Thomas Breen photos
"Don't come into New Haven and shit it up": City Building Official Jim Turcio (right) lays down the building-safety law for landlord Bart Salyga.
Fire Marshall Scott Dillon checks in on two second-floor tenants.
A team of city building, housing, and fire safety inspectors descended on rooming houses in the Hill illegally crammed with nearly 100 tenants — and left the buildings’ New York-based landlord with orders to reduce occupancies, fix code violations, and treat New Haven’s immigrant and college-student tenants with more respect.
That was the scene Wednesday at the corner of Spring Street and Howard Avenue.
City Building Official Jim Turcio, Livable City Initiative (LCI) Deputy Director Mark Wilson, and Fire Marshal Scott Dillon led a half-dozen fellow city inspectors through an hour’s worth of walk-throughs of five adjacent residential properties.
Those included the two-family house at 86 Spring St., the single-family house at 92 Spring St., and the three three-family houses at 465, 469, and 473 Howard Ave.
86 and 92 Spring St...
... and 473, 469, and 465 Howard Ave.
Wilson, who is the city’s top housing code enforcement official, said that a Tuesday visit by city housing code and fire inspectors had revealed that 94 people were illegally crammed into four of the five apartment buildings.
He said there were 24 people in three of the multi-family buildings, and 22 people in the single-family building. (The fifth building wound up having an appropriate number of occupants.)
The state building code caps the number of unrelated tenants per apartment at six. That means that over 20 more people were living in these five buildings — none of which are registered as rooming houses — than legally allowed.
Turcio, Wilson, and the other city inspectors on scene Wednesday said that the reinspection’s goals were twofold: to identify and issue orders about code violations that need to be addressed to make thee properties safe and habitable; and to find out how many people had to be relocated to area hotels while the landlord works on getting his local rental business in legal order.
Ultimately, Wilson told the Independent on Wednesday afternoon, the city did not have to relocate any tenants to hotels. That’s because the landlord was able to reduce the occupancies at his four illegal rooming houses from 94 to the acceptable number of 54. Wilson said the landlord accomplished this in one day by moving some tenants into apartments he owns in Bridgeport, and by the fact that some of the tenants left of their own accord, and some were just visiting friends for a few days and wound up heading back to their homes in New Jersey.
“It’s still a bad situation,” Wilson said, but not as bad as the city feared it might be Wednesday morning when faced with the prospect of finding hotel rooms for dozens of displaced tenants.
Thomas Breen file photo
LCI's Wilson hears out landlord Salyga in the back parking lot.
The holding company that owns these five properties is called 92 Spring LLC. The city land records database shows that it purchased these five Hill residential properties in one $1.25 million transaction last December from a regional branch of the controversial Christian sober-house nonprofit, Teen Challenge.
The state’s online business registry shows that 92 Spring LLC is controlled by Salvatore Mangiafreno of Lido Beach, N.Y. and by Unit Secure Capital LLC, which in turn is a Greenwich-based holding company controlled by Bart Salyga and Jorgelina Liberato Lima.
Salyga was on the scene during Wednesday’s raid. The 43-year-old drove up from his home in Port Chester, N.Y., to show the city officials through the apartment buildings, to attempt to answer their manifold questions about missing stairway handrails and permit-less electrical work and overcrowded apartments, and to take notes on the many fixes he’d have to make in order to bring these apartments into city-code compliance.
Turcio prepares to inspect Bart's Spring St. building.
Salyga shows city housing code inspector Javier Ortiz and fire inspector Shakira Samuel into a 3-family house on Howard.
“What are you doing in New Haven?” Turcio grilled Salyga when they first met up in the apartment buildings’ shared back parking lot at around 11 a.m. He pointed at the two-family house at 86 Spring St.
“How many people do you have in there? How many?”
Salyga struggled to answer.
“15?” he guessed.
That’s a two-family house with a groundfloor commercial unit, Turcio said. That means only 12 unrelated people are legally allowed in there.
He told Salyga that the city inspectors were going to walk through every floor of all five buildings, tally up the tenants, check to make sure that the various smoke and carbon monoxide detectors that had been missing on Tuesday had been subsequently installed, and to identify and issue orders on any other problems they found.
“Don’t come to New Haven and shit it up,” Turcio warned Salyga.
Fire Marshal: "It's Not Safe"
Turcio tours one of a bed-less room on Spring St.
Dozens of tenant shoes in a Spring St. upper floor room.
As promised, the city inspectors did go floor by floor through each of the five properties, taking pictures along the way, using long thin plastic poles to test smoke detector alarms, and talking with tenant after tenant after tenant.
The inspectors encountered roughly 50 people across the five rental properties during their midday inspections.
Nearly every single person they spoke to was a recent immigrant from India, in their early 20s, and an engineering student at the University of New Haven, the University of Bridgeport, or Sacred Heart University.
Still dressed in pajamas, many sat on top of sleeping bags, blankets, and mats laid out over hardwood floors, attending virtual classes on their computers as clothes, books and travel suitcases lay strewn alongside them.
Just about every room the inspectors walked into except for the kitchens had a mat and blankets laid out in a corner. None of the rooms appeared to have any other chairs or couches or tables or beds, besides the occasional air mattress.
Some of the rooms were cloudy with smoke, either from meal prep in the kitchen or from an open-flame candle placed in a makeshift altar.
A 21-year-old UNH electrical engineering student named Venkat said that he had been living in a back room of a second-floor apartment in one of the Spring Street buildings for several months.
He said he plans on staying there for just a few weeks more before finding a new place to live in West Haven.
He and fellow UNH students Siva, Bijjula, and Jujjuri all said that they came over to the United States from the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh four months ago to attend to university.
How did they all connect, and end up in the same apartment building?
“My brother, he is in the last room, he came here” first, Venkat said. He stressed that they would all be moving to West Haven soon.
Asked if the apartment building felt too crowded, all of the students answered: No. They said only five or six people lived in each apartment, with no more than one per room. And they repeated that they’d be moving to West Haven soon.
One of the Howard Avenue apartment's kitchens...
... and a UNH sticker posted to one of the apartment's bedroom doors.
Asked how much he and his apartment-mates paid in rent, one of the tenants of one of the Howard Avenue buildings said that the apartment as a whole cost $2,000 a month.
Asked how much each tenant paid as their own monthly share, he said $270.
Why did none of the tenants have beds?
“My bed is not working,” one of the tenants said.
Fire Marshal Dillon.
Some of the tenants told First Marshal Dillon that they stayed in UNH’s college dorms until January before moving in to the Howard Avenue apartment.
“You’re not in trouble,” Dillon said. “We’re just trying to make sure that everything is safe.”
School’s almost over, right? Dillon asked.
Yes, the tenant said, in May.
“I wouldn’t do this again,” Dillon cautioned them about living in this type of illegal rooming house setup. “It’s not safe. We’re here to look out for you. That’s why we do annual inspections. That’s why there are rooming house permits. This is not one. You’ve got over 100 people” across these buildings.
“It’s not safe,” he said. “If there’s a fire in here, you could die. We don’t want that.”
Ortiz, Dillon, and Wilson on the scene.
How did the city inspectors find out about the illegal rooming house issues on Spring Street and Howard Avenue, in the first place?
LCI housing code inspector Javier Ortiz said that he was making his usual rounds of the neighborhood and noticed lots of different people with travel suitcases walking in and out of the properties.
“So I reached out to the landlord,” Ortiz said, set up a visit to the property, and found all of the tenants — and, on Tuesday, virtually no smoke or CO detectors. City Fire Inspector Shakira Samuel also helped lead that initial Tuesday inspection, in addition to participating in Wednesday’s followup.
Ortiz said that LCI ordered the landlord to install those smoke and CO detectors right away, which Salyga did, in advance of Wednesday’s visit.
Landlord: "It's A Hard Business"
Turcio and Salyga.
Asked for his take on the city inspectors’ critique of him cramming way too many people into these Hill apartments, Salyga said he never intended to run rooming houses, illegal or otherwise.
“The problem is, I do a lease for four people, and many other people move in,” he said. “How can I control that? It’s a hard business.”
What’s the most challenging part of being a landlord for these five properties?
“You can’t really tell people what to do,” Salyga said. “If you have a lease for four, and there’s six or seven or eight [tenants who move in], I can’ control that. That’s one of the biggest things.”
And what does he think of the living conditions of these dozens of tenants, nearly all of whom were sitting on top of sleeping bags on the floors of their crowded apartments.
Salyga said he can’t control how people live their lives.
"Work With Us"
City inspectors gather their notes, and their thoughts, after the site visit.
After an hour’s worth of inspections, all of the city inspectors circled up in the back parking lot to review what they had found — and what needed to happen next.
First and most importantly, Turcio said, the landlord has “got to reduce the occupancy in these buildings.” The inspectors agreed that the occupancy levels of one of the Howard Avenue three-family homes appeared to be OK, given that that was the only one that had a family living in one of the apartments.
The other two three-family homes appeared to have only unrelated college students, meaning they needed to be capped at 18 tenants each. The single-family house needed to have no more than six unrelated tenants, and the two-family house no more than 12.
“That has to be done today,” Turcio said.
Wilson said his team would take some “occupational surveys” this afternoon to get an exact count of how many people were in each apartment. LCI would give the landlord until Wednesday afternoon to relocate tenants to other apartments he owns in Bridgeport or to nearby hotels. If the landlord doesn’t follow through by that time, then LCI will move tenants into the hotels directly.
“We’ll bill this guy” for the cost of the hotels, Wilson said. (As noted above, ultimately, LCI did not have to find hotel rooms for any displaced tenants.)
As for the various code issues that the building and fire inspectors found, Turcio said, “we need the handrails going down the front stairs, at least,” for one of the Howard Avenue properties. “That has to be done by the end of the week, worst-case scenario by Monday.”
Turcio and city Building Plans Examiner Seth Flynn spoke about the urgent need for a certified electrician to come by all of the houses and review the unpermitted electrical work. They said the newly installed battery-powered smoke detectors need to be hard-wired in the common areas. Fire inspector Shakira Samuel said that the landlord needed to install emergency lighting on the back “winders” of the apartment building exits.
“Then, when these students leave, [the landlord will need to] pull permits and actually do the work,” Turcio said.
He called Salyga over and told him all that needed to get done Wednesday, starting with reducing the occupancies of the apartments. And when the tenants leave their apartments for the summer, he said, “do not fill [these apartments] back up” before city inspectors have a chance to come back through and sign off on permitted work.
Salyga promised to do as Turcio and the other city inspectors said.
“We’re going to try to work with you,” Turcio said. “Work with us.”
“I appreciate it,” Salyga replied.
What is this? Every 5 years or so, Jim Turcio gets off his butt and pretends to find violations? Who even believes that there is enforcement of ANY LAWS in NH at all. Mayor Elicker said it was like the WILD WEST and he was right. A little shootout at the OK Corral, a few saloons.... it's like Dodge City!!! Where's Wyatt Earp??