Ocean Sales Send Tenants Packing

Jennifer Stanfield is packing to go to a place she hasn’t yet found.

She’s removed all the art from the walls. Sorted summer and winter clothes into different boxes. Set aside whole weekends to clearing every possession from the turquoise house on Parmelee Avenue where she and her husband have lived, at times with kids and grandkids, for seven years.

“I don’t know where I’m taking it,” she said, ​“but I’m packing.”

Stanfield is packing because her landlord, an affiliate of Ocean Management, has decided to sell the house — one of dozens that Ocean has put up on the market or already sold this year as the low-income housing giant unloads property after property to new owners. The sell-off is displacing existing tenants, like Stanfield, along the way.

According to Stanfield, an employee of the real estate company asked her to leave by the end of November, and verbally offered to pay her $5,000 to help, on top of a two-month security deposit for the next apartment she moves into.

But Ocean hasn’t paid her yet. As a result, Stanfield already lost an opportunity to move into one house when she couldn’t immediately afford the security deposit, and the funds promised to her by Ocean hadn’t yet materialized.

Since then, she’s been leaving flyers at churches to see if any congregants are looking to rent out their homes. She’s asked her family and her pastor to help her look for housing options. ​“My daughter’s been Googling,” she said. She hasn’t yet found a place she feels safe moving to. She’s still looking, sometimes visiting multiple houses in a single day.

Stanfield’s single-family house is one of at least 27 housing units now on the market in New Haven that are currently owned by affiliates of Ocean Management, one of the city’s largest landlords. As of the spring of 2022, Ocean controlled 1,400 mostly low-income apartments across the city. That number is now significantly less, as Ocean has been rapidly selling properties in recent months, having sold 42 rental homes and apartment buildings already this year, according to city land records. (Representatives from Ocean did not respond to requests for comment by the publication time of this article, including questions about why they have been asking tenants to move out of houses they’re looking to sell.)

Many of the Ocean properties still up for sale (depicted in orange below) are clustered in West Rock, Fair Haven, and Fair Haven Heights. Many of the properties that Ocean has already sold (depicted in blue) are concentrated in Edgewood and the Hill.

When one company owns a substantial amount of housing in the city, the actions of that company can have far-reaching effects on neighborhoods, and on the city as a whole. Elm City Communities/Housing Authority Director Karen DuBois-Walton wrote in an email that ​“the concern about any one entity controlling too much of a market relates to the impact on prices and conditions while they hold those units” — a consolidated power to affect rents and housing standards in a given community — ​“but also the disruption when the entity wants to expeditiously exit the market.” 

In other words, a mass sale of Ocean properties could lead to a flood of tenants searching for new housing. 

The Parmelee Avenue house is one of three Ocean rental properties now on the market within a three-block radius in the West River neighborhood. All three houses have been hazardous places to live, according to renters interviewed by the Independent, with tenants attesting that Ocean has been slow or inadequate in making repairs. 

It’s a hard time to look for housing right now in New Haven, with demand for a place to live far outpacing the supply of available housing units. ​“Between New Haven and the surrounding communities, there’s a dearth of options for people,” said New Haven Legal Assistance lawyer Yonatan Zamir. 

The three West River households are in various stages of preparing to move out — but only one has found another place to go so far.

Incentives And Eviction Threats

For Stanfield, who is 62 and was temporarily hospitalized two weeks ago for a heart condition, moving is a strenuous task. 

Her husband, who’s on dialysis, has a limited ability to help her. She’s relied on assistance from a friend and family members to gather her things into boxes, all while looking at potential new homes.

She pays rent with assistance from a Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher, which typically requires tenants to provide the program two months’ notice before moving and mandates that housing units undergo inspections. 

“I can’t stand all that stress. Trying to move, trying to pack, and trying to keep up with my health as well,” said Stanfield.

Finances are another source of anxiety. ​“I don’t have no money to move,” she said. ​“I need money to pay the security. I’ve been trying to call Ocean Management for over a week now. … I can’t go get a bank loan.”

Stanfield has been forced to leave the house before — when her granddaughter living with her at the time was diagnosed with lead poisoning, and Ocean had to abate the home. They put her up in a ​“disgusting” hotel, she said, where the bathtub was too dirty to use, where many of the other guests were high, and where she had no kitchen. ​“Thank God I had an electric grill that I could cook [with] inside the hotel. That’s what we used to cook, ​’cause I didn’t have money to be eating out,” she said.

At an Ocean house one block away on Judson Avenue, tenant Odalis Galanza received a letter in late September offering her $5,000 if she and her family moved out of the home in 60 days.

Galanza didn’t reply. She found the letter insulting.

Galanza lives in the Judson Avenue house with her five young children. She pays $85 per month, with the rest of her approximately $2,000 monthly rent covered by a Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher. At first, the ​“beautiful” house seemed like a dream, but it proved to be a den of mice and mold. 

Galanza has submitted complaints to the Livable City Initiative and the Fair Rent Commission about living conditions that have severely inflamed her asthma. The pressure to move out of her home felt like yet another stresser Ocean was placing on their lives. 

Since August, Ocean has been courting prospective buyers of Galanza’s Judson Avenue home. The company had arranged for a prospective buyer to tour the house on Aug. 11. Galanza forgot about a doctor’s appointment she had scheduled at that time, and didn’t show up. Ocean had initially stated that she did not have to be at the showing; ​“I never said that they couldn’t come in,” Galanza said.

Then on Aug. 21, she received the following text from a contact she’d saved as Ocean Management: ​“Good afternoon. There is a showing of the property today at 7pm. The last showing you refused to allow access. If you do so again we will start the legal process against you. We have every right to show the property we own.”

State law indicates that tenants may not ​“unreasonably” withhold entry to the unit, but that ​“the landlord shall give the tenant reasonable written or oral notice of his intent to enter.”

Ocean’s message, which was sent at 2:33 p.m., threatened to evict Galanza if she did not allow them to show the house to a prospective buyer with less than five hours of advance notice.

Like many low-income tenants in New Haven, Galanza and Stanfield are renting with month-to-month leases — adding another layer of unreliability to their housing. This kind of arrangement (as opposed to a yearlong lease) means that Ocean — or any future landlord — can choose not to renew the tenants’ leases at any time, and undergo an eviction process within weeks on the grounds the rental agreement has lapsed.

In mid-October, Galanza said she figured she’d have to leave her home soon, but had no concrete plans to do so. ​“It’s already hard enough to find new places,” she said, noting that her credit score will likely be counted against her.

Around the corner on George Street on that same October afternoon, Daphne Cogswell — whose Ocean-owned house is also up for sale — was piling furniture and other belongings out in her driveway and front porch, preparing to load them up and take them to an apartment she’d already secured. A sign out the door referred passersby to a local realtor. 

Cogswell said she found out her house was up for sale when someone knocked on her door with a potential buyer and asked something to the effect of, ​“Is it OK if he does a walk-through of the house?” 

Cogswell let them in.

She hasn’t faced the same pressure to leave her home that Galanza and Stanfield have felt — likely because she’s been very willing to leave a house that proved to be a health hazard to her family.

“All my children had very high lead levels,” she said. ​“That’s why I want to leave.”

Ocean had also put Cogswell’s family up in a hotel, for three weeks, as her house was abated of lead, Cogswell said. She called the inconvenience ​“typical Ocean Management stuff.” At one point, she said, her refrigerator broke down and the landlord did not come and fix it until after three weeks.

“I’m out,” she said, a hint of triumph in her voice.

Playing With Mice

When Galanza first moved into her Judson Avenue home, ​“I thought that for once, it could be a safe home. A happy home,” she said. ​“It’s sad that from the moment we moved in here, we weren’t able to enjoy it.”

Galanza grew up shuffling back and forth between relatives’ homes. Throughout her childhood, she was met with severe abuse everywhere she lived. As a teenager, she discovered that she could find refuge if she got herself committed to a psychiatric hospital. The hospital proved to be the safest place she knew as a child.

As an adult, Galanza has survived domestic violence, and lost a baby due to the actions of her ex-husband. She’s fiercely protective of her five surviving kids, whom she home-schools. Fearing unwanted appearances from an ex-partner, Galanza instructs her kids not to answer the door to strangers. 

The fact that ​“complete strangers” are touring the house for purchase makes Galanza uneasy. ​“Any one of those people could be someone I have a stressful past with,” she said.

The house has become less of a refuge for Galanza and more of a ​“hellhole” or a ​“war zone,” as she calls it.

Mice have overtaken the house. The rodents chew up wires. They eat through the foam that Ocean Management had used to patch up mouse holes. Mice have died in the back of her refrigerator. They scurry through the walls and sometimes rot. 

“I wake up to the smell of death,” Galanza said.

Once, Galanza found her toddler holding a mouse carcass as though it were a toy — pulling on the head and tail, seeing how far the dead animal would stretch. (The incident prompted some shrieking and a thorough bath.)

Galanza’s asthma, inflamed by an allergy to the mice, is so severe that she goes to a lung doctor regularly and receives the highest possible dose of multiple medications. She’s constantly fearful that an asthma attack will take place while she’s homeschooling her kids. She no longer uses the built-in kitchen appliances. She keeps all her clothes in bags to keep the mice from getting to them.

Meanwhile, the ceilings are riddled with brown stains appearing to be mold, and growing bubbles from water damage. Her bathroom floor is starting to sink. Galanza said she had to fix part of her backyard fence herself, and that Ocean failed to contact her before towing her vehicle in order to perform non-emergency maintenance work on the property. 

City records show that the property failed Livable City Initiative inspections in April, July, and September, as well as twice in 2022.

According to Zamir, a legal aid lawyer who frequently represents tenants in eviction cases, the tight rental housing market reduces the pressure on landlords to take good care of their properties, since tenants have such few options. ​“There’s a lot of people out there enduring really terrible housing,” Zamir said.

He speculated that, these days, a landlord could sell a dilapidated building and tell the buyer, ​“You don’t even need to fix this place up… You can rent this out to a person with a voucher or even not, and they will pay.”

Galanza said that Ocean sent an exterminator to the house three times, but that subsequent efforts to address the mouse problem — like filling mouse holes with a permeable foam-like substance — have been woefully ineffective. Galanza buys mouse traps and mouse repellent devices herself and places them where her little kids won’t be able to reach.

“I never had a stable or safe place. Not a place I could say, ​‘This is my home,’ ” she said. ​“I want my kids to have that. You don’t ever want your kids to feel what you felt.”

Against all odds, the family has made the house cozy and whimsical. In the weeks leading up to Halloween, Galanza and her kids worked together to decorate their porch with playfully-posed skeletons, carved pumpkins, spider and ghost figurines, and Día de los Muertos decor — all behind a realtor’s sign marking the property for sale.