Files Reveal Slumlord-Chasing Challenges

The owner of a rundown two-family home in the Hill — which was apparently being turned into a death-trap rooming house — kept missing appointments with city inspectors to qualify for a needed license.

Then flames erupted in the house, tenants leaped from windows — and two men never made it out alive.

The missed appointments are among the revelations from interviews and from files released Wednesday about government efforts to ensure safe conditions at 150 West St., the two-family house ravaged by Sunday’s fire, where it turns out 16 people were living.

The files, released to the Independent in response to a Connecticut Freedom of Information Act request, come from the city’s neighborhoods anti-blight agency, the Livable City Initiative (LCI). LCI is one of several agencies responsible for monitoring housing conditions, including responding to blight complaints and inspecting rental apartments as part of a residential licensing program.

Information about the work of other agencies at 150 West St. — such as the fire marshal’s office — remains under wraps for now as state and local investigators probe the cause of Sunday’s deadly blaze, which also injured four firefighters. For instance: the fire chief said the house did have smoke detectors but can’t say yet whether the detectors were working; three tenants and a firefighter involved in the incident have told the Independent that no detectors went off. Neighbors and tenants said it had become a drug house, with open illegal drug use.

Mayoral spokesman Laurence Grotheer said a total of 12 city agencies, including the police department, are investigating what happened Sunday and ​“working on responses.”

LCI officials are examining the 150 West file to see how to improve how it goes about trying to keep tabs on conditions at tens of thousands of rental apartments in New Haven.

The death of two tenants amid hidden dangerous conditions has haunted LCI staffers who work sometimes around the clock chasing after problem landlords and ensuring that people have heat in the winter and safe places to sleep. The fire occurred as LCI has undertaken a multi-pronged effort to improve its system for licensing and monitoring landlords.

“This has all been very hard for us,” LCI Executive Director Serena Neal-Sanjurjo said in an interview Wednesday afternoon in LCI’s third-floor office suite.

“The owners of that property have some culpability. But we still have to do a better job of what we’re doing. You put your emotions aside and get to what you need to do. Our charge now is: How do we move forward to do the right job for the rest of the units in the city? It does take time. It does take resources.”

4 Inspectors. 25,000 Apartments

Landlords who rent out two or more apartments in buildings they don’t live in must apply to LCI for a residential license. They must renew it every three years and be reinspected.

But LCI has only four inspectors to do that job. It has about 25,000 apartments eligible for the program, according to Neal-Sanjurjo.

Records show that Ismet Jashari, the listed owner in 2013, did pay $100 that year to apply for a license. He and Dorjan Jashari, both of Yonkers, owned the property until this March, when they sold it to John Farrar of the Bronx (who hung up on the Independent when a reporter called him for comment.)

Neal-Sanjurjo said that internal departmental records confirmed that Jashari had agreed to numerous appointments to let LCI in for an inspection. He repeatedly failed to show up. At one point LCI sent him a certified letter threatening to fine him unless he let them in. The routine continued for years.

“We were trying to schedule with this gentleman for four years,” Neal-Sanjurjo said.

With so many apartments to keep track, LCI gives landlords a chance to follow up on requests. Then it moves to start fining landlords for failing to comply. Neal-Sanjurjo was approaching that point with Jashari.

“We can’t just go into a house,” Neal-Sanjurjo noted. The landlord has to let inspectors in. Or a tenant has to call in a complaint and let LCI in. That didn’t happen in this case.

“If we don’t get a complaint, we don’t know if there are issues,” Neal-Sanjurjo said.

LCI can look at the outside of the property, which it did at 150 West. In 2013 inspector Edward Rodriguez noticed overgrown ​“grass and/or weeds” in the front and rear yards and piled-up rubbish. He ordered the mess removed, and it was.

A tenant called LCI on Jan. 1, 2018, to report having no heat. Inspector Abdias Rodriguez visited the apartment and confirmed the report. He ordered the heat restored, which it was ​“the following day,” according to the file.

The file also shows an unspecified complaint received in April 2017 about 150 West, which was forwarded to the fire department. No further information is listed. The file shows another unspecified complaint received in December 2017 about the property.

Meanwhile, the Harp administration has begun neighborhood sweeps conducted by inspectors from multiple departments to identify visible problems. On a sweep of the Hill last September, they noticed junked cars on the property. Inspector Rick Mazzadra issued an order giving Dorjan Jashari ​“hours” to ​“rid [the] yard of all unregistered cars and trucks.” Jashari complied.

When Jashari sold the property this March to Farrar, officials have now noticed, he listed the house as having seven bedrooms — even though the assessor’s database lists it as having five. But the owner had never taken out a permit to modify the building, or turn it into a rooming house. Changes were taking place inside, and no trigger was alerting the city.

Meanwhile, it is keeping an eye on other Jashari-owned properties. On April 4, according to land records, LCI inspector Mark Stroud found an illegal apartment in the basement at 649 Washington Ave. and condemned it.

4‑Pronged Strategy

The city’s working on putting more triggers in place.

LCI is specifically working to ​“revamp the system” for residential licensing, Neal-Sanjurjo said. In the last year it has double the number of licensed apartments to 6,000 —but that leaves another 19,000-odd to go.

Neal-Sanjurjo laid out a four-pronged strategy, including:

• Seeking to hire more inspectors.

• Prioritizing which properties to inspect. LCI has submitted a proposal, currently before the Board of Alders, to change some of the rules for the licensing program, including setting up a three-tier system under which the most problematic properties would be inspected every year, while others would be inspected every two or three years, depending on the owners’ performance.

• Electronically connecting different city departments’ records so LCI inspectors can access instant information about problems at a property. Alfredo Herrera, the city’s geographic information systems (GIS) analyst, has been building an app that will connect all city department’s reports on conditions at properties, so LCI, for instance, can instantly see what the building department or police have found at a location it is addressing.

• Marketing — i.e. letting tenants and neighbors know that LCI needs to hear from them about problems at properties, so LCI knows to send inspectors. That has been one of the goals of the neighborhood sweeps.

Another Tenant Comes Forward

An earlier version of this story follows:

Another former tenant of 150 West St. has come forward to talk about non-working smoke detectors in a carved-up Hill rooming house where a fire killed two tenants, displaced 14, and injured four firefighters.

Meanwhile, local government’s anti-blight agency may not have inspected the premises in six years — and the city’s dodging public requests for information about how it did or didn’t respond to persistent complaints about conditions there.

Those are the latest developments and unanswered questions in the aftermath of the early-Sunday morning fire in the Hill.

The city’s anti-blight agency, the Livable City Initiative (LCI), is charged with enforcing the housing code and responding to tenant complaints. It also is charged with inspecting all non-owner-occupied buildings with two or more apartments every three years to renew residential licenses. Records show the last LCI residential licensing inspection of 150 West St. taking place six years ago, in 2013.

Why didn’t LCI respond sooner?

Did it know that the building had apparently become a rooming house?

City officials aren’t publicly saying. At a press conference called Monday afternoon to discuss the case, administration officials declined to answer any questions about inspections or LCI’s general handling of the case. Officials said they are withholding that information pending the outcome of a state and local investigation into the cause of the fire.

LCI has so far declined to respond to a request first placed on Monday morning from the Independent to review the city’s file on 150 West St.

“I have been informed by the corporation counsel not to comment,” said LCI Executive Director Serena Neal-Sanjurjo.

In the past, LCI has promptly made property files available for review upon request. According to officials, the Harp administration has instituted a new policy under which all files must first be reviewed before release by the corporation counsel’s office, which generally has an extensive backlog of requests to work through and can take weeks or months to release files.

Democratic mayoral candidate Justin Elicker, for one, called the failure to promptly provide the public with information about a building’s inspection history part of a larger problem in the Harp administration with bureaucratic mistrust of the public.

“One of the most important things in ensuring that the public has confidence in the city’s inspection process,” he said in an interview on Tuesday, ​“is sharing publicly LCI’s strategies for how they choose what properties they inspect and what properties they don’t, as well as their progress in inspecting properties fairly across the city.”

He said he has spoken with both landlords and tenants who are dissatisfied with LCI’s residential inspection protocols, with the former feeling unfairly targeted and the latter feeling unfairly ignored.

“LCI should be willing to share that inspection data publicly to build public confidence and public accountability,” he said. This isn’t unique to LCI, he said. He added that the health department has similarly refused to release information about lead inspection and enforcement in a timely manner.

What We Do Know So Far

Tenants and neighbors, on the other hand, have been coming forward with troubling information.

The latest testimony comes from displaced tenant Rontae Hunter. Like two other tenants interviewed by the Independent, Dershaya Hargrove and Hasson Hallet, Hunter confirmed that he did not hear any smoke alarms sounding when fire and smoke engulfed the building. Someone woke him up in time for him to escape with his life.

A fire captain involved in the rescue, Fire Capt. Sean Reynolds. told the Independent (in this article) that he, too, did not hear any alarms working as he and colleagues tried to save the lives of two men trapped on the third floor. (On Monday, Fire Chief John Alston Jr. reported that the building did have smoke alarms, but said it has yet to be officially determined whether they were working.)

Hunter also described a floor plan at the house in which he and other tenants rented individual bedrooms, and had access to one exit out of the building. The house is zoned as a two-family house; the first floor where Hunter, Hargrove and Hallet lived was carved up into separately rented rooms with some doors locked so that tenants could exit only at the front or the back of the building.

In the nearly three days since the lethal fire, neighbors have come forward to talk about 150 West as a ​“problem house” on the block where an out-of-town landlord routinely fought with tenants, and where drug users and dealers reigned on the third floor. Court records (detailed in this story) show a history of allegations of shut-off heat and refusals to make repairs.

“Inactive” License

According to the city’s online permit database, 150 West’s former landlord last pulled a residential license permit for his property in June 2013.

The then-landlord, Ismet Jashari of the Bronx, paid $100 for the residential license, which is required of all landlords who rent one or more units in non-owner-occupied buildings with two or more rental units.

The city’s residential rental licensing program requires LCI inspectors to visit registered properties every three years. The permit’s status is listed as ​“inactive” on the city’s database.

Besides that 2013 residential license, the city has no other records publicly available that indicate work that Jashari or the subsequent landlords, Dorjan Jashari and, as of March of this year, John Farrar, might have done on the building. The last building permit on record for 150 West St. was pulled by former landlord Ariel Martinez in 2000 for $10,000 worth of repairs to the front and rear porches and for the installation of asphalt shingles.

The city’s land record database shows no violation notices or fines ever issued by LCI or by the Building Department in relation to this property.

“Do we need to take another look at how we figure out how some of our buildings are being transformed into these unsafe settings for people?” Mayor Toni Harp said in her latest appearance on WNHH FM’s ​“Mayor Monday” program. ​“We absolutely do. My staff will be thinking about that and working on it. It was changes made to that building that lost people their lives. We have to make sure that doesn’t happen again.”

“Get Out The House!”

Rontae Hunter and his wife moved into a ground-floor bedroom at 150 West St. two months ago. The rent was $500.

They weren’t the only tenants on the ground floor of the legal two-family house. Hunter said two other couples rented two other bedrooms on the same floor, while a single man rented still another on the ground floor. That’s not to mention the nearly dozen other people who were living on the second and third floors.

“It was a rooming house, from what I understand,” Hunter told the Independent on Tuesday morning. (Hunter declined to be photographed for this story).

During his brief stay at the house, Hunter said, he and his wife had no problems with other tenants or with the new landlord, Farrar of the Bronx, who bought the building from Jashari of Yonkers. He had heard that the third-floor apartment was a popular spot for drug dealers and users; he said he steered clear of their business and they steered clear of him.

“We never had no problem with anyone,” he said.

He said he could exit the apartment only through the back of the house because he wasn’t allowed to walk through other tenants’ spaces.

Then, soon after Hunter paid his May rent, he said, came the early Sunday morning disaster.

Hunter said he and his wife were at his mother-in-law’s birthday party until around 2:20 a.m. Sunday. When they got back home to West Street, he said, they immediately got into bed and fell asleep.

A little over an hour later, they woke up with a start. Not to the sound of a fire alarm, but to the sound of people outside screaming about a fire.

He saw lights flashing outside his window, assumed it was the police, and took a look. He found a fire marshal standing right outside, shining a flashlight into his bedroom.

“Get out the house!” he remembers the marshal yelling. ​“The house is on fire!”

When he opened his bedroom door, Hunter said, he could smell smoke from the upstairs apartments.

“Put your clothes on,” he told his wife. ​“We got to get out of here.”

Once they got outside, Hunter said, ​“the house was going up” in flames. He said he later learned that he had remained asleep in the house for a good 10 minutes after the fire had started.

The Red Cross has put him and his wife up at the Regal Inn through the end of Wednesday. After that, he doesn’t know where they’ll be sleeping. He’s calling around to friends and family now, trying to find a place to stay.

As for the landlord, he said, the last time he spoke to Farrar was the day of the fire. He has tried calling since, but Farrar hasn’t picked up.

Another tenant, Hargrove, told the Independent she called Farrar during the fire. She said he hung up on her.

Farrar had little to say to this reporter when reached by phone on Tuesday morning.

“I’m sorry. You have the wrong number,” he said, then hung up.

Click on the Facebook Live video below to watch Monday afternoon’s City Hall presser on the fire.

Previous coverage:

• Tenants Who Escaped Deadly Fire: Smoke Alarm Didn’t Sound. Slumlord Didn’t Care
• 2 Die In Hill Fire; Tenants Leap For Lives; Questions Raised On Smoke Alarms, Exits