LCI: Let’s Speed Things Up

With hopes of building a faster housing code inspection system with more teeth, the Livable City Initiative (LCI) under its new director is moving away from the courthouse and toward municipal fines.

Liam Brennan offered that update to a group of tenant advocates in a City Hall meeting room on Thursday evening.

Mayor Justin Elicker initially hired Brennan, his former Democratic mayoral primary opponent, as a consultant to guide reforms of the long-beleaguered department in April. In July, Elicker named Brennan the new LCI director while restructuring the department to focus exclusively on addressing blight and housing code violations. (LCI’s previous director, Arlevia Samuel, has moved over to a newly created economic development role focused on affordable housing creation.)

LCI has long struggled to keep up with a flood of housing code complaints as New Haven’s housing stock ages. Tenants frequently report long wait times for LCI inspections and enforcement, if enforcement happens at all, often leaving them to languish in unsafe living conditions.

The department currently employs 13 housing code inspectors and now has funding to hire five more. Each inspector is tasked with assessing about eight apartments a day, not only responding to tenant complaints, but also conducting mandatory inspections for Section 8 units and licensed rental properties. New Haven has an estimated 43,000 rental units, according to the mayor’s State of the City address in February.

On Thursday, Brennan presented plans to shift away from relying on criminal housing court as an enforcement mechanism — and toward municipal fines that the city can impose more quickly and more frequently.

De-Emphasizing Criminal Court

In recent years, LCI has worked with state prosecutors to take some of the city’s largest landlords to criminal housing court, where they can face fines of up to $250 per housing code violation.

While the potential embarrassment of being prosecuted might motivate landlords to address illegal housing conditions, the fines themselves usually represent a fraction of the rental income that those apartments generate. Brennan noted that the legal process is lengthy and requires multiple extra inspections from LCI, protracting the time for enforcement.

Brennan said on Thursday that he plans prioritize municipal fines, which he believes will be faster and higher, over criminal prosecutions.

“That doesn’t mean we won’t ever use the State’s Attorney system,” noted Brennan, who is himself a former legal aid lawyer. Prosecution ​“can be reserved for cases where for some reason you feel like that would be more necessary, more appropriate.”

He plans to advocate for the Board of Alders to create a clearly-defined municipal fine system for the housing code, akin to the fines that landlords receive for blight. (Currently, the city can fine landlords daily for housing code violations only ​“upon conviction.”)

While awaiting that legislation, Brennan plans to leverage fines associated with the city’s Landlord Licensing Program to enforce housing code complaints.

Most rental units in the city — except for single-family homes and owner-occupied two- and three-family homes — are required to be registered with LCI’s Landlord Licensing Program, although as of April, the city estimated that only 25 percent of units under this mandate have actually registered.

The program entails periodic inspections from LCI — and when violations aren’t addressed within the mandatory time frame (usually 30 days for non-emergencies), the city can fine landlords up to $100 per day, per violation.

Landlords who fail to obtain a license are also subject to a fine of $2,000 per dwelling.

So in the meantime, when a housing code complaint comes in about a unit covered by the licensing ordinance, Brennan plans to reroute that complaint to the licensing program — enabling LCI to levy licensing-related fines when appropriate.

In the future, if alders do establish a separate municipal housing code fine mechanism, Brennan said he does not anticipate penalizing landlords through both that system and the licensing program at once, because that ​“could be subject to challenges in court.”

But overall, he said, ​“We look to enforce [the housing code] everywhere we can. The goal is compliance so that we have health and safety.”

But there are guardrails: ​“There’s an independent hearing that has to stamp each citation and make sure that we have followed the rules.”

Brennan also said that he is looking into how LCI can better coordinate with the Fair Rent Commission, which has the ability to reduce tenants’ rent — potentially to $1 a month — until housing code violations are fixed. LCI inspectors may be able to directly refer cases to the commission, he said.

“If we could do that, it would change everything,” said Sarah Mervine of the Center for Children’s Advocacy.

The Goal: A Faster System

Brennan also enumerated plans to shorten the wait time between inspections and enforcement by getting rid of some administrative steps:

• Start counting the (typically 30-day) time frame for a landlord to fix a violation on the day of the inspection, rather than starting on the day the landlord receives the inspection results in a letter (as is currently the practice).

• Migrate to a new electronic project management system (Veoci), which will allow the public to submit complaints online, track particular cases, and view real-time data. (“We will always accept people walking through the doors. We will always take calls,” Brennan said.)

• Automatically email notices to landlords and tenants who provide contact information.

• Funnel criminal housing code cases to a prosecutor after two, rather than three, inspections — reducing the total number of inspections that take place before a criminal fine is imposed to four rather than five.

• Use regular mail rather than Certified Mail to send out letters to landlords, which Brennan said he expects will significantly streamline the process.

This last point prompted Room for All Coalition organizer Lisa McKnight to raise her hand.

“My mom received a notice [of a code violation] maybe a couple of months ago,” McKnight said. ​“She’s been deceased for six years.”

After McKnight’s mom died, the house in question at 11 Rosette St. sold in 2018. After a series of holding company exchanges, it now belongs to an LLC controlled by the megalandlord Mandy Management, according to the Tax Assessor’s database.

At the end of the meeting, McKnight was able to resolve the issue by working with LCI Staffer Marta Arroyo to update the department’s internal system.

Also during the meeting, Mervine pressed Brennan on why LCI does not currently operate a legally-required ​“language line” — a phone hotline with multilingual interpreters to help city officials communicate with non-English speakers.

Brennan responded that he’s already working on implementing such a system, and that he is also bringing on bilingual administrative assistants. ​“A language line is a top priority,” he said.

Mervine threatened to take legal action on this issue, noting that she works with families who struggle to communicate with inspectors because of the lack of translation resources: ​“It just is illegal for you to not be able to provide a language line.”

Meanwhile, tenant union organizer Lauren Palulis questioned whether fines from LCI would be enough to hold well-funded landlords accountable.

Some landlords (such as one of New Haven’s largest landlords, Mandy Management) are backed by international hedge funds, Palulis observed.

“When does the city stop issuing a license?” she asked, alluding to landlords with a track record of repeatedly disregarding safety. And what happens ​“if your landlord operates with a bunch of shell corporations” that may make it hard for the city, and for residents, to track them?

Brennan responded that he’s exploring whether liens can be used to tie financial consequences for code violations to particular properties.

Others at the meeting suggested that the city could look into informing mortgagers and insurance companies about neglectful landlords and imposing liens on unsafe properties.