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Judge Cirello: Gives tenants another chance.
A judge ruled that a Hill family can stay in their rented home for another month — as they try to avoid falling through the cracks of a state Covid-era program designed to help people like them avoid eviction.
The family got that 30-day reprieve Thursday after a virtual public hearing in state housing court.
State Superior Court Judge John Cirello gave the family 30 days to stay in their rented Hurlburt Street single-family home, even though a previous housing court judge signed off in September on their eviction for nonpayment of rent.
Cirello gave the family that additional time to work out whatever kinks may remain with their application to UniteCT. That state program, created during the pandemic, provides up to $15,000 in rental aid and up to $1,500 in electricity payment assistance to qualifying low- and moderate-income Connecticut families.
The program — which requires both landlord and tenant participation — has received national praise for its efficacy in keeping vulnerable tenants housed and landlords paid during the pandemic, particularly since Gov. Ned Lamont issued an executive order requiring landlords to apply for UniteCT before they can move ahead with an eviction for nonpayment of rent.
“I think this is a reasonable solution,” Cirello said during Thursday’s YouTube-streamed court proceeding.
He told Marlyce — who lives at the Hurlburt Street house with her husband and four kids, and who is one of the defendants in the eviction case — that her family will be able to stay in their rented home through at least Nov 13. (Also listed as defendants are Marlyce’s husband and her oldest daughter. She asked not to have her last name included in this article and that she not be photographed.)
“But in that time, the hope is that you get the UniteCT application in,” Cirello said. “Because if you do that, and the funds are awarded, that could mean that” the home’s property management company, Diamond Properties Management LLC, would have to withdraw the eviction and “they would have to allow you to stay in that apartment for a period of time.”
Judgment Remains; Application Still “Pending”
The Elm Street courthouse, home to New Haven’s housing court.
Cirello’s order for a 30-day stay in the case came right after the judge denied the Hill tenants’ application to “open” — or reverse — a Sept. 3 eviction judgment previously handed down by then-housing court Judge Claudia Baio.
Baio had sided with Diamond Properties Management LLC after they first brought an eviction lawsuit against the Hurlburt Street renters on Aug. 10. (While Diamond manages the property and is the plaintiff in the lawsuit, the single-family rental is owned by a holding company controlled by Roger Dawson of Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. Click here and here about some of Dawson’s past real-estate dealings in New Haven.)
In the original eviction lawsuit from early August, New London-based attorney Yona Gregory wrote that the family signed a one-year lease and moved into the Hurlburt Street property in March. They agreed in that lease to pay $2,000 per month in rent.
According to the lawsuit, the defendants failed to pay rent in May and June.
So on July 2, the property management company served a notice to quit. The company included on that document a case number for a UniteCT application, as required by the governor’s executive order.
Gregory said during Thursday’s live-streamed court hearing that that UniteCT application remains “pending” these three months later.
The property management company has been “trying to see if the defendants could cooperate and get that pushed through,” Gregory told the judge. “But we haven’t heard back from [the tenants].”
Tenant: “I Have To Stay Strong”
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Looking down Hurlburt Street from Spring Street.
After a few minutes of technical difficulties, Marlyce was ultimately able to speak up during Thursday’s virtual court hearing.
She made her case — before the judge, and during an interview with the Independent after the hearing — as to why her family fell behind on rent, and what they’re doing now to try to stay in their home.
Marlyce told the Independent that she and her family had enough money and reliable sources of income when they first moved into the Hurlburt Street house in March. They were confident they’d be able to make the $2,000 monthly rent.
Then they hit road bump after road bump, all exacerbated by the pandemic.
Both her son and her daughter lost their jobs. Nearly everyone in the family came down with Covid. Her daughter suffered a sports-related concussion. And she was unable to go back to work because she had to stay home with her kids as they finished their remote school years.
“During Covid, we don’t have a normal life,” she said from her front porch. “We don’t go outside. It’s just scary,” especially given her preexisting health conditions.
How did she fare when she contracted the novel coronavirus earlier this year?
“It was horrible,” she said. “I’m glad I was able to get through it.” She said she still experiences occasional headaches and chest pains. “Things that don’t really go away.”
Marlyce said she and her eldest daughter, who is a senior in high school, have tried to fill out the UniteCT application. They called 211 and legal aid for help filling out all the online forms.
They thought they had submitted all of the information they needed to. They said they’ve spent hours on the phone trying to reach UniteCT to clarify the status of their application.
“The landlord is good,” Marlyce said. “They’re good people. They don’t want to kick me out. So hopefully this goes through, and they’ll let me stay here and finish off” the lease.
Despite all the recent hiccups, life is starting to look up.
Marlyce said that her husband is still working. Her daughter just recently got a job, even though she’s also now back in high school full time.
Marlyce herself is also on the job hunt, connecting with Workforce Alliance to apply for jobs at Amtrak, as a custodian, and as a crossing guard.
“I have to stay strong because I’ve got four little ones,” she said.
How would landing some UniteCT financial support help her and her family right now? “It would give me time to catch up with everything that’s been going on.”
Legal Aid: “Pleasantly Surprised” With How Well UniteCT Works
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Legal aid’s Shelley White: Program’s working well.
New Haven Legal Assistance Association Director of Litigation Shelley White said she is not familiar with Marlyce’s eviction case or UniteCT application in particular.
In general, she said, the UniteCT program has been quite successful in providing much-needed rental relief to keep tenants housed during the pandemic.
“If it’s just a matter of waiting for approval,” she said, “my experience has been that most landlords wait” for the state to decide on a UniteCT application, rather than moving ahead with eviction while a UniteCT application is still pending.
White said that she has seen a lot of cases with UniteCT “get paid at literally the last minute.” If the landlord and tenant have both submitted their relevant paperwork, the state almost always approves a UniteCT application — and then a landlord gets paid and a tenant gets to stay.
She said the hardest part about working with UniteCT for her and her clients right now is that “future rents gets paid, and sometimes tenants don’t know what future rent is.” That is, the state program will allocate $12,000 for back rent and $3,000 for future rent — but a tenant and landlord will disagree over exactly which months the “future rent” applies to. “Both parties need to know exactly what was paid, and they need to know what the arrears were,” she said.
Overall, though, the program is working about as well as one might hope.
“A lot of the cases that I’ve had, I’ve been pleasantly surprised,” White said. “Landlords have taken the money. And it’s been paid in a fairly reasonable period of time.”
DOH: 38K Applications So Far; 23K Approved
According to state Department of Housing spokesperson Aaron Turner, UniteCT has received roughly 38,000 applications by both tenants and landlords to date.
Of those applications received, around 6,000 are in the “prescreening process,” 7,500 are assigned to a case review underwriting team, and 23,000 have been approved and have been paid out, or are currently in the payment process.
Turner declined to comment on Marlyce’s UniteCT application in particular, citing confidentiality concerns.
“In general, there is an Eviction Prevention Team at UniteCT that focusses on working with known eviction cases,” he told the Independent. “Eviction cases are intercepted in a multitude of ways through the self disclosure question on the application, the application section where eviction documents can be uploaded, notification from mediators or attorneys and through a weekly pull of newly filed cases in CT that are cross referenced with UniteCT applications.”
He said that there are many reasons why a UniteCT application might take some time to be processed by the state.
Those reasons might include a tenant and landlord not fully completing their parts of the joint case number, time spent responding to requests for more information from the case review team, and one party or the other not wanting to participate in the UniteCT process.
“There are Eviction Prevention Specialists at each of the UniteCT Resource Centers that are available to assist with direct support when either a tenant or a landlord is struggling to work together or complete the process,” he said. The UniteCT Resource Centers are listed on the program’s website here.
How much money has the landlord received???????