by | Nov 15, 2024 3:14 pm | Comments (23)
Laura Glesby photo
Landlord and Alder Kampton Singh: Licenses are not a problem because "I follow the rules."
Bill Santillo walked into City Hall with an open mind, ready to learn about a landlord licensing program he’d once staunchly opposed.
by | Nov 14, 2024 5:02 pm | Comments (3)
Thomas Breen photo
"Hammock Home, Hammock Home, don't let us down! New Haven is a union town."
“Mold, mice, potholes, trash! What are you doing with our cash?”
A dozen tenant advocates chanted that message on Thursday, calling for the new property manager of an east-side apartment complex to negotiate a lease with their union.
by | Nov 13, 2024 2:49 pm | Comments (28)
Nathaniel Rosenberg photos
At Tuesday's BZA meeting, where commissioners heard plans ...
... for 8 rent-reduced apartments to rise at Lombard ex-laundromat site.
An empty Fair Haven lot that once sparked a high-profile arson trial could soon be the site of eight new affordable apartments.
Continue reading ‘8 Apartments Eyed For Burned-Down Laundromat’
by | Nov 12, 2024 2:32 pm | Comments (17)
Thomas Breen photo
Shovels up, for the Monarch ...
Honeycome Real Estate rendering
... the new Monarch apartments, that is ...
Thomas Breen photo
... and not the former linen-cleaning company (pictured).
The “route men” are long gone from the former Monarch Cleaners in West River.
So are the pleas of “Uncle Sammy, you got a summer job for me?” that sisters Cathy Dziekan and Jan Lougal still remember their dad being asked by extended family in need of work.
But the history of their family’s long-time laundry business will live on — in the name and in the story behind 64 new affordable apartments now on the rise on Derby Avenue.
Continue reading ‘Ex-Cleaners Ground Broken For 64 Apartments’
by | Nov 12, 2024 10:59 am | Comments (18)
Thomas Breen photo
Blumenthal (right) with tenants union members Asia Foley and Sinclair McCutcheon: "The reach of this legislation would be very broad in protecting tenants."
Connecticut’s senior U.S. senator stood side by side with members of the city’s first officially recognized tenants union to announce proposed legislation to make it easier nationwide for renters to organize and collectively bargain with their landlords.
by | Nov 11, 2024 9:06 am | Comments (5)
Arthur Delot-Vilain file photo
Opuszynski (left): “I bought it from [Xu] after he didn’t want to deal with the headache.”
A Madison-based investor now owns two of three foreclosed former co-op properties on Henry Street — after buying the row home for $480,000 from Bethany-based landlord Jianchao Xu.
by | Nov 7, 2024 1:22 pm | Comments (16)
Laura Glesby photo
LCI hearing officer Bob Megna: Fines approved.
It took an hour and a half for volunteer hearing officer Bob Megna to issue $1,000 fines to 27 local landlords — part of the city’s latest effort to revive a mandatory landlord licensing program after a lapse in enforcement.
Continue reading ‘$27K In Fines OK’d For Unlicensed Landlords’
by | Nov 6, 2024 4:32 pm | Comments (31)
Jabez Choi photos
James Lazarus: "They want to uproot me."
Parks Department carries away belongings-turned-"trash."
The city’s Parks Department has officially cleared the homeless encampment on the Upper Green — amid a debate over when unattended belongings become discardable “trash.”
by | Nov 1, 2024 8:50 am | Comments (14)
Thomas Breen file photo
Activist Sean Gargamelli-McCreight at Monday's encampment arrests.
Jabez Choi photo
U-ACT's Suki Godek and Joel Nieves join Thursday's protest.
“When the city evicts our unhoused neighbors from the train station and the Green, they call it a cleanup,” arrested homelessness activist Adam Nussbaum said during a protest on the front steps of the downtown courthouse. “And we ask, clean for who? We all know to them, ‘clean’ means dead.”
by | Oct 30, 2024 8:29 am | Comments (19)
Thomas Breen photo
269 Humphrey: 6 apartments now. 15 to come.
An East Rock landlord won permission to boost the number of apartments at a Humphrey Street house from six to 15 — after a local attorney pointed out that the existing building contains four floors, not three, and therefore has enough gross floor area to accommodate the higher unit count.
by and | Oct 28, 2024 1:47 pm | Comments (33)
Paul Bass Photo
Officers arrest homeless advocate Mark Colville.
Police made seven arrests of activists for the unhoused and removed four tents on the Upper Green Monday after a weekend of negotiations over the city’s latest homeless encampment.
by | Oct 25, 2024 8:58 am | Comments (37)
Jabez Choi photos
Property Manager Amanda Naranjo (center) helps cut the ribbon ...
... on "the Archive" on Chapel St.
Downtown renters looking for a shiny new two-bedroom apartment can now spend $3,399-plus per month — to live in a two-building, 166-unit complex that has risen from the ashes of a pair of long-vacant Chapel Street lots.
by | Oct 24, 2024 11:06 am | Comments (30)
Jabez Choi photo
Homelessness, policing on the agenda for Hill CMT.
Hill South neighbors pressed the mayor, the police chief, and their district’s top cop to do more to build up the ranks of the city’s police department — and to work harder to address homelessness in the neighborhood.
by | Oct 23, 2024 11:28 am | Comments (25)
Jabez Choi photo
Mark Colville (right) and volunteers handing out food and supplies on the Green ...
... to campers like Strongbow Lone Eagle.
Though their tents are largely gone, unhoused campers have set up sleeping bags on the grassy patch behind United Church on the Green — where they continue to distribute and receive food and other aid, as an activist crew keeps up their protest of homeless encampment sweeps.
by | Oct 22, 2024 3:00 pm | Comments (23)
Thomas Breen photo
Jianchao Xu's property manager, David Kone, at LCI hearing: "Obviously, there's been some miscommunication."
A Bethany-based landlord was hit with $18,200 in city fines — as part of a rejuvenated quasi-judicial process designed to give the Livable City Initiative (LCI) more teeth when confronting negligent rental property owners.
Continue reading ‘Landlord Fined $18K For Missed Inspections’
by | Oct 22, 2024 1:27 pm | Comments (32)
Thomas Breen photo
LCI's Liam Brennan (center) and Javier Ortiz with Fire Inspector Steve Martin at an inspection on Nash St.
Watch out, derelict landlords: housing code violations can now come with a $2,000-a-day price tag levied directly by the city.
The Board of Alders instituted that maximum fine for landlords renting out units that are deemed to be unsafe on Monday evening, escalating the consequences from a previous $250-per-violation fine.
Continue reading ‘Alders Approve $2,000 Fines For Landlords’
by | Oct 17, 2024 6:59 pm | Comments (40)
Jabez Choi photo
Police, social workers, and unhoused activists in the final hours of Thursday morning's encampment.
(Updated) As a tent encampment on the Green came down Thursday morning, city homelessness services coordinator Velma George and Lora Weeks soon realized they had met before — at a different New Haven encampment, back in 2016.
George had been an outreach social worker. Weeks had been living outdoors.
Eight years later, they found themselves back in the same positions.
by | Oct 16, 2024 3:51 pm | Comments (39)
Thomas Breen file photo
Xu (in the background) arguing with Brennan, and shouting at this reporter: "Don't take a picture!"
A fatal-fire-inspired inspection of another one of Jianchao Xu’s potential rooming houses came to an abrupt end when the landlord confronted the city crew on his building’s front porch.
“Why did you come here? Because I’m a colored person? Why did you single me out?” Xu asked, his phone’s camera pointing at Livable City Initiative (LCI) Executive Director Liam Brennan. “This is not a communist country.”
Continue reading ‘Landlord Standoff Stops Short Inspections’
by | Oct 15, 2024 7:51 pm | Comments (10)
Laura Glesby Photo
Shenae Draughn, right, responding to a room of applause at her appointment.
Shenae Draughn will once again step in as the interim head of the Housing Authority of New Haven and its affiliate organizations, after Karen Dubois-Walton steps down in November.
Continue reading ‘Draughn To Lead Housing Authority, For Now’
by | Oct 11, 2024 3:51 pm | Comments (24)
Thomas Breen photo
A sidewalk memorial to Kenneth Mims, who died in the Oct. 6 fire at 516 Elm St.
X photo
Firefighters on the scene of the fatal fire.
City housing code inspectors hadn’t been back inside 516 Elm St. for more than a year before last Sunday’s fatal fire — but not for lack of trying.
by | Oct 2, 2024 4:16 pm | Comments (46)
Thomas Breen photo
Canna-future seen at 1041 State.
Plans to bring a cannabis dispensary — and not 75 new apartments — to an Upper State Street warehouse took one big step forward, after a Fairfield-based housing developer flipped the property for $3.15 million to a local bud entrepreneur looking to bring “Hi!” to the people.
by | Oct 2, 2024 10:57 am | Comments (10)
Showing up: Street medicine outreachers Phil Costello, Emma Lo, Claudette Kidd at WNHH FM.
Teens have started jumping out of cars and attacking homeless people sleeping on the street in Fair Haven, according to a veteran street outreach worker.
Continue reading ‘Street Attacks On Homeless Reported On Rise’
by | Sep 27, 2024 3:48 pm | Comments (38)
Thomas Breen photo
Welcome back, Chapel Street, looking east from Church.
Eastbound travel lanes are back open for the first time in a year and a half on a downtown block of Chapel Street — which is no longer a roadway-shuttering construction zone, and which now has 166 new places to live.
Continue reading ‘Chapel Lanes Reopen, With "Archive" Apartments’
by | Sep 24, 2024 12:06 pm | Comments (14)
Thomas Breen photo
Yvonne Watts (right), with neighbor Lourdes Oritz, at a Mandy Management building that has failed two recent LCI inspections: "If they fix anything else, they're going to go up on rent."
Yvonne Watts said she doesn’t want Mandy Management to repair her bathroom mirror or replace her kitchen countertops — because she’s afraid that will raise the rent too high.
Continue reading ‘Tenant To Mandy: Please Don't Fix My Apartment’
by | Sep 23, 2024 11:46 am | Comments (16)
Glendower Group renderings
63 new apartments approved for 201 Hazel ...
... and 50 senior dwellings approved for 34 Level.
The City Plan Commission signed off on 162 new mostly affordable apartments to be built in Newhallville, West Rock, and Whalley — as part of three more new-construction projects involving the housing authority’s nonprofit development affiliate, the Glendower Group.