Fed-Up Housing Judge Cuts To Chase

Judge Walter Spader, Jr. had had enough with the lawyers arguing before him. 

So, black robes swishing above his brightly hued checkered button-down shirt, he stepped down from his judicial bench to interview a key witness himself.

“For the past two hours, nothing has been helpful,” New Haven’s housing court judge chastised the attorneys before making the unusual move. ​“We’re just meandering about for two hours.”

He was going to take matters into his own hands, he promised.

So Spader left from his perch in a third-floor state courtroom at 121 Elm St. to a wooden table already crowded with documents, microphones, and people — including three lawyers, two city employees, a property manager, and a tenant.

Spader made those moves so that he himself could interview the witness he had wanted to hear from all afternoon, and who had yet to take the stand: Livable City Initiative (LCI) Senior Housing Code Inspector Javier Ortiz. 

The judge picked up a pen and a paper detailing housing-code problems that LCI had found at a rental property on Vernon Street earlier this spring. He asked Ortiz to help him move the court case forward. 

If you had a ​“magic wand,” he asked Ortiz, what should be fixed first? Referring to the tenant and landlord and their respective attorneys seated a few feet away, Spader asked the city housing code inspector: ​“What should I tell them to do?”

Back In Court Again

That judge-leaves-the-bench bit of courtroom drama took place Thursday afternoon in New Haven’s housing court downtown.

It came nearly two hours into the latest hearing in a housing code enforcement case filed by 23 Vernon St. tenant Lakeysha Harrison and New Haven Legal Assistance Association (NHLAA) attorneys Amy Marx and Richard Hine.

That tenant-launched lawsuit seeks to compel local landlord Matthew Harp’s company to address a host of problems with Harrison’s second-floor Vernon Street apartment, including a rodent infestation, holes in the walls, and faulty or inoperable doors and windows and sinks, among other concerns. Harp’s company has denied the entirety of Harrison’s housing-code-violation claims. It has filed a counterclaim arguing that the tenant has failed to keep her apartment clean, safe, and garbage-free. 

Harrison first filed the lawsuit in January of this year. After an early April court hearing, Spader ordered LCI to conduct a follow-up inspection to find out exactly what state 23 Vernon St. is currently in.

That court-ordered inspection took place on on April 14. LCI found more than two dozen remaining problems with the property. Harp’s company immediately repaired the most urgent issues, fixing a damaged bathroom floor and tiles and replacing smoke detectors. His company has appealed the rest of the LCI report — and has moved to have the housing code enforcement case thrown out entirely after pointing out that LCI’s original repairs order from January 2022 identified 23 Vernon St. first-floor apartment, not the second-floor apartment where Harrison lives, as in need of fixing up. The tenant and her lawyers have argued that that was just a scrivener’s error, and that the original LCI inspection, findings, and order clearly applied to the second-floor unit.

Thursday afternoon’s hearing was meant to focus on the current conditions of the property, LCI’s most recent inspection and findings, and what repairs if any still needed to be made in order for the apartment to be safe and liveable.

At least, that’s what the judge thought the hearing was going to be about when he first called the matter before him at 2:40.

Up until his interruption and jumping off the bench at around 4:15, he got something quite a bit different from Marx and landlord-hired attorney Tucker McWeeny.

2016, and 2022, Revisited

Most of that first hour and a half of Thursday’s hearing consisted of Marx examining, and then McWeeny counter-examining, Harrison about her and her family’s history at 23 Vernon. 

Marx went through an ​“OK sheet” Harrison had signed off on when she moved into the apartment back in January 2016 which indicated that ​“nothing’s wrong with the unit.”

“How closely did you look at these things?” Marx asked as she went line by line through the sheet’s indication that all was in good repair with the floors, walls, cabinet doors, etc… 

“I didn’t” look closely at the time, Harrison admitted. It was her first apartment. She and her kids were eager to move in. At a glance, all looked well. But the very first night of her residency, she said, a cabinet shelf fell to the floor and the lights in two of the rooms wouldn’t turn off. She talked through extensive water damage the unit suffered from later on in her tenancy. Guided by Marx’s questions, she answered that whenever she called Harp’s company, Renaissance, to make repairs over the years, they wouldn’t make them or wouldn’t do a good job.

Marx then turned to the January 2022 LCI inspection and housing code enforcement order that lay at the foundation of Harrison’s January 2023 lawsuit — and that McWeeny and his client have disputed because of its identification of the apartment in question as on the first floor, not the second floor.

Marx asked about each of the problems with the property as identified in that January 2022 report. Harrison confirmed that those problems were with her property, and not the downstairs unit. The tenant recalled an LCI inspector coming to her unit at around that time. She said she did not believe that that inspector later visited the first-floor unit.

Referring to the problems with the property that LCI found during its latest inspection this April, Marx confirmed with Harrison that the landlord had fixed the most urgent issues related to the bathroom floor and tiles, and Harrison testified that the other problems with the doors and windows and walls had not yet been addressed. Marx asked if Harrison or any of her three children ​“intentionally” caused any of the problems with the property, alluding to the landlord’s argument that the tenant was at fault here.

“You don’t keep mice as pets?” Marx asked, referring to the house’s rodent infestation.

“No,” Harrison replied with a mix of incredulity and annoyance.

Marx concluded her initial round of questions of her client by asking about Harrison’s work. Harrison said she makes just over $17 an hour, and gets paid by the hour. She’s had to miss a sizeable amount of work coming back again and again to court for this case, and that’s meant she’s missed out on income. She said she’s paid her $961 monthly rent on time into court over the past few months. 

Marx later said that Harrison had already paid more than $6,000 in rent to the court so far, teeing up an eventual argument for why that money should be disbursed to her client and not to the landlord whenever this case is resolved.

After a 10-minute break, McWeeny picked up his cross-examination of Harrison at around 3:55.

His first line of questions went back to that July 1, 2016 ​“OK” sheet that Harrison had signed upon moving into the property.

Like Marx, McWeeny went line by line through the sheet, asking if Harrison had closely examined the walls, the floors, the cabinets, etc…, before signing off on their being in good condition when she and her kids first moved in.

He then asked Harrison to identify how many holes there were in the walls of her apartment between when LCI inspected the property in January 2022 and when firefighters put out a blaze and knocked down one of the interior walls of the apartment in early February. 

If there were no holes in the walls back in July 2016, he asked, how did there come to be two to three holes in the walls by January 2022?

“How many holes did the fire department make” in February 2022? he asked.

The clock had almost hit 4:15. McWeeny was now asking if a sink in the bathroom had been loose to the same degree between January 2022 and January 2023. The hearing had dragged on for more than an hour and a half and showed no end in sight. 

And, at that point, to use a highly technical legal term, Spader snapped.

Judge: "I'm Calling The Next Witness"

That’s when Spader said that the past two hours — more or less — had not been helpful. He blamed both sides’ attorneys for what he described as an unduly ​“meandering” set of interviews and arguments.

“We’ve got the LCI guy here!” Spader said, gesturing towards Ortiz, who was sitting in the front row of the audience section of the courtroom alongside city attorney Michael Pinto and top city housing code enforcement deputy Mark Stroud.

This January-filed case has been going on for months now, Spader continued. He said he didn’t want to hear any more about recollections of the property’s condition from July 2016 or January 2022.

“All I care about right now is: Is there an emergency” condition at this property right now that makes it unsafe to live in? ​“What’s been put on in the past two hours is not what I care about. Is there an emergency?” And, if so, ​“let’s get to something that I can actually do something with.”

“I need to know right now if there is a safe place for her to reside in,” he said about Harrison.

Marx said that, while there are plenty of remaining problems with the property, the landlord had made necessary fixes to the most ​“exigent” issues after LCI’s April 14 inspection. She said she and her client wanted the judge to order the landlord to make the remaining repairs.

“Let’s hear from the LCI guys” themselves, Spader said. ​“I’m calling the next witness.”

And so he did, calling Ortiz up to the witness table. 

After Ortiz was sworn in, Spader asked him to recommend which fixes needed to be made first at this property. 

He then got up from the bench, walked down to the LCI housing code inspector, stood side by side with the witness, and ticked through his own copy of the findings from Ortiz’s May 1 ​“recheck” of 23 Vernon. 

Ortiz flipped through the pages before him, reminding himself of each violation and checking his own notes on top priority fixes. 

He recommended that all of the windows in need of repair be fixed first — including a bathroom window that ​“free falls” when opens. He then recommended doors be fixed, and a common area railing. 

After a minute or two, Spader had a list in hand identifying which 12 fixes should be made in which order. He returned to the bench and read them to the two sides, telling them that these fixes needed to be made before June 23, and after that the case could move on to arguments about how and to whom rent money should be disbursed.

At this stage, Spader concluded, ​“all I care about is these 12 things getting done.”

Court Of Law? More Like "Spiderman Finger Pointing Meme"

He concluded the hearing for the day at 4:48 p.m.

A written order uploaded to the state court’s on Friday details Spader’s ruling, including which fixes to prioritize and when they have to be made.

“Obviously, if additional repairs can be done, the defendant should do so,” Spader wrote. ​“The Court understands the defendant’s concerns that some repairs should be the plaintiff’s responsibility. That issue can be fought later. The repairs need to be done, and blame can be assessed when the Court considers the distribution of funds being held by the Court.”

He continued: ​“Before we can even get to the point of deciding what to do with the money in Court, however, the premises has to pass an LCI Report. A housing code enforcement action is designed to bring about a quick remedy for the parties — today’s hearing resembled the Spiderman finger pointing meme, with no one taking responsibility for the lack of improvements over the pendency of this case. The parties should want to stop coming to court and reporting little, if any, progress and just want to complete the repairs and be done with this case.

“The Court suggested a next Court date for June 23, but both attorneys are unavailable on that date. There is no reason to keep dragging Ms. Harrison to Court, or for LCI’s inspectors, general manager and the City Attorney to be dragged to Court to sit around and watch the attorneys barely push the case forward. The clerk is to schedule a meeting with the attorneys and a mediator the week after June 23 to review the follow up report from Inspector Ortiz demonstrating compliance with the items above being complete and to receive a second list of items for their clients to complete from the Court at that time.”