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Nathaniel Rosenberg |
Mar 5, 2025 1:51 pm
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City Building Official Robert Dillon (right): Olive & Wooster is a rooming house.
Thomas Breen photo
The luxury rooming house at 87 Union St.
A luxury apartment complex with “collective” rentals is an illegal rooming house, and the building owners could face fines for running it.
That’s according to New Haven’s Building Department, which filed a Cease and Desist order accusing Olive & Wooster, one of the new high-end apartment complexes in Wooster Square, of violating the city’s zoning ordinance by running portions of the building as rooming houses.
Shelly Thompson, Yonatan Zamir, Jeffrey Taylor, and Vorcelia Oliphant-Macher round out a two-day eviction trial.
A two-day eviction trial that revealed how emotionally fraught a long-term tenant-landlord relationship can get has culminated with a judge ordering the renter to leave because her lease has expired.
The legal debate at the trial centered on what counts as landlord “retaliation.” The judge found that a tenant can’t succeed with such a defense unless she proves that a landlord’s “primary motive” in taking her to court was to punish her for speaking out about housing code concerns.
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Thomas Breen |
Mar 4, 2025 1:57 pm
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(2)
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LCI's Brennan: "We will not be trying to enforce the judgment against the former owner."
LCI plans to walk back a $2,000 fine it filed against the wrong landlord — as it moves ahead with converting $21,700 in other court-approved civil judgments into property liens.
Rolling up a mattress before bulldozers come in to demolish a Lamberton Street homeless encampment.
File photos
Garrett, Elicker: Neighbors, but not friends (at least in regards to H.B. 7033).
HARTFORD — New Haven and Hamden might be neighbors on a map, but at a Thursday hearing at the state Capitol, the two municipalities were far apart as their Democratic mayors presented dueling testimonies about a state bill on homelessness.
Hamden’s Lauren Garrett threw her support behind the proposal, which would bolster a homeless person’s ability to sleep on public land without fear of penalty.
New Haven’s Justin Elicker, meanwhile, came down hard on the bill, which he warned would allow for permanent encampments.
Robert James (right) leads petition procession to the front office.
Elderly renters at a church-owned apartment complex on Goffe Street marched down their building’s hallway holding signs reading “Respect Seniors,” “Justice Matters,” and “Help Us Stay Safe.”
They then delivered a petition to the front office announcing their new status as a tenants union — and demanded a collective bargaining agreement.
... which LCI's Taylor Munroe said has been the subject of neighbor and SeeClickFix complaints.
Wynter and two fellow Ocean Management workers hauled a mattress, a bicycle, two shopping carts, a frying pan, a wicker chair, a pile of clothes, and a host of other belongings and debris from a Dixwell Avenue homeless encampment Thursday and into the back of a U‑Haul.
The truck was parked on the sidewalk in front of the decrepit former Monterey Jazz Club — a long-vacant building that the Elicker administration tried to buy two years ago, but that still remains rundown and under megalandlord ownership.
by
Nathaniel Rosenberg |
Feb 19, 2025 2:47 pm
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(18)
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Olive & Wooster: If it quacks like a rooming house ...
Is a luxury apartment complex with “collective” rentals actually an illegal rooming house?
A legal aid attorney argued that it is, as she defended a tenant facing eviction from one of the new high-end apartment complexes that have popped up in recent years on the downtown edge of Wooster Square.
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Lisa Reisman |
Feb 19, 2025 9:00 am
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(5)
Hamden Newhall Neighborhood Association President Tina Jennings-Herriott.
A Newhall meeting saw neighbors and Hamden town officials engaged in debate over what community members really need, in the latest installment in a group of residents’ fight to allocate one-time federal funds to addressing their crumbling home foundations.
Prez Srajer: "The tenant movement is here to stay."
Nathaniel Rosenberg file photo
"Just cause" co-sponsor Laurie Sweet (center), in January.
Hartford – Connecticut Tenants Union President and New Havener Hannah Srajer was in the middle of laying into the “unchecked greed” of corporate landlords who use no-fault evictions to hike rents when the co-chair of the state legislature’s Housing Committee said her three minutes were up. She asked Srajer to summarize the rest of her testimony.
“The tenant movement is here to stay,” Srajer concluded. “We’re not raising new problems. We’re just making them more visible. Let’s get this done.”
by
Nathaniel Rosenberg |
Feb 17, 2025 9:15 am
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(22)
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Eco-friendly affordable housing on Dixwell: More, please.
With the Connecticut General Assembly’s legislative session in full swing, New Haven’s eight state lawmakers are pushing 184 different bills that touch on everything from growing housing near transit to digging deep on thermal energy to requiring movie theaters to disclose what time the films, and not just the trailers, actually start.
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Dereen Shirnekhi |
Feb 12, 2025 3:01 pm
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(6)
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Terri Ricks (in red), with Mark Griffin (right), thanks Mandy's Ari Hoffman and Sara Bigman and pushes for them to encourage other management companies to enact similar policies.
After settling a tenant-discrimination case that changed how Mandy Management approaches renters with criminal histories, Mark Griffin is ready to take his fair-housing fight to the state legislature — as he also awaits a full pardon for his decades-old misdemeanor conviction.
Mandy CEO Gurevitch: Transparency benefits landlords and tenants.
One of the city’s largest landlords has settled a tenant-discrimination case by agreeing to adopt a formal policy detailing which criminal convictions it will and won’t consider before signing a lease with a prospective renter.
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Thomas Breen |
Feb 7, 2025 9:34 am
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(9)
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LCI's Brennan, at the scene of a recent tenant-displacing fire in Newhallville.
The Livable City Initiative (LCI) has collected $27,200 over the past few months in hearing officer-approved fines of landlords who have missed inspections, failed to register with the city’s rental business licensing program, or not acted quickly enough to correct blight or housing code violations at their properties.
And the agency is now taking four more landlords to court in a bid to collect an additional $23,700.
Resident Suki Godek outside her Catholic Worker House "tiny" home.
Nora Grace-Flood file photo
At DESK's drop-in center.
The following release was submitted by the Wessel Fund:
The Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen and Amistad Catholic Worker are this year’s recipients of the Unsung Heroes Award from the Irmgard and Morris Wessel Fund.
Cherif, with Scotch: Stipulation reached, eviction trial avoided.
(Updated) A mom of three young disabled children can stay in her Orchard Street apartment through the end of May — per a court-mediated agreement she struck with her landlord on the day her eviction case was set to go to trial.
Friday's blaze, as documented by @NewHavenFire on X.
Thomas Breen photos
Property manager David Kone: No comment.
Displaced tenant Anthony Bruton: "The smell was so strong."
Another apartment building owned by Bethany-based landlord Jianchao Xu burst into flames Friday morning — displacing a half-dozen tenants, including Anthony Bruton, who rushed to safety after an overwhelming smell of smoke wafted up into his second-floor apartment.
The latest design for 450-ish apartments planned for State St.
Zachary Groz photo
Newman Architects' Paul Santos: Looking for mix of traditional and modern.
(Updated) A development team’s plan to build nearly 450 apartments atop a publicly owned parking lot on State Street inched forward — with a second community meeting, a refined design and an estimated price tag of $125 million.
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Nathaniel Rosenberg |
Jan 23, 2025 5:31 pm
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CTTU Vice President Luke Melonakos-Harrison at the mic, fighting for "for housing stability, for dignity and respect."
(Hartford) New Haven’s tenants union leaders are back at the state Capitol for the second straight year to push for limits on landlords’ ability to evict tenants — and they’re hoping this session goes better than the last.
McClune and Schwan: $300 more is too much; Chen: That's the market.
Is Mandy Management raising the rent to align with market rates, or does the megalandlord practically set the market rates?
That question was asked at a Fair Rent Commission hearing on Tuesday evening, at which Lenox Street tenants Douglas Schwan and Natalie McClune succeeded in getting a monthly rent increase knocked down from $300 to $100.
20, 34 Fair St.: Garages demolished, housing to come.
A development team has knocked down two vacant Fair Street garages — as builders move forward with plans to construct 168 new apartments on the housing-rich downtown edge of Wooster Square.
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Thomas Breen |
Jan 20, 2025 11:53 am
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(6)
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201 Winchester and 235 Winchester (below), now under new ownership.
For the first time in more than two decades, a vacant lot and an incomplete apartment building on Winchester Avenue are no longer controlled by NFL cornerback-turned-housing developer Kenny Hill.
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Laura Glesby |
Jan 17, 2025 3:28 pm
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(8)
Laura Glesby Photo
Mandy Management tenants Noela, Mlebinge, and Jacqueline in the Clarion hotel lobby on Wednesday, waiting to go home.
After a two-night stay in a Hamden hotel, a family of nine Congolese refugees moved back to their Dickerman Street apartment on Friday morning — where, for the first time this winter, the heat came on.
U-ACT protester Mell: “Show me the law telling me I cannot walk up those steps!”
Alexis Terry in the tent on City Hall's first floor.
Four dozen people showed up to City Hall on Thursday night to protest a city policy of issuing 72-hour eviction notices upon discovering outdoor encampments — leaving a symbolic tent outside the mayor’s office after a standoff with police.
