Thomas Breen photo
Tenants Muhammad (right), his wife Akhdar, and their four children.
A New Haven housing court judge ordered the landlord of a two-family house in the West River neighborhood to temporarily relocate the first-floor tenants he is trying to evict until he can prove that the high lead levels on the walls, doors, windows, and floors of his building are not unduly toxic for the young parents and their four young children.
Judge Anthony Avallone issued that ruling during a hearing in the third-floor housing court at the Connecticut Superior Court building at 121 Elm St. He decided to continue for another week the eviction suit of landlord Abdullah Soliman against tenant Maajid Muhammad.
The case, in which Soliman is trying to evict Muhammad and his family for nonpayment of rent, pits tenant versus landlord expectations. It also deals with the legal rights of tenants who live in a city with an aging housing stock where many homes still contain lead paint.
How quickly should landlords work to abate the lead? And what are the rights and duties of the tenants while the landlords are in the process of abatement?
Soliman.
Soliman, a 35-year-old software engineer who lives in Manhattan, owns the two-family home at 75 Sherman Ave. in West River. He owns one other property in the city, a three-family home at 270 Edgewood Ave.
Soliman bought the Sherman Avenue property in late 2013. Outside the hearing on Thursday, he told the Independent that he has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars renovating the house.
“There’s brand new vinyl replacement windows,” he said. “Basically every single part of this house has been renovated.”
Muhammad and his family of six have been living in the three-bedroom, ground floor apartment at 75 Sherman Ave. since April 2017.
Muhammad, a 25-year-old Hillhouse graduate who runs a used car dealership in Atlantic City, N.J., and his wife Raihana Akhdar, a 24-year-old Hillhouse grad, moved into the apartment because they needed more space for their young children, ages 1 through 5, they said. They said they also figured that Soliman would treat the family well because landlord and tenants alike are Muslim.
Akhdar said that she immediately started noticing problems with the apartment after moving in. She said that the family had to spend four weeks out of the home last spring because of a carbon monoxide leak. She and Muhammad reported consistent problems with a broken sink and defunct heaters.
“The last straw for me was when we didn’t have heat,” Akhdar said. “He [Soliman] really didn’t care. We said, ‘We need you to fix things now, because our son got sick with pneumonia.’ He was like, ‘If this isn’t working for you, then you can go.’”
75 Sherman Ave.
According to city records, a Feb. 23 inspection by local government’s anti-blight agency, the Livable City Initiative (LCI), found that the ground floor was missing carbon monoxide detectors, that the heating level in the apartment was consistently under 65 degrees, and that the kitchen sink was missing base drawers.
But what drove Muhammad and Akhdar to stop paying rent in February 2018, according to the tenants, was a regularly scheduled doctor’s appointment for their 1‑year-old son Malik in November, which revealed that he had a blood lead level of 11 micrograms per deciliter. In 2012, the federal Center for Disease Control (CDC) defined a blood lead level of 5 micrograms per deciliter in children as “elevated.”
According to court records, Muhammad stopped paying rent in February. Soliman filed for an eviction on Feb. 22, with a mandated move-out date of Feb. 26. In a March 12 answer, which included a filing with the city’s Fair Rent Commission, Muhammad wrote that he and his family had no heat in the house, the stove did not work, and his whole family was sick. He said that he wanted the problems with his home to be fixed up to code for him and his family of five.
Soliman said that a subsequent LCI inspection found that the apartment was up to city code. He said that, after Muhammad called the city’s Health Department and asked for a lead inspection of the apartment, Soliman spoke with the lead inspector about how, even after remediation, many thousands of houses in New Haven will still bear some traces of lead.
Since 2013, New Haven’s Health Department has opened 1,183 new lead poisoning cases, the Independent found by analyzing state and city records. Four hundred sixty child-poisonings have been reported in the past two years.
“Any house built before 1978 will contain lead unless you’ve stripped that house down to the bones,” Soliman told the Independent. “The lead inspector basically told me, ‘We don’t test for lead on the surface. We’re testing lead for 1/8th of an inch past the surface. We’re going all the way down to the bare wood.’”
The lead inspector did the inspection and found high lead levels. But that the paint was largely intact, Soliman said, and the inspector told him that he has to undertake lead abatement efforts under city watch in order to get the apartment certified for rental.
“Here’s the point: That [led abatement] is precautionary,” he said. “It’s not proving causation. It doesn’t say, ‘Oh, this apartment is responsible for that.’” Instead, he said, the lead abatement process is just to show that the landlord is taking the necessary precautions to remediate the home according to city standards.”
Soliman argued that Muhammad and his family were using complaints about lead to get out of their obligation to pay rent.
“They’re not actually interested in resolving this case,” he said. He stated that he had applied for federal subsidies for lead abatement for the property but that Muhammad had not yet submitted requisite tenant financial information in order for those subsidies to go through. “They are essentially trying to live in the apartment without paying rent.”
Akhdar told the Independent that her husband was aware of the financial disclosure required for Soliman’s application for federal assistance for lead abatement. She said that Muhammad had reached out to the necessary federal contact with his financial information, but that she was not aware of the latest in that conversation. (Muhammad could not be reached for a follow-up comment on this issue before the publication of this article.)
Soliman also said that, after reviewing a database of lead-abated houses in New Haven that he found in a recent article in the Independent, he learned that a small fraction of mid-20th century housing stock in this city has been deemed lead-safe. According to newhavenlead.com, only 1,114 apartments have been certified by the city as lead-safe. The total number of rental apartments in the city is 33,176, according to the site, and those apartments have a median year of construction of 1955.
This abundance of lead-affected apartments that have not been abated, Soliman said as he prepared for a negative ruling from the judge, “makes the judge’s assertion that the apartment is uninhabitable basically untenable, because that would render almost every single apartment in New Haven uninhabitable.”
Err On The Side Of Safety
Soliman and Muhammad both chose to represent themselves without outside legal counsel in court Thursday.
Judge Avallone did not have to decide the case based only on testimony and allegations of foul play coming from both landlord and tenant. He also got to review as evidence a copy of a letter brought by Muhammad that the city’s Health Department sent to Soliman on April 16. It detailed the findings of the city’s lead inspection of 75 Sherman Ave.
The letter noted that Glenda Buenaventura of the Health Department conducted the inspection of Muhammad’s apartment on April 10.
“Said inspection revealed the presence of toxic levels of lead in paint (intact and defective),” the letter read, “i.e., paint containing more than 0.50 percent lead by dry weight…or lead at or above 1.0 milligrams per square centimeter of surface.”
The report found lead levels in the high teens and twenties in every room in the apartment. A lower wall side in the kitchen had paint with a lead rating of 14.9. A closet door in the rear room had paint with a lead level of 20.8. A bedroom window sill side had a lead rating of 25.1.
“The Director of Health has determined that the presence of such lead-based paint and chipped and flaking pain constitutes health hazards,” the letter read. “Since there are one or more children with an elevated blood lead level residing on the premises, the aforementioned conditions constitute grounds for issuance of this order.”
The inspection letter ordered Soliman to submit to the department a lead abatement plan to be undertaken under supervision of the city. It called on Soliman to repair all holes and cracks in the walls and ceiling; to scrape and remove all chipped and flaking paint; and to strip to the base surface all doors, door jambs, baseboards, and walls which contain a lead hazard.
“Any children who occupy the apartment in question are to be excluded from the work-site/apartment while the lead paint abatement efforts are being performed,” the report read, “and are not to re-enter the site until all paint chips, dust, and debris have been completely and safely cleaned from the area.”
“It is imperative,” the report continued, “that the health of the child not be further jeopardized by allowing access to lead paint chips, lead containing dust, and/or lead paint fumes.”
Soliman said that he had not yet received the report by mail, and requested that it not be admitted as evidence until he could subpoena the health inspector and bring her in to testify on the substance of its contents.
Avallone overruled his objection based on the weight of the evidence.
“Clearly the children cannot stay in the conditions that are found,” Avallone said after reading the inspection’s findings.
Soliman argued that the tenant’s child first presented a lead levels of 11 in November, and that a subsequent blood lead level exam in March found that that child was still at 11. He said the fact that the child’s blood lead levels had not changed from November to March suggested that the Sherman Avenue apartment was not responsible for the lead poisoning.
“My first concern is for the welfare of those children,” Soliman said. “But if the tenant was concerned about lead levels, why is the tenant still living in the apartment?” He asked why the tenant had not sought out a new place to live.
“Those are wonderful questions,” Avallone replied. “Except they’re not relevant to the safety of the children in this apartment.”
After the court case had ended, Akhdar told the Independent that she and Muhammad stayed as long as they could at the apartment despite the dangerous conditions because they hoped they could convince the landlord to fix up the apartment. She said that she and her family have spent a significant amount of time staying with her mother in Hamden over the past few months.
She also said that, by the time that she and Muhammad firmly resolved to leave the apartment earlier this year, after their child got pneumonia, the eviction process had already started. She said that they applied for new housing but were denied by a prospective landlord because they were in the process of being evicted from Sherman Avenue.
Avallone said that he will give Soliman time to subpoena the city lead inspector and collect information supporting his claim that Muhammad and his family could reasonably remain in the Sherman Avenue apartment during the process of lead abatement.
“But right now, I have amply evidence to believe there is lead in that apartment,” he said. “The children should not be in this apartment.”
The judge ordered the case to be continued for another week, and for the parties to reconvene at the courthouse on Thursday, May 3. In the interim, Avallone said, Soliman must at his own expense relocate Muhammad and his family to comparable, safe accommodations for the week.
“I’d rather err on the side of safety than otherwise,” Avallone said. He also ordered Muhammad to cooperate with Soliman during the temporary relocation process.
After the hearing, Muhammad said that he looks forward to winning the case and finding a new place to live for him and his family.
“But my child has high levels of lead,” he said, “and he’s got to deal with that for the rest of his life. Whatever the ruling, it’ll be over, but I have to deal with that for the rest of my life.”
One day after the hearing, Akhdar told the Independent that Soliman had reached out to her family with a deal: if they agreed to drop their complaints about lead and other problems with the apartment, he would return their latest month’s rent, he would pay them $1,000, and he would terminate the eviction proceeding. Akhdar said that she and her family are not interested in taking the proposed settlement.
Previous coverage:
• 460 Kids Poisoned By Lead In 2 Years
• Bid-Rigging Claimed In Lead Cleanup
• Judge Orders Total Lead Paint Clean-Up
• Legal Aid Takes City To Task On Lead
If the tenants have good faith objections to the habitability of their apartment, why didn't they make payments into a court escrow?