Rafael Ramos’s cell phone rang at midnight. A woman and her daughter were shivering in their apartment — punished, the woman said, for speaking out to their landlord about a leaky fridge.
Ramos (at left in photo above) jumped in his city car and met the family at their home. He fixed the heat. And within an hour of reaching the property manager, he got the family a brand new fridge.
It was another small victory in Ramos’s battle to defend tenants’ rights to a safe, clean home — and to bring warmth and light to New Haven, as a public servant, a civic volunteer, and a community arts pioneer.
He waged that battle daily in 2009. He won it, again and again.
Ramos, who’s 52, waged it in part as deputy director of housing code for the New Haven government’s neighborhoods agency, the Livable City Initiative. Sometimes he wrote citations; one day this fall he ended up cleaning dried blood from a front porch, the scene of a shooting. A renaissance man, Ramos also played conga drums, ran a summer camp for kids, and put together barrier-breaking shows through his community theater, Bregamos.
In between rescuing tenants and tracking landlords’ code compliance this year, Ramos found time to organize an elaborate five-day camping trip for 40 city kids and to stage plays, including one about New Haven history, that brought together different cultures in town.
Monday night found Ramos fielding complaints from tenants who didn’t have heat.
“Is this Mr. Ramos?” a woman asked on the midnight cell phone call.
“How did you get my number?” he replied.
“You gave it to me,” she said. She told him she had met him a couple years ago, when a fire forced her family out of their home. Now she needed his help again.
The woman lives in an apartment building at 1617 Chapel St. in the Edgewood neighborhood. Earlier that day, she had a dispute with her property manager over a leaky fridge. The freezer wasn’t working, and the fridge door wouldn’t close. The family had to throw out food, including leftover turkey, because the fridge wouldn’t stay cold.
The woman called her property manager. He wouldn’t fix it, she said. So she threatened to withhold her rent until the fridge was fixed. Then she heard what sounded like a threat.
“Don’t call me if something happens,” the property manager allegedly told her.
Later that day, at 6 p.m., her heat suddenly shut off. The woman sat in the cold for about six hours. Then she called Ramos for help.
Ramos (pictured), who lives in Fair Haven, fired up his city-issued Mercury Grand Marquis and headed across town. He met the woman.
The property manager wouldn’t pick up the phone. So he went into the basement to fix the problem himself. He forced open a door to her furnace and discovered something fishy: The switch to the furnace had been turned off.
Ramos flipped the switch on.
He couldn’t prove who turned it off. But he did take a look around the building, and he noticed a few violations. He took note of a leak in the basement and a rear emergency exit that was made treacherous by ice and snow. In the morning, he typed up an order listing the improvements that had to be made.
In the morning, he kept on the property manager’s case. He finally got through to the man, Mario Makus, at 9:30 a.m. The building has a license under the city’s residential licensing program, but he told Makus there were still problems with the building.
“You may need a new inspection,” Ramos said. He told Makus he “better get them a new fridge,” too.
Makus promised to comply.
Ramos swung by later that day to follow up.
He left City Hall in his silver Mercury. In the trunk, he carried a space heater ready to loan out to a family in need. On the back seat sat a copy of the New Yorker, a hint at an NYC-infused cultural and intellectual life that he lives when he’s not getting his hands dirty in basement boiler rooms. Ramos, who’s Puerto Rican, grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He and his wife still keep a place in Harlem. In the summers, they return to Tomlinson Park every weekend to hit the congas as part of a Puerto Rican and Afro-Cuban drumming circle.
Ramos wore a leather cap, corduroys and a heavy pea coat with sailor buttons over his official LCI jacket. He rang the doorbell.
Tyquanda Woodward, who’s 25, invited him upstairs. She smiled when he asked about the fridge. She said the property manager had rolled in a new fridge at 10:30 a.m. This fridge was white, not black with dirt.
Ramos tested it out with his thermometer gun. The leftovers were indeed staying cold.
Something else had changed: The heat was on. Woodward sat comfortably on the couch watching TV without a blanket or a hat.
Ramos checked out the fire escape, which had been dumped on by the weekend storm. The ice and snow were gone. That revealed another problem: The steel stairs were weak with corrosion.
Around 4 p.m., Ramos came back to meet Makus face to face.
Ramos showed the property manager the back stairs.
“A fireman is heavy enough to fall through that,” Ramos said. He handed Makus (at left in photo) the official orders listing the code violations.
“No problem,” Makus said. He said he had already begun fixing up the place that morning.
Asked about the heat, Makus conceded he is the only person with the keys to the boiler room. But he denied turning off the furnace.
“I know it looks like me,” he said, “but I didn’t hit that switch.”
Makus said he had no further comment except to say that people in New Haven often don’t pay their rent.
Ramos left quickly in order to avoid getting into an argument with the man whose testimony seemed shaky at best. But the heat is on. The building’s being fixed. That’s what mattered.
The confrontation was one of a series of calls on the no-heat beat. When temperatures drop, LCI workers respond 24/7 to tenants who find themselves in the cold.
“We never shut down,” Ramos said.
Tenants can call the emergency number (203 – 946-6237) if their heat drops below 65 degrees Fahrenheit, the minimum required by state law.
Ramos tried to explain all that at Norton Court, an apartment building on Norton Street that’s occupied by a number of people from ALSO-Cornerstone, which helps people with mental health and substance abuse problems. One woman there said she has problems with the heat, but doesn’t want to speak up for fear of retribution.
Ramos showed up there to respond to a no-heat complaint. One woman let him in to test the temperature in her apartment. She said she does have problems with the heat, but not at that particular moment. As he left, he asked her name.
“Stool pigeon,” she said.
“No, you’re not,” Ramos said. “You need to be warm.”
In another apartment he found a young woman whose radiators had stopped working. His temperature gun recorded an average of 54 degrees Fahrenheit — 10 degrees below the legal minimum. He called the landlord.
“I’m condemning this apartment,” Ramos told him. “It’s uninhabitable.”
The landlord, who hadn’t returned phone calls all morning, showed up in a jiffy. Three radiators were broken. The landlord offered to have the woman sleep in an empty apartment, on a mattress that night. Ramos balked at the idea.
“She’s a human being!” Ramos said. He made arrangements for the landlord to put her up in a hotel.
The day capped a busy year for the housing inspector.
Some days were tragic. Others, just bizarre.
In October, Ramos was called to a home where a man had been fatally shot. Two days after the killing, a mom and her three kids were still walking past a pool of blood to get to their third-story apartment. Ramos got into a Tyvek suit and, with a mop and an ice-scraper, wiped the place clean.
In May, he found himself tending to a Lombard Street home where a tenant had discovered slaughtered chickens and dead fish in his bedroom.
In past years, he has helped immigrants living in squalid, illegal basement rooms stand up to their landlords.
Ramos has done housing code enforcement for the city for 15 years. He said the appeal is simple: “I like helping people.”
By The Books
He arrived at the post after an unusual path.
A plumber by trade, he came to New Haven 22 years ago as a construction cost estimator for a company that worked on the Chase financial building. His job was to estimate how much concrete they needed. When the last slab was poured, he got laid off.
So Ramos launched an experiment: He tried to make a living selling books on the street.
For two and a half years he ran an operation called Uptown Books. He set up a table at Church and Chapel Streets. The books had cultural lessons. One of his favorites was called “Alfro-bets,” a compendium of African-American heroes from A to Z. He supplemented the collection with clothes and bags.
The Bart Simpson T‑shirts and fake Gucci bags went like hotcakes, but the books didn’t really sell.
“I winded up giving the books away” — about $6,000 worth, he said.
Ramos decided to go back into the housing field. He landed a job as a lead inspector in Bridgeport.
“It was awesome,” he said. A couple years later, he took a job in New Haven as a housing inspector. He has stuck with it ever since.
When he’s not rapping on landlords’ doors or lending out heaters, Ramos works on a few other projects. In 2000, he founded the Bregamos Community Theater Company.
The theater exposes young New Haveners to theater, often through hard-hitting performances about life on the streets. Their success has taken them all the way to Holland. Click here, here and here to read about a few of the theater’s shows.
In 2009 Ramos’ Bregamos helped stage readings of a play (by the Independent‘s Allan Appel) about the Puritan-era “Excommunication of Mrs. Eaton.” He engaged young Fair Haveners like Melvin Matos in the project — giving them a taste of theater production while also connecting them to their city’s history.
Next up: Ramos plans to put on a show by, for and about people who live at the Church Street South housing project. With a grant from the Office of Cultural Affairs, he hired a NYC-based playwright to write a play based on interviews with residents. The plan is to hold a theater workshop at Church Street South, then have people who live there perform the play in the community room of their housing complex.
Ramos lights up when he talks about theater. He got into it back in New York, at a squat on the Lower East Side that was converted into a black box theater. If you catch him on the street, he’ll likely be quick to promote the latest Bregamos with gusto.
“Theater has everything,” Ramos gushed. “It’s educational, vocational, entertaining and therapeutic. … What better way to bring people together?”
A father to seven children, Ramos appears to have endless energy. Every summer, he and his wife, Siri Rishi, lead kids on a camping retreat called Big Turtle Village. Click here to read about their adventures this year at Devil’s Hopyard State Park. The camp takes place in July.
“That’s my year!” said Ramos, catching his breath. “It goes by fast.”
He picked up his thermometer and headed out to another call.