building are just like the ones he fled in 2009, when he lived in a basement apartment at Robeson. In a lawsuit filed in state court, Penn alleges that on Oct. 11, 2009, the furnace in the basement leaked noxious chemicals into the building because the ventilation pipe wasn’t properly connected. Penn and another tenant both suffered from carbon monoxide poisoning, according to the lawsuit. Penn said he spent five days in the hospital as a result of the leak. His suit seeks over $15,000 in damages.
The suit charges the landlord with negligence for creating a situation that was “dangerous to human life.” At the time of the alleged incident, the building was owned by Toni Harp’s husband, Wendell Harp. Matthew Harp inherited the business from his father in December 2011 after his father died.
The case is set to go to trial this fall in state Superior Court.
Matthew Harp declined to comment on the pending litigation. In a memo filed in court, lawyers for his dad’s company, WCH Limited Partnership, wrote that if the furnace was defective, as charged, the tenants “failed to pay attention and to observe and avoid the defect.” The plaintiffs’ own actions contributed to their injuries because they “failed to mitigate the damages,” the landlord argued.
Landlord v. Drug Dealer
In an interview Wednesday, Matthew Harp acknowledged the building’s current problems.
“It’s a very tough building in a very tough neighborhood, and we are doing the best that we can to manage it,” he said.
Harp said the problems reflect the challenges facing landlords across the city who rent to low-income tenants. The Robeson apartments are subsidized by the federal Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) Section 8 program, for low-income elderly and disabled tenants. Harp is the managing partner of ROB WH LLC, the company that owns the building. He said he’s doing his part to keep on top of the property.
“The building is cleaned on a weekly basis — every week or two weeks,” depending on staffing availability, he said.
He acknowledged the front door is broken. But he said that’s not due to landlord negligence.
“There is a tenant there whose son is dealing drugs,” he said. “The door is broken because every time that we fix it,” the “tenant’s son continues to bust out the lock so that his customers can have ready access.”
Harp said he is trying to evict the drug-dealer’s family. But “the courts are friendly to tenants, especially” when the person causing problems is not on the lease: It’s hard to evict a father for his son’s behavior.
“It’s very hard to find a court who is going to move these people on,” Harp said.
“Drugs in urban areas, especially in Section 8 areas, are a huge issue,” he added. Even when everyone knows who’s dealing drugs, it can be hard to build a case because tenants don’t want to testify against them.
Harp said he plans to add more lights to the back of the building, as the 84-year-old Korean War vet suggested.
Cops Move In
Harp said he has been working closely with cops to monitor the situation. He recently gave Lt. Witkowski the keys to the building, as well as keys to an office on the 3rd floor, to be used as a mini-substation.
Keeping a building safe and clean “requires tenant buy-in,” Harp added. “That means that tenants have to be responsible for trash. If they see something, they need to say something. If they see a bottle of urine or a dime bag, it’s not unreasonable to expect that they would pick it up, rather than wait” for a weekly cleaning.
Asked about people sleeping in the hallway, Harp said, “I’m not there when people are sleeping, but that’s the reason why we’ve giving police access to the building. It’s the tenants’ job to call the cops when they see people sleeping in the hallway.”
Harp said since he took over his dad’s business, all of his properties have scored over 85 on a 100-point scale on federal Real Estate Assessment Center (REAC) inspections.
91 Rosette is “not a slum property,” Harp said. “It’s not on the same level as a Church Street South. There’s a huge difference.” A HUD spokeswoman Wednesday confirmed Robeson earned an 89 on its most recent inspection. Anything above 60 is a passing grade.
Harp said he’s also making moves to improve the conditions inside the apartments, most of which are one-bedrooms or efficiencies. “As people move out, we’re renovating each apartment,” putting in new floors and new cabinets. He started doing that when he took over the business in December 2011, he said.
“There has not been a lot of tenant turnover, so we have not had the opportunity to do that as much as we would like,” Harp said. But he said he is making the renovations at Robeson and at other properties “at great personal cost to the business,” because he believes it’s right.
Separate Lives
As he drove away from the Hill around 10 p.m., candidate Carolina said the visit proved the point he was trying to make: That Harp’s family is “one of the biggest slumlords in the city.”
“None of our elderly residents should be forced to live like that,” especially not those who risked their lives for their country in war. “My heart goes out to them for having to live in those conditions.”
Matthew Harp later replied that his business, Renaissance Management, runs seven apartment complexes in New Haven and one in Ansonia.
“If [91 Rosette St.] were the only building that we own,” Harp argued, “I would say perhaps Kermit has a point and we can do better. But this is not the only building that we own.”
Harp said Renaissance is doing much better at other properties.
“Kermit unfortunately attempted to cherry-pick something,” Harp said.
Melissa Bailey File Photo
Toni Harp.
Carolina cast the blame on Toni Harp. As the “matriarch” of the family, she should “hold people in her own home accountable,” he argued.
“For her to allow the properties that her family owns to exist like that is a crime,” he said.
Matthew Harp said the responsibility lies with him, not with his mom.
“At the end of the day, what I do is not at all reflective of my mom and/or her position in this campaign,” he said.
“When it comes to this business, it’s not her job, it’s mine,” Harp said. “We are two separate people. We do two separate things.”
Assuming any one of these allegations are true, this is absolutely beyond revolting. People are LITERALLY dying by being forced to live in these conditions. And Mr. Harp has not a shred of honesty in him.
For Senator Harp to claim she has no interest, when she lives for free in a 9,700 square foot mansion overlooking the Yale Golf Course, is simply beyond the limits of acceptability in New Haven.
Let's hope Harp drops out of this race, and focuses on some more frequent conversations with her family.