Thomas Breen photos
Mandy Management’s Israel Mochkin and tenant Henry Pizzaro.
Persistent rat problems at a Mandy Management-owned Dixwell apartment led the city’s Fair Rent Commission to set a tenant’s rent at half of the original monthly rate until the rodents are gone for good.
Commissioners made that unanimous decision Tuesday night at a public hearing held on the second floor of City Hall.
324 Goffe St. / 401 Sherman Ave.
Following up on their May decision to reduce 38-year-old tenant Henry Pizzaro’s monthly rent from $675 to $0 because of longstanding roof leaks and rodent infestations at his 324 Goffe St. studio apartment, commissioners Tuesday called on Pizzaro and Mandy representative Israel Mochkin, along with Mandy attorney Shanique Fenlator, to provide an update on living conditions at the apartment in question. Mandy owns the property through a holding company called Netz 401 Sherman LLC.
Pizarro, Mochkin, and Fenlator all confirmed that Mandy fixed the roof in Pizarro’s apartment in July, thus completing half of the maintenance order put in place by the Fair Rent Commission in May. This roof fix was enough to win the Fair Rent Commission’s unanimous decision to raise Pizarro’s monthly rent from $0 to $337.50, half of his original rent, starting in September.
Tuesday night’s Fair Rent Commission meeting.
The tenant and landlord disagreed about the efficacy of the work that Mandy has done to date to solve the apartment’s rat problem.
Mochkin and Fenlator presented a contract that Mandy signed in June with SK Pest Elimination LLC to do monthly rodent inspections and extermination work at the building. Fair Rent Commissioner Otis Johnson pointed out that the city’s anti-blight Livable City Initiative (LCI) passed the apartment during a recent housing code inspection on July 11.
Nevertheless, Pizarro said, rats still run wild in his residence.
“I got a brand new couch,” he said. “I can’t sit on it, because they got a nest on it. That’s not fair.”
Fair Rent ED Otis Johnson shows Mochkin Pizarro’s photos.
He showed photographs he had taken over the past three days depicting rats caught in traps throughout his kitchen.
He said he can’t turn on the lights at night without seeing rodents scurrying from fridge to stove, from sink to shower, around his bed and into the living room. He’s hounded by these pests when he sits on the toilet, he said, and when he washes his dishes, and when he tries to go to bed.
This has been the case for the entirety of the four years that he and his wife have lived in the apartment, he said. Mandy always sends a pest control person whenever he calls, he said. They put two bags of poison and a trap down, and tell him to wait 21 days for it to work. “They’ve been telling me to wait 21 days for four years,” he told this reporter on Wednesday morning at his apartment.
Pizarro inspecting his new couch for rat feces.
“If I had the money to move,” he said, “I’d move.” But he’s disabled, spent the little money he inherited from his father moving from a homeless shelter in New York City into the Goffe Street apartment four years ago, and doesn’t see himself moving out anytime soon. All he wants, he said, is for the rats to be gone.
Fenlator stressed that LCI would not have passed the apartment if the city weren’t satisfied with the rodent infestation being resolved.
“Are you happy?” Commissioner Kenneth Jones asked Pizarro about the work Mandy has done at his apartment since his rent was dropped to $0 in May.
“To be honest, with the repairs, yes,” Pizarro said. The roof has been fixed, he said. A carbon monoxide detector has been installed, as has an air ventilation system in his bathroom.
The taped-over hole in Pizarro’s kitchen.
But is he satisfied with the rat extermination work to date? Absolutely not.
The treatment plan that Mandy has signed with SK Pest Extermination, Fenlator said, guarantees that the company will get rid of the pests. “To my understanding,” she said, “the rodent infestation has already been addressed.”
“In my years of working in this business,” Mochkin said, “SK Pest does a great job.” Furthermore, he said, since the Fair Rent Commission handed down its order reducing Pizarro’s rent to $0 in May, “I took every step to make sure the problem is solved.”
Fenlator and Mochkin asked the commission not only to reinstate Pizarro’s full monthly rent of $675, but to require the tenant to pay back rent for July and August, dating to the month that LCI signed off on the housing code compliance of the apartment.
Pizarro, however, insisted that the rodent extermination work was and is not complete. “They don’t do the job like they’re supposed to,” he said, “because they don’t want to spend money.”
Fair Rent Commissioners Howard Boyd and Kenneth Jones.
During the commissioners’ post-hearing deliberations, Jones argued for the reinstatement of full rent.
“I feel that the management company has fulfilled their obligations,” he said. “You can’t get rid of them [the rats] over night.”
Fair Rent Commissioner Garry Monk.
Commissioner Garry Monk disagreed. “If he’s still living with rats in his house,” Monk said, “they ought to move him out. That’s really an issue.” City attorney Kevin Casini informed the commissioners that they do not have power to order the relocation of tenants, just to reduce the reduce the rent until certain living conditions are met.
“Please remember,” Johnson implored the commissioners, “that they did fix the roof,” thereby meeting half of the commission’s prior order.
“They got the roof done,” Jones said, “so let’s pay the people something.”
Monk proposed as a compromise that the commission bump up Pizarro’s rent to 50 percent of its original amount starting in September, and deny the request for July and August rent. That 50 percent rent rate, Monk said, should stay in effect until “the pest control issue is resolved.”
All four commissioners in attendance agreed, and voted in support.
At his apartment on Wednesday, Pizarro said the amount of rent is not of concern to him. What he wants is his apartment rid of rodents.
“Do you think it’s fair?” he asked. “For years” to have this problem with rats.
Is his particular unit the only one with the rat infestation? From the picture, one would assume this is a wide spread issue within the entire building. Have other tenants complained ? Has the exterminator work been extended to the other apartments?