LCI Slays Another Zombie House

A neighbor saw Evan Trachten poking around the brick house with barn-red trim on Lakeview Terrace.

“Did you come to get the zombies out of the basement?” the neighbor asked.

“Actually,” Trachten responded, ​“we got in touch with the owner of the property — who didn’t know they owned it.”

It wasn’t the first time Trachten poked around the house.

Trachten works as property acquisition and disposition coordinator for New Haven’s government, anti-blight agency, the Livable City Initiative (LCI). He has been sleuthing around ​“zombie houses” like this one — abandoned by previous owners, lost in the bureaucratic shuffle with national banks that made too many bad loans and now won’t take responsibility for abandoned properties.

His goal: Get the bank to take title or sell, and take care of nuisance properties that drag down neighborhoods. (Click here about another recent case; and here for another example of his real-estate sleuthing.)

The house at 110 Lakeview Terrace has been dragging down its pocket of Upper Westville for three years, left empty and overgrown by Fannie Mae and Wells Fargo. Wells Fargo apparently foreclosed on the property and transferred it to Fannie Mae. Neither entity seemed to know anything about the house until LCI started contacting them about it.

Now, Trachten said, he has obtained a promise from Wells Fargo, to take better care of the property. In fact, Trachten got a message from Wells Fargo Wednesday letting him know that some of the landscaping issues were taken care of on Saturday.

Even better, Evan Trachten reported, the bank also plans to look for a buyer. It took a nudge, and then some, from the city, the state Banking Commission and a U.S. senator’s office to make that happen.

Trachten and a trainee, rookie Hill neighborhood specialist Jeff Moreno, stopped by the other day to check on the property.

“You’re going to see some action out here,” Trachten assured the neighbor.

Small Victories

“There’s been nobody here since 2012,” Trachten said. ​“It’s a gorgeous house, but there are years of leaves in this backyard. Where backyards meet like this, why should anybody have to look at this in any neighborhood?

Trachten has been pulling double duty as the acting-neighborhood specialist for Westville. His predecessor, Nick Licata started the ball rolling on the hunt for the owners of the Lakeview Terrace house. Licata, who has since moved on to the city’s fire department, sent a notice to the bank back in 2014 about the need to clean up the property.

“Nick sends the letter, and nothing happens,” Trachten said. When the problem house landed on Trachten’s desk this past summer, he did what he does best: start digging.

Like Licata before him, Trachten sent a letter and got no response. He discovered that the deed for the house said it belonged to the quasi-government lender Fannie Mae. So he called 1 – 800-7FANNIE.

“I talk to one guy and he’s like, ​‘Yeah, we don’t have it in our system,’” Trachten recalled. Getting nowhere with Fannie Mae, he dug further and discovered that Wells Fargo holds the title to the property and has done so since early 2012.

Next-door neighbor Tony Bialecki, a former city economic development deputy director, called to say that the grass had grown nearly waist high. Trachten had LCI cut the grass.

LCI will take care of some problems like cutting the grass and removing trash around abandoned houses, saving up bills and fines to charge the owners upon sale of the properties. The Lakeview Terrace house has a small lien of $508.20 that LCI slapped on it to cover the costs the agency incurred to take care of landscaping before the bank got involved.

Meanwhile, Trachten reached out to bank officials to try to get them to tell him why they own the house and haven’t been taking care of it. No response.

“I put my thinking cap on,” Trachten said. His brainstorming led him to Lou Mangini in U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro’s office. Mangini got one of DeLauro’s aides on the job, but the aide hit a dead end.

“It dawns on me that former Alder [Jorge] Perez is now the banking commissioner,” Trachten recalled. He contacted Perez’s office, where staffers promised to look into the house.

Just for good measure, Trachten also reached out to U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal’s office. Blumenthal’s staff got a senior Fannie Mae official to call Trachten. Perez’s office succeeded in involving a vice president at Wells Fargo.

Just last week Trachten received an email and a call from a vice president at Wells Fargo who apologized profusely and promised that the company would do a better job of maintaining the house.

“I threw everything I had at it, and we finally got someone’s attention after three years,” Trachten said. ​“It took 90 days to get to the point of where we are now. But now someone will be here shoveling, cleaning, trimming. I gave them a laundry list of stuff to do.”

Trachten said that in his line of work, a series of small victories are often required to stop blight. Sometimes those small victories come by using all of the resources at his disposal. It’s a lesson that he’s teaching Moreno.

“A new guy coming on needs to see this stuff every day, in motion,” he said.

Backing Up Homeowners

“Blight has many shapes, forms and sizes,” Trachten said. ​“You have the poster child that looks like a bomb went off, and then you have a house like this bringing down a block.”

The ​“this” that Trachten is referring to is a yellow house at 61 Greenhill Terrace. It has a broken back fence and a backyard covered in layers of pine needles. It’s tucked between two other homes that are well maintained and owner occupied.

When one of the trees on the Greenhill Terrace property actually crashed onto the garage of the house next door, LCI responded.

“We’ve got the homeowners’ backs in all neighborhoods,” he said.

The bank that owns this house recently had to hand over $32,000 to LCI because it had failed to maintain the landscaping of the property, Trachten said. He notified the bank last winter when he discovered four feet of snow on the sidewalk. Not only did he fine them $2,000 for not shoveling the snow; he also made them dig out that same day.

“I would say 90 percent of the houses are owner occupied well landscaped, well maintained,” Trachten said. ​“So when I say to these people ​‘Guys you got to do something,’ I mean it. We’re reasonable, but when you do nothing and act like you didn’t get my order and I have a certified green card on my desk with someone’s signature, I really don’t feel badly.

“We don’t just pick on banks. Unfortunately, there are residents who are not LLCs [limited-liability corporations] that are also subject to our fines too. It just so happens that in Westville, it’s all bank properties for the most part.”

Passing The Torch

When Moreno spotted a truck with what looked like landscaping tools on the back in front of a problem house at 72 Lawncrest Road, both men got excited.

“Are they here?” Trachten asked.

“Yeah, I think that’s them,” Moreno said.

“Pull over,” Trachten said. ​“You get to see LCI in motion.”

Trachten has been on the owners of the particular house, the quasi-public Connecticut Housing Finance Authority, to cut down a wild overgrowth of hedge that has climbed the gutter of the house unchecked.

The sound of a leaf blower could be heard from the back yard.

“Excuse me,” Trachten shouted above the cacophony of the blower. ​“I’m from the city. You’re working for CHFA right?”

“Yeah,” the man responds, warily. ​“I work for the bank.”

“Did they have on your work order to trim the bushes that are growing up the gutter?” Trachten asked. Trachten said CHFA had promised him it would trim the wildly growing bush, but had yet to do it. He was prepared to pull up an email on his phone, or call the owners, to get the man to trim. The man offered to take a picture of it and go ahead and cut it down.

“That’s why it is important to be out in the neighborhood — to get eyes, feet out on the ground,” Moreno (pictured) said. ​“If we were still in City Hall or eating lunch, we could have missed this. We’ve been on this house for months.”

Moreno said it’s moments like this that make him excited about his new neighborhood specialist job. He came to the city from a corporate job. And working in the Hill allows him to give back to the neighborhood in which he grew up.

“We’re in the now, we’re in the mix,” he said. ​“Evan and I are right-now kind of guys. I hate procrastination; I hate waiting. I’m super impatient. I’m like, ​‘Clean it up. The violation has been there for years. What do you mean you need another week?’”

Though Trachten has no immediate plans to leave the city he is mentoring Moreno to fill the Hill neighborhood specialist role in the same way that he does it in Westville and anywhere else in the city that he is called.

“If I leave the city in six months, at least Jeff would have gotten the best training that he ever could,” Trachten said. ​“He can carry on our tradition of really being out here and being visible. That’s how we roll.”