Inspector Seeks The Heat

LCI Inspector Frank Alvarado paced around a frigid Cedar Hill bedroom with a mystery to solve: How could a bedroom have been built without a heating vent?

Another city inspector hadn’t noticed the problem the last time he’d visited the apartment. Now a judge had sent Alvarado back to check again.

The rare court-ordered housing inspection took place Monday at the house at 118 Cedar Hill Ave.

Alvarado arrived to assess allegations of mold and uneven flooring.

Once there, he found a more glaring structural issue with the house: The floorboards of a child’s bedroom, it turns out, had been laid out over the vent, leaving the room freezing cold in the winter. The heating problem, along with three other violations, caused the house to ultimately fail the inspection.

That bedroom usually belongs to Dazauna Smith’s 1‑year-old daughter; the baby has lately been sleeping in a crib in Smith’s room while the family waits for heat. 

Smith is suing her landlord, an affiliate of Mandy Management, to enforce the housing code in the apartment where she’s lived since November 2022. Having filed the suit by herself, she presented photographs of mold, peeling paint, and a shaky floor to Superior Court Judge Walter Spader. 

Spader reviewed a series of housing inspections between 2022 and 2023, both from the federal Housing Choice Voucher/Section 8 program’s inspectors and from New Haven’s Livable City Initiative (LCI), which alternately failed and passed the house. Smith contested the results of the latest LCI inspection, which passed the apartment. She also argued that a mold test, which found surface fungus in the kitchen but not airborne spores, hadn’t been properly performed with the windows closed.

Her allegations prompted Spader to order LCI to re-inspect the home in the presence of housing court mediator Eduardo Torrealba. 

So on Monday afternoon, Torrealba and LCI inspector Alvarado joined two legal aid lawyers, Mandy Management representative Zalmy Weiss, and Mandy lawyer Jeffrey Weisman inside Smith’s two-bedroom apartment.

Peering around the freezing back bedroom where Smith’s child sleeps in warmer months, Alvarado said, ​“I don’t believe that there’s not a vent in there.”

But he couldn’t find one.

The team eventually visited the basement, and then checked outside, to determine where the heating vent should have been. They deduced that a contractor had installed the room’s flooring in a way that covered up the vent and prevented heat from coming out.

In the meantime, Smith has been keeping the oven on to warm up the apartment and permanently plugging the gap at the bottom of the door with a towel.

Though the heat issue wasn’t raised in court, Smith said, ​“I did tell maintenance when they were here.”

“My immediate priority is the heat,” said Weiss. He said he could send someone to come by the next morning; when Smith asked whether an upcoming afternoon would work instead, he said he would get back to her. 

Room by room, Smith showed the inspector how, as she argued, Mandy’s previous fixes to problems she reported either failed to address the root causes or created new issues for her to contend with. 

A recent coat of paint, intended to address moisture problems, had begun to bubble slightly by the corners. She believes that speckles on the basement ceiling are evidence of mold in the walls and floors, and she also found mold lining the kitchen sink door. 

Though Mandy replaced a broken outlet, the landlord didn’t properly repaint the walls in that area, which she feared would expose her daughter to lead. In various areas in the kitchen, the floorboards sink beneath her steps and occasionally lift up. The floorboards have tripped her one-year-old child, she said, who has blood cancer and can’t afford to get scraped.

Overall, Smith said, she’s concerned about her and her daughter’s ability to breathe in an apartment she fears is laden with mold and lead. 

“Nobody wants them to come again and again,” she said, referring to the maintenance crew. ​“I want to transfer out of here.”

She later wrote in an email, ​“If I didn’t show the judge pictures of the apartment still not being fixed Mandy Management would have gotten away with another inhabitable apartment and I would have been just another Mandy tenant in an unfortunate situation because they really don’t care. My daughter has blood cancer & I will do anything to make sure she’s in a safe & habitable environment!”

The Mandy representatives responded to many of those concerns. 

They found no issue with the bathroom paint job. 

The mold concern in the sink, Weiss said, is surface-level buildup that is the tenant’s responsibility to clean. ​“I’m not responsible for cleaning your apartment,” he said; Smith argued in turn that the mold was a systemic issue originating in the sink pipes, as she said a maintenance worker had told her.

Weisman argued that the floor, a ​“floating floor” that isn’t designed to be glued or nailed to the ground, is supposed to be bouncy. ​“They have some give to them,” he said. (An article from Home Inspection Insider offers this take.)

The lack of heat wasn’t the only surprise to greet the inspectors.

A trip to the basement revealed another problem: an unstable stair that caused Smith to trip as she led everyone downstairs.

As the group explored downstairs, an unexpected visitor made an appearance: A small rat (or perhaps a very large mouse) sprinted across the room.

Smith, who hadn’t seen rodents in the house before, froze for a minute in anxiety over the prospect of another problem to add to her list.

On Wednesday, LCI published the inspection results: the apartment failed on account of the heating problem, as well as a broken section of the house, a broken electrical outlet, and ​“makeshift repairs to walls” that need to be corrected. The agency does not typically test for mold, which is not covered in the city’s housing code. As for the lawsuit, the court and Smith will wait to see how well the repairs are made. Including whether the baby’s room gets heat.