Block Burned By Bank’s Blight

Claudio Pinos has been building up the block where he lives in the Hill — and now an international bank has let part of it burn down.

The bank, JP Morgan Chase, foreclosed on a vacant three-story house at 425 Howard Ave. in June 2013. Rather than fix or sell the house, the bank let it rot.

City government hounded the bank to board up the place. To clean the trash. It took a year to get the bank to admit it owned the property.

The house caught fire in March 2016. Claudio Pinos started hounding the bank, too. He asked it to repair a fence on his property that firefighters had to dismantle to fight the blaze. No luck. The city kept trying. It began fining the bank. The bank continued keeping the property, a fire trap.

Then, in the early morning hours of Nov. 11, the house burned again, this time so badly it had to be demolished. So badly that two adjoining properties caught fire, too, including one owned by Claudio Pinos. Twenty-one people, including five kids, were burned out of their homes. The Red Cross had to find them temporary new lodgings. Firefighters and cops risked their lives to save people. (Click here for a story about that.)

Now he needs to obtain enough insurance money or else tear down the three-family house he owns next door to what’s now a vacant lot at 425 Howard.

The episode reflects the challenge that homeowners and government face in trying to rebuild neighborhoods where absentee banks either own the properties or hold the mortgages on vacant blighted buildings — and hide behind faceless, difficult-to-navigate bureaucracy when the locals try to hold them accountable for dragging down the block.

“The bank didn’t take care of the house,” Pinos said in disgust the other day as he surveyed the damage. ​“This is the bank’s fault.”

The Builder

Pinos (pictured) said he has lived on the block for around 20 years since he immigrated from Ecuador. He started out renting an apartment in one of the houses.

He saved up his money, bought the house at 433 Howard in 2001, and kept it in good shape. He bought 429 a year later, according to city records. Then he bought 439 Howard, where he now lives on the first floor. Three houses in a row, in good shape and anchoring the block.

After the first fire, Pinos said, he complained that the bank failed to secure 425 Howard. It also had trash all over the property.

“I work two jobs. My wife works two jobs. So we can have the houses,” Pinos, who’s 43, said during a rare day off, which he spent clearing pipes of water in his now-vacant house next to 425 Howard so they wouldn’t freeze. ​“One day we want to retire and have a place to live.” He works days at a North Haven factory making car moldings, he said and supervises a cleaning crew in North Haven at night.

His tenants told them they would see people around the bank’s property — a man smoking in the backyard at two in the morning, for instance. He and they would notice the plywood falling off the front where the bank sought to secure the building. 

While they can’t say for sure, fire investigators concluded that in both fires, squatters had gotten into the house and caused the blaze, according to Chief John Alston, Jr.

City Building Official Jim Turcio said he was hoping that Pinos’s house could be saved.

Pinos said he’s confident he can get insurance money to save it.

“I don’t want to demolish,” he said. ​“I want to fix.”

“If the numbers work” from the insurance company’s reimbursement, Turcio said, Pinos will get the go-ahead to keep rebuilding the block.

The Regulators

The staff of New Haven government’s anti-blight agency, the Livable City Initiative (LCI), have battled out-of-state banks for years over neglected properties. Often banks hold off on foreclosing on an abandoned house — which then becomes a ​“zombie” house that drags down the neighborhood. Other times the banks take ownership but, with a national inventory of bum properties, drag their feet on selling to new owners. LCI staff can spend months battling voicemails and email accounts to find the right person in a bureaucracy to take responsibility and respond to pleas to board up empty buildings or cut the grass. LCI then resorts to $99 daily fines for violating the city’s anti-blight ordinance; the bills can add up to tens of thousands of dollars, which then can make it harder for a bank to sell the property.

In the case of 425 Howard, it took almost a year for LCI to get JP Morgan Chase to admit it owns the property.

“We recently received a municipal code violation notice from your office regarding the property” at Howard,” Chase wrote to LCI on Nov. 25, 2015. ​“We are not the owner of this property, but we will notify the borrower(s) of our receipt of your notice.”

The letter was signed ​“Chase.” No name of a human attached. It had a phone number and email address. (The Independent was unable to find a person who could answer questions at that number and address.)

LCI persisted. It began levying the daily fines on March 26, 2016.

Evan Trachten, LCI’s acquisition and disposition coordinator, has become experienced in wrestling with banks over zombie properties. He recalled getting a Chase official on the phone and insisting, ​“Ma’am, I’m looking at the deed. You do own it.”

The violations continued. Fines kept mounting. ​“We kept calling in,” Trachten recalled. ​“They wouldn’t take responsibility.”

Trachten contacted the office of U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal. The staff there intervened with JP Morgan Chase.

Finally, neighborhood specialist Jeffrey Moreno received a letter from an unnamed ​“Mortgage Banking Executive Office” on Sept. 23, 2016.

“We are addressing the condition of the property,” the letter read in part.

“We apologize that we didn’t meet your expectations and appreciate that you took the time to share your comments about the service you received. We’ll use your feedback to improve the service we provide in the future.”

“We have forwarded the notices you provided to the appropriate department. They have confirmed receipt of them and advised that they will be addressing the violations.”

No improvement followed.

A Chase executive with an actual name — Lewisville, Texas-based Property Preservation Specialist Christopher S. Martinez —addressed the situation in a letter to Moreno’s LCI successor in the Hill, Arthur Natalino, this June 2.

“I checked on the property on 425 Howard St.,” Martinez wrote. ​“Per our vendor the completion for the initial work as supposed to be completed on 4/29/17. But that was delayed due to a 3rd-floor illegal unit issue. We are working with our vendor to get this cleared up as soon as possible.”

(Martinez did not respond to requests for comment. Chase’s regional media spokesperson, Erich Timmerman, failed to respond to repeated requests as well.)

The building remained open to squatters, the trash still around the yard. LCI placed a lien on the property. As of Nov. 13, according to LCI records, JP Morgan Chase owes New Haven $62,734 and counting: $59,800 in anti-blight fines, another $2,934 for emergency property maintenance the city did on its behalf.

Then, two Saturdays ago at 4:45 a.m., Roxana Chica’s family, like Pinos immigrants from Ecuador, was sleeping in their second-floor apartment at 429 Howard when someone awoke to cries of, ​“Help me! Help me!”

Roxana’s mom burst into her room. ​“There’s a fire!”

Roxana (pictured above) a 15-year-old Wilbur Cross High School sophomore, grabbed her coat over her pajamas and ran outside. ​“I was in pajamas, looking crazy!” she recalled. Her mom grabbed her younger sister. As the roof of their house caught on fire, they rushed out into the freezing cold along with their upstairs and downstairs and next-door neighbors. They spent hours out on Howard and in the police substation across the street.

By the end of the day, 425 Howard was no more. And the block had a bigger problem than it had a day earlier.

“Had this house not been burnt to the ground, they should have been able to sell it in fire-damaged condition for $50,000,” Trachten estimated. Not now. Meanwhile, he noted, ​“the community suffers on so many levels.”

LCI does have less bank-wrestling to do than before: The city had as many as 1,400 vacant properties at the height of the foreclosure crisis, and more like 500 today, Trachten said. But as the Pinos and Chica families learned firsthand this month, one blight-creating bank is enough to drag down the block.