Mandy Leads Pack In Eviction Filings

A review of 2022 eviction lawsuits reveals that affiliates of Mandy Management moved to boot 261 New Haven rental households — making the local megalandlord by far the busiest property owner in housing court in a year that saw eviction filings surge statewide.

That’s one finding from the New Haven Independent’s review of 1,712 eviction lawsuit filings from 2022 that were recorded on the state court’s online database.

Two hundred and sixty one of those New Haven eviction lawsuits — or a full 15 percent — were filed by affiliates of Mandy Management. That number is nearly three times more than the city’s second-highest eviction-filer of 2022, Ocean Management.

That doesn’t mean that Mandy actually kicked out 261 apartments’ worth of New Haven tenants last year. Far from it.

As of the publication time of this article, Mandy wound up withdrawing more than a quarter of these eviction cases.

Still more were resolved via court-mediated stipulations.

As of the publication time of this article, roughly a third of Mandy’s 2022 eviction lawsuits have ended with court-issued summary process ​“executions” so far. 

Still, these lawsuits will remain part of the public record for at least a year, affecting tenants’ ability to find a new place to live at a time when more and more landlords are automatically discounting tenants with an eviction record.

All the while, Mandy Management — a Whalley Avenue-headquartered property management company that is backed by a Tel Aviv Stock Exchange-traded company called Netz and that partners with private equity firms, commercial lenders, and other out-of-town investors to spend tens of millions of dollars every year buying mostly low-income rental properties in and around New Haven — continued to expand its local holdings. 

According to the Independent’s review of all property sales recorded on the city’s online land records database in 2022, Mandy affiliates spent another $27.1 million buying 77 different properties containing 229 apartments in New Haven last year.

That means that, in the past five years alone, Mandy affiliates have spent a total of $151 million acquiring over 1,530 New Haven rental housing units. (According to DataHaven’s 2021 Equity Profile of New Haven, the city has a total of 55,682 housing units.)

While a complex web of Limited Liability Corporations (LLCs) makes it difficult to know exactly how much property each landlord controls in New Haven, the Independent has tracked Mandy Management’s uniquely rapid growth for several years. Click here, here, here, here and here to read previous year-end articles about the expansion of Mandy’s local real estate empire of mostly low-income apartments. Mandy’s status as the city’s most frequent eviction lawsuit filer of 2022 reflects that consolidation in New Haven’s housing market.

More Apartments, More Evictions

In separate interviews with the Independent for this article, Mandy representative Yudi Gurevitch and a group of New Haven Legal Assistance Association housing court attorneys said that these eviction lawsuits reflect the vast number of housing units Mandy’s affiliates own across the city.

“We are one of the largest landlords offering affordable housing in New Haven,” Gurevitch said in an email comment. ​“The likelihood for potential issues corresponds directly to our unit count, especially in our current inflationary environment. I’d add too that the vast majority of our tenants pay every month and on time.”

Gurevitch said that his company has become ​“more efficient in our accounts receivable (AR) operations due to tech-driven back office capabilities built out during Covid. This has allowed us to intervene much faster when our software system flags troubled accounts.”

He continued: ​“We don’t want to file a notice to quit just like banks don’t want to file a [foreclosure]. We prefer tenants stay in their apartment, and many of our tenants want to stay in their apartment. That’s why we invested in our IT system so we can work with them as early as possible to resolve any AR irregularities.”

Legal aid housing attorney Yoni Zamir offered a more skeptical take on the parallel expansion of Mandy’s real estate holdings and proliferation of Mandy-filed eviction lawsuits.

“It’s a commodity for them,” Zamir said about Mandy’s local apartments. ​“It’s disgusting.”

Ocean's Busy, Too

While Mandy filed the most eviction lawsuits against New Haven tenants of any landlord last year, they certainly were not the only property owners to sue to try to get a court order to move tenants who were behind on rent out of their apartments. 

The second most frequent eviction filer in New Haven was Ocean Management, another local megalandlord whose affiliates filed 96 evictions, or over 5 percent of New Haven’s total, in 2022, The third most frequent was Bethany-based doctor and landlord Jianchao Xu, whose companies filed 68 eviction lawsuits against New Haven tenants, or nearly 4 percent of the city’s total.

All of this took place against the backdrop of a sharp statewide increase in eviction lawsuits in 2022 as many of Connecticut’s pandemic-era renter protections and relief programs expired and as renters reeled from pandemic-induced medical, economic, and mental health challenges. Last year also saw low-income tenants in three New Haven zip codes qualify for a lawyer in housing court under a new state-funded ​“Right to Counsel” pilot program, changing the power balance in court for the many tenants who reached out for legal help.

"Operating A Business"

In comments emailed to the Independent for this article, Gurevitch stressed the costs to Mandy’s business when a tenant stops paying rent. 

“While the tenant is still in the unit, there are still operating expenses, creditors, vendors and employees that need to be paid regardless of a tenant’s ability to pay rent,” he wrote. ​“We are operating a business, and as such, require cash flow to maintain solvency.”

He stated that while tenants ​“have been heavily impacted by rising prices for essentials like groceries, electricity and gas,” Mandy’s local housing business is ​“also experiencing higher wages, rising operating costs including heating oil, gas and hot water, higher property taxes, insurance, construction and maintenance fees which weigh quite heavily on our bottom line. This confluence of economic events is making it difficult for everyone, forcing all of us to make hard decisions.”

According to the Independent’s analysis of 2022 eviction lawsuits against New Haven tenants, Mandy and other large landlords frequently filed eviction lawsuits in batches all at once. 

For instance, Ocean affiliates filed 12 New Haven eviction lawsuits in state court on May 9; Jianchao Xu-controlled companies filed 8 on Feb. 2; Mandy affiliates filed 11 on June 1. 

Gurevitch said that filing a number of evictions at once is more efficient for landlords like Mandy: ​“Evictions are typically filed in clusters which is more cost effective than filing cases individually. It is also more efficient in tracking and resolving.”

Mandy’s accounts receivable department uses an automated system to flag tenants who are behind on rent.

“This system helps us drive consistency across business operations. Automation helps us address a variety of AR challenges. We can now quickly follow up with a letter, then a phone call to find out what is going on,” Gurevitch wrote. ​“If we do not hear back within a few days, a collections staff member will make a visit to the tenant to discuss the situation in person. If we are unable to reach the tenant and the situation compounds, we have no option but to seek remedy.”

“We prefer not to serve notice, but there are times when we have no choice,” he continued. ​“Each day that passes without a rental payment, debt accumulates and the likelihood of recovering income diminishes.”

In cases of unpaid rent, there’s no set time frame or balance due that triggers Mandy to launch an eviction lawsuit, according to Gurevitch.

“The time frame before we serve a notice to quit varies depending on circumstance and communication,” he wrote. ​“If you wait too long, the unpaid balance may become unmanageable risking any possible settlement. Grounds for eviction are the usual, including nonpayment of rent, lapse of time, breach of lease terms, and so on. We treat all tenants the same in full compliance with Fair Housing Laws.”

According to the Independent’s review of 2022 eviction records, in some instances, Mandy’s attorneys cited one month of lapsed rent as a cause for an eviction lawsuit. Other Mandy-launched evictions in 2022 cited five or six months’ worth of unpaid rent.

High Evictions, Low Vacancies

Among the 261 evictions Mandy affiliates filed in 2022, the company ended up withdrawing 26 percent of those cases — or 69 in total — so far.

That number was likely shaped in part by the availability last year of pandemic-era rental aid from programs like UniteCT and CASTLE. In a number of cases, especially early in the year, Mandy would file an eviction and later withdraw the case after appearing to receive rent aid.

Those cases were likely withdrawn either because the tenants were able to catch up on unpaid rent or because the tenants voluntarily moved out. In total, about two thirds of Mandy-filed eviction cases did not actually result in a tenant having to leave the unit.

Still, according to New Haven Legal Assistance Association Assistant Director Elizabeth Rosenthal and her colleagues, the percentage of eviction lawsuits that actually forced tenants out of their homes appears to have grown significantly in 2022.

Prior to the pandemic, ​“housing court was absolutely a debt-collection court,” Rosenthal told the Independent. ​“Most cases ended up with stipulations.” Since then, Rosenthal said, her team has encountered more resistance to repayment plans and other agreements from landlords. 

With Mandy Management in particular, Rosenthal said, she has noticed that when citing a reason for eviction, ​“Mandy is throwing everything on the wall” and seeing what sticks. The landlord frequently alleges lease violations and lapse-of-time causes in addition to the most common reason for eviction, ​“nonpayment of rent.”

The tight rental market of the past year reduced the pressure on landlords to retain tenants, legal aid attorneys said. At a recent press conference, the city’s Department of Community Resilience Director Carlos Sosa-Lombardo reported that the New Haven-Milford area’s vacancy rate at the beginning of December was 1.3 percent — lower than the state’s 2.1 percent and the nation’s 5.6 percent.

In a city with a disproportionately low vacancy rate, there is a long line of tenants applying for almost any given apartment. Renters are increasingly replaceable. And landlords can increasingly afford to rule out applicants with any sort of eviction history.

“There’s no vacancies,” said Shelley White, legal aid’s director of litigation. Landlords can scrutinize tenants more than ever ​“because there are a lot of ​‘perfect people’” applying for each unit.

When asked whether Mandy Management employs this screening practice, Gurevitch wrote in response, ​“We do not automatically screen out tenants who have a history of prior evictions. We look at each tenant individually. We interview each one and talk with them to discuss their background, rental history and circumstances. We look at the whole picture — just as any business does before providing products or services that require some form of credit.” 

As Mandy and Ocean continue to grow their presences in New Haven real estate, legal aid attorney Daniel Burns said, the tenants whom those landlords evict have an increasingly hard time finding an alternative place to live. ​“It’s forcing them out of New Haven.”

Neighborhood Disparities

A map of eviction lawsuits filed in New Haven throughout 2022 reveals an additional layer to the story of New Haven’s eviction lawsuits last year. Clear patterns emerged not only in the landlords most responsible for the city’s evictions, but also in the neighborhoods that most frequently experienced them.

A review of all 1,700-plus eviction lawsuits filed against New Haven tenants last year revealed that Fair Haven, Edgewood, the Hill, and Newhallville saw the most eviction filings in 2022.

Clusters of evictions also appeared in areas with smaller populations, including West Hills, West Rock, Cedar Hill, and Quinnipiac Meadows.

Meanwhile, East Rock, Wooster Square, Morris Cove, and lower Westville were markedly less affected by the eviction crisis.

While court records do not indicate the racial or ethnic identity of evictees, the neighborhood disparities appear to indicate racial disparities in local evictions, confirming national data that Black and Latino tenants are disproportionately evicted from their homes. 

The neighborhoods with the highest eviction rates comprise majority-Black and Latino residents, while the neighborhoods with the lowest eviction rates have larger populations of white residents.

Right To Counsel Tested

In late January 2022, New Haven Legal Assistance Association’s role in eviction defense expanded. A new ​“Right to Counsel” state law came into effect guaranteeing a lawyer to qualifying tenants in certain zip codes who are facing eviction.

The Right to Counsel program has so far rolled out for veterans and tenants in three New Haven zip codes, selected by their high concentration of evictions: 06511, 06515, and 06519. (The West Hills and Amity neighborhoods, where a significant number of evictions occurred in 2022, are not yet covered by the program.)

Since the Right to Counsel was established, every eviction notice in those zip codes came with an information sheet about a statewide hotline that could connect low-income tenants to an attorney. Tenants are eligible if their income is equal to or lower than 80 percent of the state’s median income. (For a family of four, 80 percent of the median income is $79,900 per year.)

Despite this new program, of the 425 eviction lawsuits launched by the city’s top three filers last year, 208 cases — or roughly half — saw tenants represent themselves in court without the help of a lawyer.

Just 88 of those tenants — or 21 percent — were represented by a legal aid attorney, and roughly 30 percent didn’t file a legal appearance with the court at all.

Why did so many tenants represent themselves in court against massive, court-experienced and legally represented local landlords?

Some were evicted before the Right to Counsel program was established on Jan. 31. Some weren’t eligible for a lawyer due to zip code or income requirements. Some could only read a language other than English or Spanish, the two languages represented on the Right to Counsel information sheet. Some may have decided not to contact a lawyer because they were already working with rental assistance programs to pay off their debt.

​“People think, ​‘I didn’t do anything wrong,’” theorized Rachel Scotch, who was one of several new lawyers hired by legal aid this year specifically to handle Right to Counsel cases.

“Some people don’t want to ask for help,” added Sinclair Williams, another legal aid lawyer.

Rosenthal noted that the Right to Counsel information sheet is on the second page of each Notice to Quit. There’s supposed to be one eviction notice per person living in an apartment, so larger households might receive a stack of papers informing them of their impending eviction.

It’s overwhelming for many tenants, Rosenthal said. ​“You are completely stressed out. You push it away.”

Burns said he believes the court system could do more to advertise the Right to Counsel program. Housing court judges or staff could confirm with tenants that they are aware of their right to a lawyer, he proposed.

For the tenants who have connected with legal aid, having a lawyer can make all the difference, Rosenthal said. ​“Even if we’re not able to preserve their tenancy,” she said, lawyers can help tenants secure ​“time, or the opportunity to negotiate back rent.” Crucially, a lawyer can help identify when a landlord has crossed a legal line during the eviction process.

“An attorney is a huge part of the puzzle, but they are not the whole puzzle,” Rosenthal said.

This article is the second of two reflecting on a year of evictions in 2022. Read the first in the series here.

See below for other recent stories about New Haven eviction cases:

• Eviction ​“Answers” Reveal Renters’ Struggles
• Eviction Suit Caps Tenant’s Tough Run
• Investor Skips Hello, Starts Evictions
• Eviction Deal Drops $1 Ruling Appeal
• Judge’s $1 Award Tests Eviction Rule
• Court Case Q: Which​“Nuisances” Merit Eviction?
• ​“Or” Evictions OK’d
• Fair Rent: Dog’ll Cost You $150
• Rent Trumps Repairs In Elliot Street Eviction
• Though Sympathetic, Judge Blocks Eviction
• Family Feuds Fill Eviction Court
• Rent Help Winds Down. What’s Next?
• Eviction Withdrawn After Rent Catch-up
• Hill Landlord Prevails In​“Lapse” Eviction
• Landlord Thwarted 2nd Time On Eviction
• Church Evicting Parishioner
• Hard-Luck Tenant Hustles To Stay Put
• Eviction Of Hospitalized Tenant, 74, Upheld
• Judge Pauses Eviction Amid Rent-Relief Qs
• Amid Rise In​“Lapse-of-Time” Evictions, Tenant Wins 3‑Month Stay
• Leaky Ceiling, Rent Dispute Spark Eviction Case