Power Cut, Tenants Out At Blighted Home

UI cut power at the line Friday for a blighted three-family absentee-owned New Haven home, as one squatting tenant was served eviction papers and another two were left to find a new home.

That took place at 445 Huntington St. at around 11 a.m., as inspectors from the regional electric company United Illuminating converged on the block with city police, Livable City Initiative (LCI) Neighborhood Specialist Linda Davis-Cannon, property manager Eddie Pagan, and a state marshal serving eviction papers.

The property is owned by Everest Realty Group LLC, a holding company owned by Geema Chen Yi Sun, who is listed in the city land records database as a resident of New Zealand. (Her company is listed in the assessor’s database as based in Flushing, N.Y.)

According to online city property records, LCI served Sun with an anti-blight civil citation in June 2018 for 445 Huntington being a dilapidated structure, open to trespass, with an accumulation of junk, trash, and other rubbish throughout the property. In August 2018, LCI filed a lien against the landlord for $5,700 in unpaid fines associated with that initial anti-blight notice.

Friday’s cutting of the power, however, had nothing to do with that the property’s history of blight, Davis-Cannon said. Rather, said a UI representative who declined to share her name, it was due to the electric company not having any ​“active clients” at the residence.

That’s different from customers not paying their electric bills, she said. It means that UI simply does not have any active customers on record for the property.

And yet, as Pagan, Davis-Cannon, and a variety of Newhallville-based police officers, including Scott Shumway, found upon heading to the backyard, a third-floor tenant was getting power. The tenant did that by connecting a long, orange extension cord from hallway lights and the fuse box in the basement to her third-floor apartment. There were three air conditioners in the third-floor apartment’s windows. ​“Well they weren’t hot, that’s for sure,” Shumway said. ​“Three air conditioners running off an extension cord.”

Pagan, who said he manages the property along with 35 others in the area, said that tenants had cut a deadbolt he had fastened to the cellar door to get the extension cord in.

In the basement, he unplugged the cords from two different ceiling light fixtures. Davis-Cannon explained that, even with no legal paying customers in the house, the landlord still has to pay to keep lights in the hallways on.

Outside in the backyard, Pagan rolled up half of the extension cord, then cut it from the third floor with a knife. Over an adjacent fence, a neighbor urged Pagan not to do that, given how much the cords cost.

“They should have paid the light bill before buying an extension cord,” Pagan said.

The second-floor apartment was empty, with a large hole kicked through a sidewall and the latched door broken up. ​“You’re going to have to take care of that immediately,” Davis-Cannon told Pagan.

But there were tenants living on the first and third floors.

A state marshal arrived at roughly the same time as the UI, police, and LCI to serve an eviction notice to the tenant living on the third floor. That tenant was not home. The marshal said she was being served for nonpayment of rent.

On the first floor, 59-year-old tenant Michael Gaston and his girlfriend Camille found out just minutes before power was cut that they would have to find a new place to live. Pagan said he would make sure the couple is relocated to another property he manages.

“I gotta go somewhere,” Gaston said as he smoked a cigarette and watched the inspectors head to the backyard. ​“What am I gonna do about all my furniture and stuff?” He said he had broken his neck a few years ago, and remains in a significant amount of pain. He said he had been living in the first-floor apartment paying $400 a month for rent for about a year.

When asked about conditions at the apartment, Camille said: No good. Someone stole their car while they were living here, she said. Kids routinely hang out on their front porch and get in fights. And there’s too much gang violence in the area, she said.

About Pagan, though, she had only nice words. She said he is an attentive property manager, and always helps out when he can.

“You can only do so much with something so raggedy,” she said.