Inspectors Sweep ​“Rodent Heaven”

In the trash-strewn backyard behind the Howard Mini Mart & Deli, Frank D’Amore found a collapsing chain link fence. The deputy director of the city’s anti-blight Livable City Initiative (LCI) also found an uncovered hole in the ground filled with empty milk crates. And piles of fallen branches and twigs. And two large tanks: one filled with grease, one filled with water.

All right next to a tattered mesh-screen doorway leading directly to the deli’s kitchen.

“This is like rodent heaven,” said D’Amore, shaking his head.

As the deli’s on duty cook Reuben promised to clean up the trash by this afternoon, D’Amore and city Health Department Senior Sanitarian Brian Wnek strategized about which combination of orders, citations, and fines would best pressure the deli’s landlord, Abdullah Shehadeh, to clean up the 660 Howard property for good.

The Howard Mini Mart was one dozens of stops that a team of city officials made on Thursday morning during a two-and-a-half hour ​“Clean & Safe” tour of the Hill North.

The latest interdepartmental neighborhood sweep saw around 20 building inspectors, anti-blight officials, health department personnel, and other city staffers walk between Sylvan Avenue and Columbus Avenue alongside neighborhood alders, business owners, and residents.

The goal of Thursday’s walk through the Hill, as with previous neighborhood sweeps in Newhallville, Fair Haven, and the Annex, was to document building code violations, blighted properties, and other quality-of-life concerns besetting a neighborhood, and then enforce city laws in a coordinated way against landlords who don’t know them, or who choose not to follow them.

As D’Amore, Wnek, and one half of the assembled city inspectors wound their way between Congress Avenue, Daggett Street, Washington Avenue, Columbus Avenue, and White Street, they found plenty to keep themselves busy. The other half of the group covered a similar stretch of city blocks between Congress Avenue, Vernon Street, Sylvan Avenue, and Kossuth Street.

The two groups started their walks at the corner of Daggett and Congress, across the street from John C. Daniels School.

One of their first stops was 58 Daggett St, a two-and-a-quarter story single-family home also owned by Abdullah Shehadeh (the same landlord who owns Howard Mini Mart). Five brown and copper-colored hens skittered up and down the driveway around city Building Official Jim Turcio. A white truck and a gutted minivan sat derelict next to a yard cluttered with chairs, cardboard boxes, and other trash.

In front of the house, LCI Housing Code Inspector Rick Mazzadra jotted down notes on a rotting porch.

“These pillars are sitting on shit,” Turcio said. ​“That’s a technical term.”

Several calls were placed to the landlord seeking response, to no avail.

Further down Daggett Street, D’Amore and Evan Trachten, LCI’s city acquisition and disposition coordinator, found two neighboring backyard heaped with more trash.

Looking over a wooden picket fence into the yard behind 32 Daggett, Trachten took a photograph of mounds of broken chairs, bicycles, buckets, and wooden planks piled on top of a broken down car.

Behind 28 Daggett, Trachten snapped another photo of a tree fallen square across the middle of a blow-up pool.

“They’ve got to catch a letter on the standing water in that pool,” Trachten said, writing up a long list of anti-blight violations for the two landlords.

Looking out towards the corner of Howard and Washington, Hill North Community Management Team Chair Howard Boyd directed the city personnel to the Howard Mini Mart.

“That’s one of our biggest problems on the block,” he said.

Turcio, D’Amore, and Wnek circled the property, taking notes on the busted chainlink fence, piled empty crates, and assorted fallen branches and other trash.

“A lot of homeless people hang out in this parking lot,” the deli’s cook Reuben said about the yard between the deli and the neighboring home, also owned by Shehadeh. He said that some people drive down Howard, stop and dump bags of trash behind the property.

Shaking Reuben’s hand, Fire Chief John Alston Jr. pointed out that the black crates piled behind the deli were debris that the deli’s operators, not neighboring litterers, were clearly responsible for.

“Thank God I never ate here,” Turcio said as he looked at the debris littering the property’s back yard, most of it close to the deli’s back entrance and away from the property’s two dumpsters and clothing donation drop box.

“We in a bad neighborhood, bro,” Reuben said. He promised to call the deli’s owner immediately and get the crates cleaned up Thursday afternoon.

“You can’t keep a deli here based on the conditions of this property,” D’Amore said. He told Wnek that he would write up an anti-blight citation for the property upon getting back to his desk. Wnek said that he would send a clean up order to the landlord and note that the property is in violation of the city health code’s prohibition against rodent harborage.

If the landlord doesn’t comply with the clean up order, Wnek said, then the Health Department will file criminal charges and bring him to housing court.

“He’s jeopardizing you,” D’amore said to Reuben about the deli manager and landlord’s lack of upkeep of the property. ​“He’s jeopardizing the business.”

As the group made their way down Hallock Street, Alston pointed towards 38 Hallock as an example of a responsibly maintained vacant building. The ground floor doors of the two-story, single-family home owned by Helena Newtown were covered up by secure wooden boards. Alston said that securing vacant buildings is one of the most important steps a landlord can do to minimize the threat of fires spreading to neighboring properties.

He said that the fire department is currently working on drafting an ordinance to be presented to the Board of Alders that would create a registry of vacant buildings in the city. He said that when he worked in Jersey City, the fire department saw a significant reduction in fires after the city’s fire department set up a vacant building registry, which provided greater awareness and oversight of empty, fire-vulernable city properties.

The last block on the group’s sweep was White Street, where Turcio, D’Amore, and Trachten noted the boarded up, fire-ravaged home at 47 White. D’Amore said that the landlord, Doug Hall, is currently appealing the city’s anti-blight charges.

White Street resident John Devlin, watching and smoking a cigarette from his front porch across the street, said that the fire that ravaged 47 White happened nearly nine years ago. Still, he said, the building remains an unrepaired wreck.

“I hate that house,” he said.

But closer to Congress Avenue, Devlin pointed out a part of the block he is very proud of: the New Haven Land Trust’s Thomas Chapel Church Community Garden, replete with wooden planting beds, benches, and even crosses that Devlin said he built himself and donated to the garden. He turned around and took a look at a few other homes on the residential block: he had helped build one person’s door, had renovated another porch.

“It’s not a bad neighborhood,” he said. ​“We all look out for one another.”