Church Street South Evacuees Crammed In Hotel

Jessica Rivera said her four children don’t mind eating hotel restaurant food every day. But after two weeks of living in a single hotel room, they’re ready to go home — to Church Street South.

It doesn’t appear home will be ready for them any time soon.

“I just want somebody to do something,” she said. ​“They need their rooms and to sleep in their own beds.”

Rivera, a resident of Church Street South Apartments for 17 years, her husband, Luis Perez, and their children, were moved from their three-bedroom apartment which had become infested with black mold.

They are one of six households from the embattled apartment complex that have been removed from their condemned apartments. New Haven’s neighborhoods agency, the Livable City Initiative (LCI), ordered the complex’s owner, Massachusetts-based Northland Investment, to make the apartments livable again, fix a roof, and house the families elsewhere in the meantime.

Northland is putting the families up in La Quinta Inn & Suites on Sargent Drive. They were told their stay extends until Friday. But their apartments remain either gutted, or untouched, with no sign of repairs being completed and certified soon.

The families are crammed into small hotel rooms. They get $40-a-day per-person food vouchers to spend at the hotel’s pricey Greek Olive restaurant. They don’t have cooking facilities, and only some have access to a mini-fridge and microwave, limiting their ability to shop economically.

LCI Executive Director Serena Neal-Sanjurjo said Tuesday that Northland must continue housing the families until the repairs are made. She said Northland, not LCI, is responsible for the food arrangements.

“They thought they were going to be doing patch work. But it’s bigger than that. That’s why it is taking longer,” Neal-Sanjurjo said.

“I’m concerned about the folks there now. I don’t want this to turn into an exploitation event.”

LCI ordered Northland to temporarily relocate a sixth household, a family of six, on Wednesday, according to Neal-Sanjurjo. City Building Official Jim Turcio, who had issued orders to Northland to replace a roof and perform other emergency repairs, said he had an appointment with a Northland contractor at the complex. The contractor didn’t show, he said. ​“They canceled on me. They thought it was going to rain.”

Turcio said Northland’s local attorney, Amy Blume, asked for an extension on his emergency repair orders. He said he is disinclined to grant it. Instead, he said, he intends to return to housing court next week to seek redress if satisfactory repairs aren’t made.

Blume offered this version of events in an email message: ” I never requested an extension. I actually contacted several City employees yesterday to try and ascertain the names of the persons on the ​‘Municipal Board of Appeals’ because that is the Board that hears appeals of building enforcement actions. No one in the City seemed to have the answer. Later yesterday Jim Turcio called me and told me I didn’t need to appeal his orders and that he would provide us with more time. I told him to provide me an extension in writing. The assistant corp counsel sent me an email that basically states that if we pull permits, that negates his orders.”

Turcio said that Blume did request an extension, but ​“you can’t get an extension on a stop-work order.” The order means the company never the company never pulled a permit for work it was doing. That’s why the corporation counsel staff informed Northland that pulling permits negate sthe order, Turcio said.

Attorney Amy Marx of New Haven Legal Assistance Association, which is representing five of the seven families, said Northland’s failure to communicate with the tenants has left ​“in limbo” those who are still in moldy apartments and those who have been moved.

“The present situation is totally untenable,” she said. ​“There was a complete lack of communication with the tenant families, many of which have small children. They have moved into this hotel with no information regarding the expected time frame for their stay, no information regarding repairs that are supposed to be made. All the tenants are reporting to us that they see absolutely no construction progress in their units.

“It is totally unacceptable to leave these tenant families in limbo with no information and no time frame for how long they will be out of their homes.”

“Northland must immediately start communicating its plans for repairs on each of these units so the families have some understanding of where they’re going to be living and under what conditions,” Marx added.

“We have accommodated them when requested – one family has been provided two adjoining rooms,” Northland Chairman Lawrence Gottesdiener reported Tuesday afternoon. ​“Meals are also being provided.”

He said that repairs on one of the condemned units should be completed by Monday. Meanwhile, he said, ” other units are in initial air testing/remediation phase and could take a week to 10 days.”

Gottesdiener Tuesday offered an update on repairs the company has made to Church Street South since buying the complex in 2008. He said the company has spent ​“over $5 million” through this August, including more than $1 million on roofs and windows. Yet leaks persist. (Click here for a Northland-compiled breakdown of the $4.6 millin of repairs conducted through July.) Gottesdiener argued that the complex is beyond permanent repair and needs to be razed and rebuilt, a job his company would like to carry out. (Read about that here and here.) The repairs come to an average of $16,000 per unit, Gottesdiener said.

School’s About To Start

Meanwhile, the families at La Quinta huddle and adjust to the disruptions in their lives.

For the first week of their relocation, Rivera (pictured) and her family stayed at the Premiere Hotel & Suites on Long Wharf, where they had access to a small kitchen. Then Northland moved them to La Quinta Inn, with just a small microwave and mini-fridge.

Rivera and her family took as much of their clothes and other possessions as they could when they left Church Street South. They even brought an air mattress to supplement their hotel room’s two double beds and pull-out sofa.

“I had no one to help me move all of this but my two girls,” Rivera said. ​“It was a big struggle.”

Her husband, who is disabled, uses a wheelchair. Because he is not on the lease at Church Street South the family wasn’t provided a wheelchair-accessible room. The family goes back and forth from the hotel so he can shower and so she can wash the family’s clothes, to avoid the cost of doing laundry at the hotel.

On the trips back to the apartment Rivera has found no sign of repairs being down at her apartment. She smells the stench of a moldy apartment that has been shut up with no air conditioning for two weeks.

School is slated to start Aug. 31. Rivera said she doesn’t know if she should bring her children’s school clothes to the hotel and if she will have to drive them there from the hotel to school.

“I don’t think they’re going to fix it so fast,” she said of the repairs. ​“It’s almost the 31st.”

Northland gave the Church Street South evacuees $40 vouchers per day for use at the hotel’s Mediterranean-style Greek Olive Restaurant.

For families like Rivera’s, there is a voucher for each family member covered by the lease. That means her voucher covers up to $200 per day for food at the restaurant. It does not include food for her husband because he is not on the lease. She said if they don’t eat the hotel’s free breakfast, they try to make sure they don’t spend more than $10 per person for breakfast. She said they don’t eat lunch so that they can have more money for more food for dinner.

Roxanne Bleau, who has been at the hotel with her four children for two weeks, said she believes the families have all been moved from the Premiere to save money.

“My mother-in-law helps me with the kids,” she said. ​“But it’s been hectic.” Bleau said there are two to three pages filled with descriptions of repairs that need to be made in her home. She said she hopes they will be made by Friday, but she’s not optimistic.

“There’s a lot wrong with my apartment,” she noted.

“No Hispanic Food”

Pablo Batista said he breathes better in his mold-free single room on the third floor of La Quinta than he did at his condemned, flooded Church Street South apartment. But he is having trouble building a new routine outside of his own home.

For 27 years, he has cooked and eaten typical Dominican meals — ​“mi arroz, habichuelas, carne, yucca, platano” — and his cuisine has not changed. When the city condemned his apartment (read about that here), Northland at first put him up at a room in Premiere Hotel & Suites that had a stove and fridge. He was moved to La Quinta after one night.

The room has the bare minimum, just a bed, desk and bathroom. The hotel’s management said it might be able to switch Batista to a room with a mini-fridge, but not until after Saturday. Batista doesn’t recognize or enjoy any of the menu items at the Greek Olive.

“El menu en ingles no entiendo pero me dijeron que comida hispana no hay,” Batista said. ​“I don’t understand the menu in English, but they told me there’s no Hispanic food.”

He said he has tried a few of the salads, but they are basic and unsatisfying, and he usually doesn’t finish them. Instead he buys dinners with his own money at Dominican restaurants in the Hill neighborhood, which can mean shelling out up to $20 and wasting the voucher.

Tuesday, he ordered steak strips at $15.99, a meal accompanied by rice and grilled vegetables. He said he didn’t expect to use the remaining $24 on the voucher.

Batista said he locks himself in his hotel room every day — he doesn’t know any of his hotel neighbors and doesn’t recognize anyone from Church Street South at La Quinta. He watches television, but there are no Spanish-language channels and he doesn’t know how to put on Spanish subtitles.

When Batista called Church Street South Apartments management Tuesday to ask when his apartment would be fixed, he was told the company didn’t know, because Northland has not yet sent anyone to start the repairs.

He is not convinced the repairs will be thorough or effective — Northland’s past promises to fix the major leaks in the roof and walls have merely yielded extra coats of paint or plaster. Walking through his apartment, it’s clear that nothing has changed and the smell of mold is even stronger than it was a week ago. ​“No me han dicho nada,” Batista said. ​“They haven’t told me anything.”

Paul Bass contributed reporting.

Previous coverage of Church Street South:

• Church Street South Endgame: Raze, Rebuild
• Harp Blasts Northland, HUD
• Flooding Plagues Once-Condemned Apartment
• Church Street South Hit With 30 New Orders
• Complaints Mount Against Church Street South
• City Cracks Down On Church Street South, Again
• Complex Flunks Fed Inspection, Rakes In Fed $$
• Welcome Home — To Frozen Pipes
• City Spotted Deadly Dangers; Feds Gave OK
• No One Called 911
• ​“New” Church Street South Goes Nowhere Fast
• Church Street South Tenants Organize