Mice Reduce Ocean Tenant’s Rent To $1

The last time Tia Cuthbertson used her oven was over a year ago. She was preheating the appliance when she noticed a cloud of smoke — and found a charred mouse inside, burning alive.

Cuthbertson has now received a dramatic reprieve from the Fair Rent Commission, which lowered her rent to $1 per month until her megalandlord, Ocean Management, clears out the mice that have invaded her apartment and fixes other problems.

The commission met online via Zoom on Tuesday night and issued a rare cascade of unanimous decisions to lower three tenants’ monthly rents to $1 each in the face of extreme housing violations.

One of those was for Cuthbertson’s apartment on Henry Street in Dixwell. The other two were for tenants living in a Clifton Street three-family house with persistent sewage-flooding-basement problems. That house is owned by a company controlled by Shmuel Levitin, and saw convicted scammer Yossi (or Joseph) Levitin show up as a landlord representative and ​“office manager” to speak up on the owner’s behalf. (Click here to read more about that case.)

The Fair Rent Commission oversees complaints of excessive rent, landlord retaliation, and unsafe living conditions. Under the leadership of Commission Director Wildaliz Bermúdez, it has taken on a bigger role in soliciting, hearing and acting on rent and living-condition complaints, and in promoting the creation of more tenants unions citywide.

“These cases are emergencies,” reflected Fair Rent Commissioner Garry Monk about both Cuthbertson’s home and the other case reviewed on Tuesday. ​“No one should be living in these conditions.”

Cuthbertson lives with her one-year-old and seven-year-old twins on the third floor of 40 Henry St., a Dixwell house owned by an affiliate of Ocean Management with a history of rodent-related housing code complaints. Prior to the commission’s decision, she had been paying $975 per month to live in the three-bedroom apartment.

According to Cuthbertson, the mouse traps in her apartment catch about five to nine mice per day. Rodent feces are so pervasive in her carpeted apartment that she doesn’t let her kids play on the floor, fearing that they’ll accidentally ingest the droppings. 

When Fair Rent Director Bermúdez inspected the apartment, one dead mouse had already been caught in a trap. She found mouse poop in the oven that Cuthbertson no longer uses (and in cabinets and on the floor). Bermúdez surmised that the rodents had likely also chewed through the oven’s insulation. 

For Cuthbertson, scrubbing mouse poop has been a daily part of her routine throughout the three years she’s lived on Henry Street. ​“I spent my entire pregnancy deep-cleaning,” she said. ​“It’s a lot of effort.” 

At this point, the mice are so much a part of her home that they feel like ​“part of the family,” Cuthbertson joked.

This extreme infestation is only one of Cuthbertson’s worries. 

The apartment is constantly shedding and crumbling. Paint throughout the apartment is peeling, and Cuthbertson fears it may contain lead. The mice seem to have chewed through the bottoms of cabinets and wood, Bermúdez noted in her report.

“It’s an anxiety-stricken feeling, every time your one-year-old has something in their mouth,” she told the commission. ​“You’re wrestling them to make sure it’s not a piece of the floor or the wall in their mouth.”

Meanwhile, the ceiling of the room that used to be her twins’ bedroom is cracking and leaking. (“I’m nervous it will fall,” she told the commission on Tuesday.) The seven-year-olds, one of whom has epilepsy, have been sleeping on the living room recliner couch all summer. 

Outside the apartment itself, Cuthbertson is concerned that the building’s front door doesn’t close properly and is often swinging wide open. There’s also no light in the stairwell leading up to her apartment, and no landing to stand on or railing to clutch onto while opening the third floor apartment’s door.

And at least two bats have infiltrated her apartment, causing Cuthbertson to fear the diseases they may carry.

According to Cuthbertson, Ocean has sent an exterminator ​“a couple of times” in the three years she’s lived in the apartment. She said that after a recent Livable City Initiative inspection, her landlord simply gave her a pack of mouse traps to put out.

Ocean representatives did not respond to requests for comment. The lawyer representing Ocean at Tuesday night’s commission hearing, Herb Reckmeyer, had been retained by the landlord about 24 hours prior and said he was unable to speak to the specifics of the situation.

“It’s just me living in an abandoned building, basically, until whenever the city decides to condemn it,” Cuthbertson told the commission.

An Ocean Of Neglect

Reckmeyer appeared before the Fair Rent Commission on Tuesday evening to request a continuance, asking for more time to research the case, as he said he had been retained by Ocean shortly before 6:15 p.m. the night before.

Reckmeyer said he wanted to ​“see if we can resolve this matter amicably.”

Cuthbertson told commissioners, ​“I’m leery about a continuance just because of the length of time I’ve spent trying to resolve the issues I’ve had. It’s been three years in the making.”

She submitted her first complaint to the Livable City Initiative (LCI) in October 2020 and continued to report code violations to the agency in the years since. LCI took out a warrant against Ocean in the spring of 2021, although a judge dismissed the case after determining the issues had been addressed.

According to Cuthbertson, however, the infestation and other housing problems persisted. The property failed yet another housing code inspection this past June, after which LCI referred Cuthbertson to the Fair Rent Commission.

Regarding the request for more time, Chair Lizz McCrea noted that Ocean had not appeared or sent a representative to previous informal hearings regarding the case. ​“They have not showed up, and they knew before yesterday that they had a hearing today.”

The commissioners unanimously voted to deny the continuance.

When Reckmeyer had a chance to make a case before the commission, he said he did not have enough information to respond to Cuthbertson’s specific concerns.

He did ask a rhetorical question: ​“If the complainant has been living there two [sic] years, why didn’t she move out?”

He added, ​“The thing that’s just remarkable is, why would a person put up with these situations for over two years? I understand recently the real estate market is tight, but it wasn’t tight two or three years ago.”

Commission Chair McCrea responded first: ​“One of the reasons why is because rents are not that affordable. … That may be why. I know it may be hard to fathom for some people, but unfortunately sometimes people don’t have another choice.”

“I will not dignify that with an answer,” Cuthbertson added after Reckmeyer’s question about why she stayed. ​“Regardless of the circumstances, everybody deserves to live in a safe environment. As a landlord, they have a responsibility to their tenant.”

Outside her home on Wednesday, Cuthbertson explained that a housing market dominated by a few large landlords has left her with few options. 

Her decision to move to Henry Street was itself an attempt to improve her living situation. She signed her lease with Ocean in order to flee a mouse infestation at a previous apartment owned by Mandy Management, another large landlord focused on low-income housing in the city. Though the Ocean apartment is larger, she said, the mouse infestation is worse.

Cuthbertson sees the same landlords’ signs ​“everywhere you go outside.” There are a few large property owners ​“preying on the inner city,” she said. 

People living in high-quality housing are doing their best to stay put, she surmised, while the apartments most frequently available for rent are the ones in worst condition.

Cuthbertson works nights as a hotel receptionist, and she said she regularly sees guests who are staying there to avoid poor living conditions at home.

When the commission deliberated, Commissioner Monk remarked, ​“They gotta get out of there ASAP because they’ll be the next meal for those mice.” He called the case ​“one of the worst we discussed in my tenure on the commission.”

When informed of the commission’s unanimous decision to lower her rent to $1 on Wednesday, Cuthbertson was pleased.

“It means an opportunity to save and get my kids into a better situation,” she said. ​“I would very much like to get myself out of this.”

New Rent Set: $1, $1, $1

The Fair Rent Commissioners, who comprise a mixture of landlords and tenants, frequently disagree on how to respond to tenants’ various concerns. Not on Tuesday, however.

All seven commissioners unanimously voted to reduce rent for the three tenants who appeared that night to $1 a month, starting retroactively from the time of the tenants’ Fair Rent complaints and lasting until the landlord provides documented proof that the issues at hand have been resolved.

Commissioner Douglas Losty, who frequently advocates for less punitive responses to landlords, made each motion for rent to be reduced to a dollar. He suggested that the Health Department be called in to inspect all three properties; his fellow commissioners agreed, and concluded that in the case of 40 Henry St. (where mice had ostensibly chewed the oven’s insulation), the fire department should also be called.

The three decisions marked an unusually strong rebuke from the commission against the living conditions at stake.

Still, Commissioner Bita Taubes argued that the extreme living conditions presented during the hearing are not uncommon.

“New Haven is full of mice, full of mold, full of horrible buildings that people live in,” she said. ​“It’s not just one house, one child, one family. There’s many of them.”