Welcome Home — To Frozen Pipes

Families returned to De Diego Court 11 days after being driven away by a deadly gas leak, only to find wet floors, cold rooms, ruined food and the stench of mildew. Meanwhile city inspectors have found yet more code violations and are pressuring the federally subsidized slumlord to get clean up its act.

Jessica Garcia (pictured) wrapped her 7‑month-old son in a blanket Wednesday against what she called ​“freezing cold” in her apartment. Margaret Brodie, in apartment 13A, said she came home to a ​“busted pipe” and ​“flooding all over the floor.”

It was not the homecoming they had hoped for after many nights shuttled between four different hotels, not knowing when they’d return to their apartments.

The families had been displaced since Jan. 15, when a missing pipe in a furnace caused dangerous levels of carbon monoxide to leak into the air, sending four adults and one child to the hospital. They moved in beginning Tuesday night through Wednesday afternoon to De Diego Court, a 14-unit wing of the Church Street South complex, a private development of 301 federally subsidized apartments across from Union Station. The complex is run by DeMarco Management Corporation and owned by the Northland Investment Corporation.

As of Wednesday afternoon, technicians were still fixing furnaces in the apartments. They tended to problems that city officials say persisted for months while federal authorities — who control the purse strings for the complex—looked the other way.

Rafael Ramos, deputy director of city government’s Livable City Initiative (LCI), said Wednesday that the gas leak has been fixed, but the furnaces still need work to return heat to all the apartments.

“They re-piped the exhaust system,” Ramos said. But some apartments were not getting heat because the furnace was off for a week and a half, he said. The system needs to be calibrated, and there’s the possibility of frozen or burst pipes, he said.

City officials gave tenants the OK to move back in Tuesday evening. However, those who did so were forced to leave again because their apartments were so cold.

Sharee Murphy (pictured), who’s 28, said she got a call from the city Tuesday that she could return home to their apartment at 11B De Diego Court. She and her 9‑year-old daughter had been staying at the Econo Lodge in West Haven. Conditions there were possibly even worse than at home — ​“two days of no heat,” she said. Without a car, she struggled to find transportation to her job in East Haven and for her daughter to get to school over the 11 days.

“It’s just been hell,” Murphy said.

She returned home at 11 p.m. Tuesday only to find the apartment ​“freezing cold.” She cranked up an electric space heater (on her own dime) and got a ride back to the hotel. Murphy returned Wednesday at 1 p.m. to find her house had finally warmed up.

Her neighbors were not so lucky.

Garcia, who’s 31, walked across the hall into Murphy’s apartment, carrying her baby, around 1:30 p.m.

“My apartment is freezing cold!” she announced. She said her baby got a ​“nasty cold” from all the traveling between cold hotel rooms.

“They called us to move in here, for what?”

Garcia said she and her four kids, ages 15, 13, 5 and 7 months, all shared a two-bed apartment at the Econo Lodge for the last week. She said it was so dirty that she had to buy $50 in cleaning supplies to make it livable.

Garcia returned home Wednesday afternoon to find spoiled meat in the freezer, because the electricity had cut out. Despite a comforter hanging over her living room window, a draft of cold air still made its way into the room. She looked for a sweatshirt for her son, Jaheim (pictured), who huddled next to her on the couch for warmth. She poked through a pile of garbage bags in the living room for warm clothes.

“This is all our stuff for two weeks,” she said, pointing to the pile, which took up most of the room.

Upstairs, a leaky roof had sent water into her daughter Karina’s room. The ceiling bubbled where the water had come in. Garcia found out Wednesday that maintenance workers had patched over the wall with new plaster and paint, but the stench of mildew remained.

“You’re not sleeping here tonight,” she told her daughter.

Garcia said the fixes to her apartment — such as a new letter on her door — were superficial, and do not solve deeper problems in the building such as a leaking roof, drafty windows, and a heating system that never seems to keep the apartment warm.

Fed up, she announced she was heading to DeMarco Management office to complain. First she had to dive into the pile of kids clothing a neighbor had carried back from the hotel.

“I’m looking for my shoes!” she said.

DeMarco Management referred comment for this story to the landlords, Northland Investment.

Northland is ​“working proactively with City officials to inspect all boiler installations, identify any situation that could be a potential health hazard to residents and take immediate corrective action,” said Northland Senior Vice President Peter Standish in a statement.

HUD: Make Repairs, Or Else

Just as Garcia and others pressured the property management to fix their homes, federal authorities have begun to do the same.

Despite city inspections that gave failing grades to 48 apartments for a wide range of problems, including ill-installed furnaces and missing carbon monoxide detectors, inspectors hired by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) gave the complex a passing grade on Sept. 20, releasing up to $3,693,408 in rent subsidies for the year.

As the feds gave Northland the OK to rent out the apartments, the city pursued the company for $63,000 in fines for code violations. The apparent federal oversight was first reported by the Independent in this Jan. 19 story.

The day after the article appeared, a HUD staffer fired off a letter to Northland warning that it risked losing its Section 8 rent subsidy funding if the landlord does not take ​“corrective action” to repair the buildings.

The letter, dated Jan. 20, is signed by Suzanne C. Piacentini, the director of HUD’s multifamily program center in Hartford. It is addressed to Larry Gottesdiener, chairman of Northland Investments.
 
In the letter, Piacentini warns Northland that it ​“may be in default” of its HUD contract by failing to ​“maintain the Project in decent, safe and sanitary condition.” Piacentini cited several ​“deficiencies” noted by the city in inspections last fall, during the CO poisoning episode, and in subsequent inspections.

After the carbon monoxide scare, the city re-inspected all 301 apartments at Church Street South, with an eye out for more faulty furnaces that might lead to similar gas leaks. The city found 200 improperly installed furnaces, according to Ramos.

HUD ordered Northland to respond within seven days of receipt of the Jan. 20 letter, providing the status of all repairs required by the city’s fall 2010 inspections, as well as a ​“corrective action plan” with a timeline for fixing all the problems the city identified.

Northland risks losing money, Piacenti pointed out: ​“Section 8 funds cannot be vouchered for any units that cannot be occupied and therefore are not decent safe and sanitary” as required by Church Street South’s federal contract.

HUD further ordered Northland to provide progress updates at least weekly, including any correspondence with the city.

That part of the letter addresses what appears to be an information gap: Reached last week, HUD spokeswoman Rhonda Siciliano was asked why HUD did not catch missing carbon monoxide detectors flagged by city inspectors. She said the city does not routinely share inspection results with HUD.

On Tuesday, Siciliano clarified that while HUD guidelines do not require Section 8 apartments to have carbon monoxide detectors, the Section 8 contractor is required to follow local city housing code.

As of Tuesday, HUD had not received a response from Northland, Siciliano said.

Northland spokeswoman declined to address the HUD letter specifically. She instead forwarded a statement issued last Friday, attributed to Vice President Standish.

He said that the tenants who suffered the CO poisoning were released from the hospital ​“within 48 hours of the incident,” and Northland agreed to put them up in a hotel ​“until their apartment is ready for occupancy.”

“Our staff is doing all it can do to minimize the disruptions to the families at Church Street South, and make those families that have been displaced as comfortable as possible in area hotels with transportation, meals and laundry services until their homes are ready to be reoccupied,” Standish said.

Standish said Northland believes the missing furnace exhaust pipe that caused the CO leak ​“appears to have been deliberately removed in an act of vandalism.”

Northland has been ​“working with fire department officials to monitor CO levels throughout the complex and will continue to do so until all corrective work is complete,” Standish continued.

“We have invested nearly $2 million to date in capital improvements and have vastly improved the community living standards left in place by the previous owners.”

Several DeMarco staffers were onsite Tuesday cleaning up the area around De Diego Court. Gabriel Garcia ran a snow-blower through the rear path behind the apartments. Luis Guzman shoveled out the front.

Workers from Southern Connecticut Gas Company turned on the gas lines Tuesday morning at the city’s request.

Brian Michaud (at left) and Ryan Johnson (at right), technicians from the Perfect Temp heating and cooling company, were hired by DeMarco to inspect the apartments.

Michaud said they inspected almost all the apartments on Tuesday. They went in with a combustion kit to make sure the flu gases were properly ventilated. Michaud said in the first apartment, the gases were fine, but they found another problem — ​“frozen pipes.”

No frozen pipes were visible at De Diego Court. At nearby Malcolm Court, pipes outside a vacant apartment sent a waterfall of icicles down the cement wall.

On Wednesday afternoon, Michaud was back on the site, peering into Esther Martinez’s furnace closet with a head lamp.

He said the furnace was firing up, but kept shorting out.

When Martinez opened the door, the lights were out. She reset the fuse, only to have the lights cut out again about 10 minutes later. She concluded the strain of the space heaters was too much for the circuit.

Martinez lives in Apartment 11A with her two great-grandkids, Roberto and Destiny, ages 9 and 11. She said the kids had fun in the hotels at first, but then they got bored and missed home. The whole episode — traveling between four hotels, shuttling the kids to school through the snow in her car — was ​“terrible,” she said.

By Wednesday, they were ​“going crazy,” itching to get home. They rushed into the apartment and went directly to their rooms to play with their toys.

Meanwhile, Martinez looked with concern at the two men tinkering with her furnace.

“I’m scared,” she said. ​“I’m not going to stay.” 

Martinez said she has lived in the apartment for six years, and has had a long history of problems — including with the furnace, which at one point sent water leaking into her son’s room.

Upstairs, Murphy rattled off her own list of problems, which she said she has been complaining about for three years. The cabinets — originals installed in 1979 — are chewed around the edges by mice. The windows let air in. The carpet’s coming up. The walls leak. The porch light is out. There’s mildew in the kitchen.

She pointed to the kitchen in the ceiling, where ​“the mold just keeps coming back.”

Murphy said she grew up in the Church Street South projects, and returned there when she had a baby at age 18. Ever since, she said, ​“I’ve been stuck here.”

Murphy said the homecoming has been bittersweet.

“I’m happy to be home,” she said, ​“but I’m not satisfied.”

Murphy said she finds it hard to sleep at night, and worries about the safety of her daughter. People often hang out in her hallway, doing drugs and drinking beer, she said. She lifted a curtain, showing where she’d made a makeshift bar across the window to keep intruders away.

“We come back now,” said Murphy, ” and still nothing’s done. Murphy said the last two weeks have been stressful and chaotic — ​“I never thought I’d have to go through something like this.”

Now, she said, she’s moving on to Chapter Two: ​“We have a whole ​‘nother story about the conditions we live in, the environment here.”