nothin “Clean Sweep” Smokes Out Slumlords | New Haven Independent

Clean Sweep” Smokes Out Slumlords

Christopher Peak Photo

Team of city workers — from Youth Services, Livable City Initiative, Public Works — sets off down Winchester Avenue.

At 687 Winchester Ave.

An army of city inspectors came upon a two-family Winchester Avenue home with a compromised roof, exposed wiring and hanging gutters and proceeded to condemn it.

Now they have to figure out how that same building passed inspection — and how they can stop others homes in New Haven from sinking to that condition.

That encounter reflected the promise and the challenge — how quickly action can occur; how government now needs to up its game — of an ambitious Clean City” sweep that officials launched in Newhallville Thursday as an experiment for a citywide effort to make neighborhoods safer and more livable.

Officials from departments throughout government are on a two-day walking tour of the neighborhood. Day one of the block-by-block review revealed a dangerously unkempt apartment, an un-permitted construction crew, and tons of illegal dumping.

Over the next few weeks, they plan to fix the problems they’ve found, analyze the data they’ve collected, draw lessons about how to stop the problems from recurring. Then they plan to replicate the campaign next spring in Fair Haven, the Hill and Downtown. (Click here for a previous story about the project’s genesis.)

The housing stock is the most important thing. We’re trying to protect it,” said Abdias Rodriguez, a field inspector for LCI. A [tenant] can leave tomorrow, but the next guy that’s going to come in is still going to inherit it. Even the landlords, I try to let them know that this is not really yours. This is a property” within a city.

What We Don’t Know”

558 Winchester Ave., a vacant building with a Brooklyn owner.

At 9:45 a.m. Thursday, a crowd of public employees — housing inspectors, fire marshals, youth workers, health experts, lawyers, development planners, infrastructure managers, tree-trimmers, cops and firemen — all converged on the district’s police substation on Winchester Avenue for a pre-sweep briefing.

Mike Carter, the city’s chief administrative officer, explained that the multi-department press had several objectives: surveying neighbors about what keeps their block together, scoping out external code violations, and quickly beautifying the city-owned streetscape by tidying up gutters, trees and parks.

A few used a mobile version of a new Citistat” app developed to centralize all information gathered about properties in one spot; most employees took notes on paper. Once inputted, that data is going to be essential for creating systemic change, said Matthew Nemerson, the city’s economic development administrator.

Knowing what we don’t know is very important,” Nemerson explained to his coworkers. As we walk around the neighborhood, let’s take notes about what kind of landlords are doing a good job [and] where we can help them do a better job.”

The city chose to roll out the project in Newhallville, a neighborhood that once boasted the highest percentage of African-American homeownership and has since fallen into disrepair in stretches dominated by absentee landlords.

Our goal is to have every neighborhood look the same as every other neighborhood. That’s showing respect for all the citizens of New Haven,” Nemerson said. We know that some neighborhoods don’t get the support from their building owners, so we’re really here to help on the margins and figure out how we can help more by having better records.”

Something’s Living In There”

704 Winchester Ave., site of a March 2016 fire that displaced eight residents.

Around mid-morning, public employees stopped to look at a few bags of trash near 704 Winchester Ave. Then they puzzled over why a brand-new, spot-free black van would be parked in the driveway of a burnt-out four-bedroom home, where the acrid smell of smoke from a March 2016 fire still drifted from the boarded-up door.

The vehicle must belong to a neighbor who wanted some extra parking space, guessed Livable City Initiative (LCI) Neighborhood Specialist Linda Davis-Cannon. But a walk into the backyard revealed a crew of Chinese-speaking construction workers rehabbing the place, tossing scorched wood out into a massive pile and nailing new beams in without a permit.

Workers scramble to clear out, after their illegal work-site was discovered.

That’s it,” said Jim Turcio, the city’s top building official, as he immediately issued a stop-work order.

The workers scrambled, rushing a ladder and tools out the back door. When that wasn’t fast enough, they removed a plywood board and started throwing copper and thermoplastic pipes out the window.

After United Iluminating finished up work across the street, they’d come over to 704 Winchester Ave. to cut the power. That usually prevents crews from operating power tools for a while. Inspectors now know to stop by and listen for generators, said Robert Doyle, the city’s fire marshal.

Roslyn Hamilton and a worker talk through a translator.

Roslyn Hamilton, a senior sanitarian at the Health Department, tried to get to the bottom of who was skirting the permitting system. She called up a language line to translate her conversation with the workers.

Can you ask them who they’re working for?” she said into the phone. We’re just trying to find out the contractor’s name and a phone number.”

The person who knows the name is actually not here right now,” the foreman answered in Chinese.

A heap of garbage, taken from inside 704 Winchester Ave.

Out back, an effluvial smell, perhaps from a decomposing animal, emanated from a heap of construction material. Without a Dumpster, piping and wood, possibly tainted with lead and asbestos, had been tossed onto the ground.

A neighbor next door said he had made reports on See Click Fix repeatedly about the trash in the back. Something’s living in there,” he said. We need to get it out of there.”

Condemned

Jim Turcio, Mike Carter and Rafael Ramos triage 687 Winchester Ave.

Across the street, the team members stumbled upon another example of what they didn’t know at 687 Winchester Ave.

A two-family home, owned by a Hamden resident since 1999, had passed an LCI inspection in May 2016. It now appeared dangerously unsafe.

The front yard was cluttered with a black garbage bin on an oil-slicked front stoop, a shopping cart loaded with cardboard boxes and portable fan by the stairs and a garden overrun by weeds. 

Worse, an 88-square-foot, second-floor balcony had entirely collapsed. Holes peeked through the gabled roofing where it had fallen loose, while wires shot out from the cracked siding. Pigeons flew through the second-floor window.

How did this pass an inspection?” Nemerson wondered aloud. Is that a quality-control issue on our part? Did someone actually inspect this? Was there a huge change in the condition in the last year? What’s going on? For us, this is a good conversation to have with our own people.”

LCI’s Rafael Ramos checks out the backyard of 687 Winchester Ave.

Department staffers jumped into action to triage what had gone wrong.

LCI Deputy Director Rafael Ramos pounded on the front doors, as he dialed UI to find out if anyone was paying an electric bill. He walked around back, down into an open basement and flipped the switch.

Colleague Davis-Cannon, a neighborhood specialist, meanwhile, asked the neighbor whether she’d seen anyone living next door.

Paul Kowalski, the Health Department’s environmental director, after pointing out that the shingles were made from asbestos, joined Davis-Cannon next door and asked the neighbor if she had any children at home. Nope, she said. Nobody that carries germs anymore.”

Carter noticed that an Audi with a flat tire in the driveway shared the same license plates with an Honda parked in the backyard. He called the cops to run the numbers against their outstanding warrants.

Ramos said the property would be condemned later in the day, and the agency would work with the owner to relocate the current occupant.

Starting Over

679 Winchester Ave., on the market for almost eight months.

The decrepitude seemed to be dragging down the whole block.

A few doors down, for instance, a near-success has stalled. In 2013, LCI initiated a strict foreclosure for 679 Winchester Ave. It was so bad it wouldn’t even sell at an auction,” said Frank D’Amore, LCI’s deputy director of operations.

Often the city splits these sliver lots and sells them to the neighboring properties, allowing them to construct a garage or expand the side yard. There’s some exceptions: We don’t like to reward bad behavior,” D’Amore explained, of why some are rejected. But those require the city to pay for a tear-down.

At this one-off,” as D’Amore termed it, the city found a developer last year willing to buy the property for $20,000, demolish and rebuild. It’s a win-win,” he said. The objective now, D’Amore said, is to sell the new building as an owner-occupied rental. But the property’s been listed on the market for roughly $278,000 for the last eight months without a sale.

That property right here looked like this, probably worse,” D’Amore said, as he pointed to 687 Winchester Ave., where inspectors were circling the building. This is a perfect example.”

Overhearing the conversation, Kowalski asked, Is this slated for demo?”

With any kind of luck,” quipped John Rose, the city’s corporate counsel.

No-Show Owners

John Rose and Matt Nemerson discuss rental licenses outside 675 Winchester Ave.

As the city’s team experienced repeatedly throughout the day, like at 687 Winchester Ave., plenty of landlords collect cash from their tenants without reinvesting in their properties. They often deliberately dodge inspections to make sure that negligence doesn’t catch up with them.

A good share don’t purchase a rental license from the city, Nemerson learned as he walked the block. For instance, a For Rent” sign was up in the front yard at 671 Winchester Ave., a nine-bedroom building, but the Norwich-based owner hadn’t obtained a rental license, city records showed.

Why aren’t property owners complying? They likely don’t want to pay a $40 fee per dwelling unit and subject themselves to a cycle of three-year inspections — especially not when the maximum penalty they face is only $250, Nemerson speculated.

It’s cheaper to ignore us than to follow it,” he added. We have to have some other teeth, because what we really want to do is go in and inspect.”

2 Read St., where 13 utility meters suggest the Mahopac, N.Y.-based owners should have money for capital expenses.

Nemerson said that explains some of the financial hurt that Elm City tenants are feeling, when it comes to their housing bills.

People are correctly saying that rents are going up here. It’s not a question of gentrification; it’s a question of too many people looking for housing in New Haven, because there’s no other place in the state for them to live. Landlords are taking advantage of that,” Nemerson explained.

Our job is to make sure that we at least have the rules and the regulations to get people to reinvest into the property and back into the housing. But what we can control — what these sweeps are really all about — is saying you’re charging an extra,” he continued. If you’re going to have more expensive housing, you want to have higher quality. People should not be spending this kind of money and having rats running around in their apartment.”

D’Amore noticed one apartment — 2 Read St., owned by a couple from Mahopac, N.Y. — with 13 utility meters visible from the street-front. With that kind of rental income, assuming all apartments are occupied, no reason why this house shouldn’t be pristine, right?” he asked.

Caretakers, Of All Sorts

Behind 722 Winchester Ave., a city-owned sliver lot that’s become a junkyard.

Of course, the neighborhood does have its caretakers, many of whom expressed gratitude for Thursday’s sweep. Mrs. E,” as one woman introduced herself, regularly shows up at community management team meetings and calls up LCI to report problems. In fact, I was going to call you today,” she said to Davis-Cannon from her porch as she pointed out a mattress that someone had dumped in a sprawling vacant lot across the street.

The city itself manages a good chunk of the neighborhood, much of it vacant.

Thursday’s walk-through highlighted one publicly owned lot in bad shape. Right behind 722 Winchester Ave., facing Bassett Street, someone had taken over the parcel as a junkyard for old cars. Unpaved, the dirt parcel was filled with sitting water, topped off with a sheen of oil leaking out of the broken-down cars.

The sliver lot was just a quarter of what used to be a vacant lot. LCI sold off the other three to extend the adjacent Winchester Avenue property owners’ backyards. But the fourth abutting owner — a couple who live in the Dwight neighborhood — could didn’t buy its sliver, D’Amore said. They simply don’t have the money or the wherewithal,” he said. That lot is always going to look like that [because] they’re not maintaining their property.”

After seeing the lot, D’Amore said he plans to kill the deal.” In its place, LCI will clean up the cars and fence in the area. After that, he expected the lot would become green space. Someday, he added, the agency could reconsider for a more responsible owner.

I’m glad I saw it like it is,” D’Amore said.

Monitoring Results

City staffers regroup in the police substation to discuss the morning’s work.

In a debriefing back at the police substation shortly after 11:30 a.m., public employees rattled off the successes from their hours of block-by-block canvassing.

LCI condemned one apartment, the Building Department cut off power to an illegal work-site and the fire marshal convinced the father of a 4‑year-old to replace his smoke alarms. Parks department crews sawed off two precarious tree limbs, weeded Bassett Park and added new nets on the basketball court. And outreach workers hung warnings about lead-paint hazards on every doorknob on four streets.

A lot of letters gotta go out today,” Turcio said.

Less tangibly, workers got a better sense of the violations and enforcement mechanism in other departments’ codes. LCI, for example, might tell DPW about a pile of trash in a driveway, or vice-versa, DPW might ask LCI to conduct an inspection inside.

Everybody has a particular code or statute that they follow, so the more you get everybody involved, the easier it is to address it,” Doyle said. You see more with more eyes, you hear more with ears.”

And city staffers talked long-term solutions, thinking up ways to preserve the clean-up they’d initiated on one drizzly morning.

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