Nora Grace-Flood file photo
Seramonte tenant Paul Boudreau: “We started the union in hopes that it would wake somebody up.”
A large Hamden landlord has moved to overturn three rent-hike-stifling decisions — and has asked a state court to declare the town’s Fair Rent ordinance “unlawful” as part of a broader pushback against growing tenants union organizing.
That landlord is Seramonte CT, LLC, a New Jersey-based company that owns hundreds of apartments on Hamden’s Mix Avenue and Kaye Vue Drive.
According to state court records, on Dec. 27, the landlord filed three different appeals contesting three recent rulings of Hamden’s Fair Rent Commission.
Seramonte’s three recent court filings come as Hamden’s Fair Rent Commission is set to start reviewing a cascade of additional complaints from dozens of other union members. The appeals also come following a statewide revitalization of governmental rent oversight, tenant organizing, and efforts on the part of both Hamden and New Haven to draft (and, in New Haven’s case, enact) fresh laws recognizing tenant rights.
In all three cases, Seramonte sought to increase rents on different Mix/Kaye Vue Avenue tenants. And in all three cases, Hamden’s Fair Rent Commission said no, turning down the proposed hikes as legally “unconscionable.”
Seramonte has responded to each ruling by asking the state court to reverse the Fair Rent Commission’s decision to bar their ability to raise those three tenants’ rents for the next year — and to declare as “unlawful” a section of Hamden law describing what circumstances the commissioners must consider when deciding whether or not a rent increase is “unfair and unconscionable.”
The landlord’s lawyer, Kevin McEleney, alleges in these appeals that Hamden’s Fair Rent Commission did not follow the rules laid out by Hamden’s Code of Ordinances 33.70 governing how a hearing should be held and what evidence the commissioners can consider.
The appeals argue the tenants in these cases should have been represented by attorneys rather than by tenants union leaders; that the Zoom format of the meeting at certain points barred Seramonte’s representatives from entering the conversation; and that, more broadly, the commission’s final ruling did not reflect the facts presented by both parties.
The appeals also argue that a section of Hamden law, 33.79, contravenes state law and is therefore “unlawful for being irreconcilably vague and not providing a comprehensible standard.”
“The Ruling is arbitrary, capricious, unlawful, and otherwise an abuse of discretion by the Commission,” one such appeal reads.
Read through the three appeals here, here and here.
Representatives of Seramonte Estates did not respond to repeated requests for comment from the New Haven Independent.
The original reports of unfair rent practices that led to these Fair Rent Commission decisions, meanwhile, came from three different families who are all part of the Seramonte Tenants Union. That’s the tenant advocacy group that sprouted out of the reportedly pothole laden sidewalks of Seramonte Estates last February and that has since grown to roughly 300 people, according to the union’s co-founder.
Vice-Chair: "I Stand By Our Decisions"
Peter Cunningham, center, at a Fair Rent Commission hearing in September.
“I’m really disappointed by these appeals,” Peter Cunningham, the vice chair of the commission, told the Independent on Wednesday. “If some of these rent raises went through,” he said, “a lot of these people were gonna be on the streets.”
Cunningham joined the commission last fall when Hamden’s Fair Rent Commission convened for the first time in at least four years, the direct result of action taken by the Seramonte Tenants Union founders.
That spur to action also came from the Democratic Socialists of America, who have helped establish at least two tenants unions in New Haven over the past year, one of which has already been formally recognized by the city.
Much of this tenant organizing in Hamden and New Haven has been directed at pressuring local governments to address poor living conditions and ever-higher rents at apartment buildings owned by some of the largest landlords in the area.
Read more here about some recent complaints heard by the Fair Rent Commission about steep jumps in monthly rent as well issues of maintenance and landlord nonresponse.
Fast forward to December, and the Quinnipiac Valley Health District is also reportedly considering pursuing legal action following Seramonte’s failure to correct a series of code violations — read more about that as well in the New Haven Register.
These new court appeals by Seramonte, meanwhile, take issue with several procedural aspects of these three hearings. And they complain that the Hamden ordinance establishing and determining the scope of powers of a Fair Rent Commission is “unlawful” and doesn’t line up with relevant state law.
“I stand by our decisions on the commission,” Cunningham told the Independent in response to the court appeals. “I think the commission acted in good faith and that our decisions were well within our rights and powers under the ordinance in Hamden. It seems to me that their appeals were based not on saying that we didn’t act within our powers, they’re saying that the ordinance is wrong.”
Seramonte’s skepticism of Hamden’s Fair Rent ordinance raises questions of how recent legal drafting on the part of both Hamden and New Haven aiming to give tenants unions more power will fare against larger landlords seeking to avoid culpability.
For example, New Haven just became the first municipality in the state to pass an ordinance formally recognizing tenants unions. That new law, among other things, allows the union to collectively designate a representative but does not allow for union members to file collective complaints.
Hamden is now in the process of trying to take New Haven’s ordinance one step further by naming the rights of tenants in the same union to testify on one another’s behalf and to submit joint protests against their landlords. Read that amended ordinance — which has yet to pass — here.
However, even people like Cunningham, who said that he generally supports “tenants coming together,” admitted that he is already apprehensive of those potential changes to Hamden’s ordinance. He said the proposed edits may be legally impractical and only serve as further cause for future appeals from Seramonte and other landlords.
Union Leader: "A Lot More People In Need Than I Realized"
Original Seramonte Tenants Union members.
Those directly advocating for the rights of tenants, on the other hand, such as Seramonte Tenants Union Co-Founder Paul Boudreau, are pushing for additional rights for tenants unions as a solution to some of the exact problems that Seramonte itself described in its appeals.
Allowing tenants to file collectively could assist with one major issue that has affected all of the hearings so far that have been held by the commission: That is, legal representation of tenants.
“Because it costs money, we just can’t afford it,” Boudreau told the Independent on Wednesday when talking about hiring professional attorneys to represent himself and his neighbors before the Fair Rent Commission. “That’s the case for everyone, otherwise we’d all have lawyers.”
In lieu of legal assistance, Boudreau has been working for months with his partner, Greta Blau, and Democratic Socialist of America organizer Luke Melanakos-Harrison, to represent every tenant looking to contest Seramonte’s rent increases.
Boudreau has worked behind the scenes to help prepare documents, hire paid witnesses, such as mold inspectors, and coordinate with tenants while Blau has advocated directly on behalf of tenants and cross-examined Seramonte at each hearing in front of the commission.
“Ultimately it’s mentally taxing,” Boudreau said. “We handled it well, but it would have been really nice to have attorneys, because we all stress out massively when these things are coming up because we don’t want to lose for people who really need this.”
Boudreau and Blau first filed a complaint concerning unfair rent practices with the town last February. That complaint is not scheduled to be reviewed by the commission until this January following a slate of continuations on the topic from November. Boudreau said he and his partner originally began their unionizing efforts to try to get the attention of both Seramonte and municipal government as they struggled to figure out how to successfully combat the major Hamden landlord.
“We started the union in hopes that it would wake somebody up,” Boudreau said. “We had to keep escalating to actions and protests and letters and all that stuff,” he said, before the town’s Legislative Council finally found volunteers to get the Fair Rent Commission up and running.
In the meantime, he said, “I’ve learned there’s a lot more people in need than I realized… probably twice as many people as I thought there would be.”
He said that he has received calls from tenants in towns and cities ranging from Cheshire to Watertown to Toronto, Canada. While the union itself has grown from just Boudreau and Blau to roughly 300 tenants, renters across North America are also reaching out to the union organizers in a desperate attempt to figure out what to do in the face of eviction notices, landlord nonresponse and sudden rent hikes.
When Boudreau was first threatened with eviction from Seramonte, he said, “we called everyone: The town agencies, state agencies, even federal. We didn’t know what to do and nobody had answers.”
“We [the union] provide answers,” he compared. To offer an example, he enumerated his typical responses to callers: “You need to go to housing court, you need to go to the clerk’s office, you need to file an extension, you need to file a fair rent complaint.”
In other words, the Hamden union has ultimately become a resource for renters who have merely uncovered more roadblocks and obstacles while trying to protect their access to housing. With more unions spreading across the region and naming the correct channels by which tenants should be defending their rights, the question has become whether under supported government entities can meet the new demand.
As always, I will defer to the lawyers. But non-lawyers routinely represent applicants before executive, as distinct from judicial, agencies. This happens regularly before the City Plan Commission and Board of Zoning Appeals. And nothing in CGS § 7-148b et seq., which authorizes municipalities to establish fair rent commissions and specifies their powers and the factors that they must consider, suggests that a tenant must be represented by a lawyer.