Thomas Breen file photo
Fair Rent Commission Director Wildaliz Bermúdez (right): "Tenants report there is evidence of advanced mold behind bathroom walls" at 234 Fillmore.
Fair Rent commissioners dropped a Fillmore Street tenant’s rent down to $1 per month in a bid to pressure her landlord to speed up repairs to a dangerously unhealthy property with water-damaged ceilings and walls and allegedly beset with mold.
That was the outcome of Tuesday night’s latest regular monthly Fair Rent Commission meeting, which was held online via Zoom. The Fair Rent Commission is a state-empowered local body charged with cracking down on rents deemed“harsh and unconscionable,” and on hearing rent-related tenant complaints about landlord retaliation and unsafe living conditions.
The three commissioners present for Tuesday’s meeting voted unanimously to reduce the rent for the first-floor apartment at 234 Fillmore St. from $1,200 to $1 per month.
They did so after hearing from tenants Emily Pike and Jerhiel Vidro and their lawyer, Yale New Haven Medical-Legal Partnership Project Director Sarah Mervine, about long-standing problems with the property. Pike said those problems — documented by Livable City Initiative (LCI) inspectors — have resulted in a slew of upper respiratory infections for and her two young kids.
“It’s just very concerning and dangerous,” Pike told the commissioners about the conditions in her apartment affecting her health. “It’s kind of like a ticking time bomb in the background, and it’s harming us in the meantime. We really need something to be done.”
Zoom photo
Fair Rent Commissioner Garry Monk on Tuesday: "Mold is a big, big item."
“I just think it’s disgusting,” Fair Rent Commission Chair Lizz McCrea said about the condition of the property as described by Pike and a LCI inspection report. “I think it’s unsafe. It’s unhealthy.”
“Just to get the attention of the landlord,” Commissioner Garry Monk said, “I make a motion we reduce the rent to $1 until we get some satisfaction, until we meet again … I don’t know.”
Fellow Commissioner Wendy Gamba helped Monk fashion that motion into one that all three commissioners present on Tuesday wound up voting in support of. That final commission-approved decision reduced the Fillmore Street apartment’s rent to “$1 until all repairs are complete and verified with licensed contractors, invoiced, evidenced,” per Gamba’s motion.
234 Fillmore St.
The three-family Fair Haven rental property at the center of Tuesday’s Fair Rent Commission order is owned by Panorama Del LLC, a holding company controlled by the real estate investor-property management-property ownership company Ocean Management.
Ocean did not send a representative to participate in Tuesday night’s Fair Rent Commission meeting, which was not well received by the commissioners. “You all know how I feel about landlords who don’t show up,” Gamba offered at the start of the deliberations on this case. (The head of Ocean Management did not respond to a request for comment by the publication time of this article.)
Because Pike, Vidro, and Mervine all did show up to speak up for the tenant’s side, they got to present their case to the commissioners and to issue their ask for a rent reduction and for help getting the landlord to make needed repairs.
Mervine said Pike has lived in the 234 Fillmore St. apartment since November 2021, paying her monthly $1,200 rent on time throughout her tenancy.
Fair Rent Commission Executive Director Wildaliz Bermúdez said that LCI inspected her apartment on Nov. 28, 2022 and found “unsafe and unhealthy housing conditions.”
Those LCI-discovered problems included a damp and damaged ceiling, holes in the floor, chipping and flaking paint, and trash piled around the outside of the property.
There is “evidence of liquid seepage and damage to walls and ceiling of several rooms,” added Bermúdez, reading from an inspection report put together by a Fair Rent Commission field inspector this spring. “Tenants report there is evidence of advanced mold behind bathroom walls; the walls are fragile and when gently compressed break through and expose dark/black substance.”
LCI subsequently applied for a warrant for the prosecution of Ocean Management head Shmuel Aizenberg in New Haven’s criminal housing court because of delayed fixes to these city inspector-found problems. Aizenberg is slated to appear in court on those and other criminal housing matters this upcoming Tuesday.
Pike filed a complaint with the Fair Rent Commission on March 21 about unsafe and unhealthy housing conditions at the property and about the landlord’s attempt to raise the rent from $1,200 to $1,350 per month. At an informal hearing on the matter on May 17, Bermúdez said, the landlord’s attorney withdrew the proposed rent increase, leaving just the unhealthy and unsafe housing conditions complaint before the commission.
At Tuesday's Fair Rent Commission meeting.
During her five minutes to address the commissioners on Tuesday night, Pike explained just how unpleasant, unhealthy, and dangerous living at 234 Fillmore has been for her, her husband and her two kids.
“Pretty much since we moved in, pretty quickly, we noticed the mold in the bathroom,” she said. “It grew very rapidly, spreading throughout the whole back wall behind the toilet. Black mold. It started out as gray and transformed into black mold very rapidly, within a few days, and it kept spreading. We noticed a very, very strong smell of mildew and just wetness. Dirty, dirty wetness. Very distinct. When I walk in the house, I smell it. You get near the bathroom and it just hits you so strongly.”
Pike said that Ocean sent a maintenance worker to repair the bathroom wall last year. “How they repaired it, they had one guy come in with no equipment whatsoever. He cut a little part of the sheet rock out and replaced that little part of the sheet rock and just painted over it. Nothing beyond that at all. There was a lot of debris from that.” She said what the maintenance worker found behind the wall was “a lot of rotting. It was completely black. … It’s just ruined, decayed. It’s black and just very, very bad and needs to be fixed.”
She said there’s more water damage on the ceiling now than when the LCI inspector and the Ocean maintenance worker last came. That damage has “kind of spread throughout the house, in the living room, kitchen, my children’s room, and the bathroom. Just huge warping, bubbling. When LCI touched it with the end of a broom, the whole ceiling moved.”
(According to LCI’s online inspection records as recorded on the city’s City Squared website, 234 Fillmore St. failed LCI housing code inspections on Nov. 28, Jan. 30, and Feb. 27, leading to LCI’s application for a warrant. The November inspection findings as recorded on the city’s website identify damp and bulging ceilings, chipping paint, building cleanliness issues, and holes in the floor, among other concerns. They do not identify mold. LCI has not yet responded to a FOIA request for the full inspection report for this property by the publication time of this article.)
Pike said she has two young children, and is currently seven months pregnant. She said she got sick “14 times” last year with upper respiratory infections. “I’ve never had issues with my health like this before. My children are getting sick constantly.”
Mervine told the commissioners that she connected with Pike and Vidro because of these very same health issues her children had been experiencing. “The doctors at Yale sent this case to me,” she said.
She noted that, since moving in in November 2021, Pike has paid a total of $22,800 in monthly rent “without fail.” Besides the minor fix to the bathroom as described by Pike and a subsequent recent replacement of the apartment’s busted refrigerator, “the landlord has not shown up at all.”
She urged the commission to reduce Pike’s apartment’s rent — and to press LCI to reinspect soon and to make sure that the needed repairs get done.
Commissioner Gamba: "You all know how I feel about landlords who don't show up."
During their deliberations at the end of Tuesday’s meeting, the commissioners pointed again and again to the documented housing code violations at 234 Fillmore St. and to Pike’s testimony about dangerously unhealthy living conditions when justifying their decision to drop Pike’s rent to $1.
“Where I’m at right now is the health piece, with the mold,” Monk said. “We have children there. … It sounds like it’s gotten worse. Mold is a big, big item. A big ticket item.”
“I hate to reduce people’s rent,” he continued, but repairs need to be made and they need to be made soon. And so he moved to drop the rent to $1 per month until those repairs are complete, and the fellow commissioners voted in support.
This is outrageous. Ocean needs to be fined big time. Reducing the rent $1 is okay I guess. But Ocean should be not only fined but needs to feel some heightened punishment. What about reducing the rent on the other floors - what does the 2nd floor look like? The leakages are either coming from the plumbing or the roof leaking. The whole building shoud be inspected from roof to basement and all violations cited.