Eviction Fallout Follows Ex-Newhallville Family

Two years after an eviction lawsuit left Jacqueline Frett and her four kids with no place to live in New Haven, the 35-year-old former Harding Place tenant and her family are now trying to make their way back to the city they once called home.

They haven’t had a home of their own since 2021, when an affiliate of Mandy Management kicked them out for not paying rent on time.

Now crashing in a friend’s living room in the Bronx, Frett wants to come back to New Haven — where her kids attended school for years, where she felt safe and separate from a life she wanted to leave behind. 

“I’ve been trying a whole year and a half to get back here,” she said in a recent interview with the Independent.

But facing a thousands-long Section 8 wait list and the winding down of a seasonal Amazon job, she’s not sure how to return.

Frett’s eviction case started with a notice to quit served in December 2019 and ended with a stipulation that required her to leave her Newhallville apartment in July 2021. The case sent her tumbling into a hole of housing insecurity that she’s still trying to get out of. 

She strains to wrap her head around the fact that one event could have such lasting ramifications. She told her story, based largely on her memory and supported by old court documents and photographs, in three interviews between 2021 and 2023.

Over the course of a series of unstable housing arrangements that Frett and her family have relied on since their eviction case, ​“We lost half our stuff,” she remembered. The kids ​“messed up in school.” She doesn’t blame them. ​“People don’t understand, when you don’t have a stable home and household, it’s hard to maintain something outside.”

Seeking Safety In New Haven

Frett first came to New Haven with her children in 2018 because she wanted to get out of New York City. 

New York was where her grandmother, who raised her for much of her childhood, had recently passed away. It’s where her exes, including one who was abusive and one who she worried might end up in jail, lived. ​“My kids are not street kids,” she said. By 2018, she was pregnant with her fourth child, and wanted the baby to grow up in a place that felt safe.

So when a friend in New Haven called Frett and offered to hand off her three-bedroom apartment for just under $1,000 per month, Frett jumped at the chance. ​“It’s a new start for you and the kids,” her friend had said. The prospect of New Haven promised a new kind of independence. In the Bronx, Frett had relied on her partner to help pay the $2,700 monthly rent; in New Haven, she could afford rent all on her own. 

In the summer of 2018, Frett moved to her friend’s former apartment at 3 Harding Pl. She got a job at Amazon’s North Haven warehouse. Her baby’s first steps and first birthday party took place at that apartment. 

She painted her apartment walls white, with one wall turquoise blue; the landlord supplied the paint, she said.

Behind On Rent, & Forced Out

At first, she neglected to notify the landlord — an affiliate of the megalandlord Mandy Management — that she had taken over the apartment. For a year and a half, she rented the apartment under her friend’s name, and no one noticed. Frett referred to this arrangement as a ​“sublease.” In a separate interview with the Independent for this article, Yudi Gurevitch, a Mandy representative, described her tenancy instead as ​“squatting.”

When Mandy finally realized that their former tenant was gone, they offered Frett a lease in her own name in September 2019. They raised her rent to $1,100 per month — a cost that Frett initially thought she could manage, she said, until she lost her job at Amazon soon after signing the lease. She missed multiple months of rent by December and received an eviction notice telling her she had to leave by the 31st.

“She missed months of rent and eventually amassed $4,325 in unpaid rent,” Gurevitch wrote in a statement provided to the Independent. ​“At that point, we had exhausted all options and had no alternative than to file an eviction notice.”

“That’s New Year’s Eve,” Frett remembers thinking at the time about the original eviction order. ​“That’s my kids.” She skipped Christmas presents that year to pay some money and tide the costs. Amid the eviction lawsuit, Frett took her youngest daughter, Amiahlee, to the hospital three times for a seizure-inducing illness. 

After a series of negotiations, which stalled for a time due to the pandemic, Mandy agreed to allow Frett and her family to live on Harding Place until July 1, 2021, if she paid $275 extra per month. By then, she had regained work at Amazon. At the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, she would change clothes immediately upon coming home, worried about bringing the virus to her kids.

By July 2021, Frett paid what she owed to Mandy, but the landlord and tenant parted on bitter terms. Frett remained outraged by mold that grew on her bathroom ceiling (Gurevitch denied that the mold existed, saying he found no record of complaints about the matter; Frett showed the Independent a video documenting the mold). Meanwhile, Mandy claimed she left a mess in the apartment by the time she moved out (Gurevitch documented a bed frame, food, clothing, appliances, and some trash in photographs of the apartment after Frett moved out). ​“I left some stuff in the kitchen and I told them to throw it away,” Frett conceded.

A Neighbor's Apartment; A Parked Car; Back To The Bronx

Frett found refuge in the home of a downstairs neighbor. She and her kids crashed there, right below the apartment that was no longer theirs, from July until the second week of December. Frett says her neighbor suddenly accused her of stealing a pair of sneakers and kicked her out. The neighbor didn’t allow Frett and her family to retrieve all of their belongings, she said — she lost furniture, clothing, toys, personal documents. 

So Frett found herself piled into her small sedan with four kids and some hastily-packed clothes. She didn’t know where to drive. She left a message with 211, which local shelters require all clients to call for a referral. ​“I’m crying on my phone because I don’t know where to go. Me and my kids are stuffed in the car,” she recalled. 

Frett remembered parking on Sherman Avenue, right by James Hillhouse High School, where her two oldest kids attended school at the time. In the frigid cold, the five of them bundled up beneath blankets and turned the car heater on high. Frett didn’t go to her work shift at night so that her kids wouldn’t have to sleep alone in the car, effectively quitting her job. She rented a grimy motel room for an hour so her family could take showers; she doesn’t remember which motel, but recalls that it was near a highway in New Haven.

Within 24 hours, a 211 operator called Frett back and told her the city’s homeless shelters were full. The operator pointed her toward a program that would cover the first month’s rent and security deposit for a new apartment, but Frett worried that she wouldn’t be able to afford future rent.

Frett and her kids lived in the car for three days. Frett decided to drive back to the Bronx, where her youngest daughter’s godfather, Raphael, offered them his living room. 

To Frett, moving back to New York felt like stepping back into a life she had tried to leave behind. ​“My kids are not street kids,” she said. ​“Moving to Connecticut, they changed a lot.” Where they live now, she said, her kids don’t feel safe going outside.

“I was forced to come back to this place because it’s where I grew up at, this is where I know people,” Frett said. ​“I couldn’t continue living in a car with four kids.”

At first, Frett made the hour and a half commute from the Bronx to Connecticut up to four times per day, where she still worked and where three of her kids still went to school. She would drive to the North Haven Amazon warehouse for her shift starting at 6:45 p.m., then work about ten and a half hours overnight. Some mornings, her kids would take Metro North and meet her at the Stamford station after her shift. Other mornings, Frett would use some of her paid time off to leave a shift early and meet her kids back in New York, only to turn back around and drive them to school in New Haven. 

While her oldest kids went to class in New Haven, Frett would return back to the Bronx for a nap. She’d then return to New Haven to pick up the kids from school; drive them back to the Bronx; then drive another hour and a half to North Haven for her next work shift. She zig-zagged between the two cities so frequently that she worried about her ability to stay awake while driving.

This routine was always supposed to be temporary. But Frett struggled to find housing in New Haven, and the arrangement lasted several months.

One day, Frett’s car broke down on the highway — and she decided that she couldn’t make the commute any longer. ​“It was taking a big toll on me.” She enrolled her middle school-aged daughter, Alexandra, in a New York school. Her teenage sons, Jaykob and Alexis, decided to drop out of high school to help take care of Amiahlee while their mom worked. ​“Ma, you really need the help,” she recalled them saying. To Frett, the situation was unfair. ​“Children shouldn’t even have to do that just to help out.”

Trying To Get Back To New Haven

Frett still hopes to move back to New Haven. She said she’s been on New Haven’s Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher wait list since April 2021; she said there are about 7,000 people ahead of her. When she heard about an initiative to give voucher applicants a priority if they are experiencing homelessness, she said she called 211 this spring — and heard back that since she is no longer based in New Haven, she can no longer qualify.

“I came as an emergency,” Frett said. ​“It was my last option.”

Housing Authority Director Karen DuBois-Walton responded to Frett’s story in an email. ​“These are the stories that break my heart and keep me up at night. They put a personal face of the crisis of homelessness and housing affordability in our city, state and country,” she wrote. 

Regarding the homelessness priority for which Frett didn’t qualify, DuBois Walton added, ​“These ​‘loopholes’ that leave families in limbo are things that it is important we address through the state’s coordinated access network/211 system so that the system may better serve the families who need help.” She suggested contacting the city’s homelessness coordinator, Velma George, who in turn said she would speak with Frett.

In the meantime, Frett has lived in Raphael’s Bronx living room with her kids for over a year. Frett found a seasonal position at Amazon Fresh, a brick-and-mortar grocery store run by the online merchant. Jaykob and Alexis enrolled in a continuing education program for non-traditional high school students last fall; they’re both scheduled to graduate soon. The two of them still visit their New Haven friends every other weekend. ​“I raised them really good,” Frett said. She’s proud that one of her sons got hired to work with younger kids this summer in a New York City Housing Authority-based basketball program.

Still, the year has been marked with grief: Raphael, who provided the family’s haven in the Bronx, passed away last month. Without him, Frett said, ​“I have no more family. That backbone I used to have is all gone. It’s just really me and my kids.”

Raphael’s family has so far allowed Frett and her kids to continue living on the first floor, at least for now. Frett isn’t sure how long this arrangement will last. Without the only other adult who felt like family, she feels more urgently than ever that she needs to come back to New Haven. 

“This is somewhere we just don’t want to be anymore. It’s just traumatizing,” she said. ​“You just want to run.”

See below for other recent stories about New Haven evictions:

• Judge Rejects Newhallville Eviction
• Landlord’s Court No-Show Debated In Eviction
• Lenox Landlord Prevents Sheffield Eviction
• Senior Dodges 50-Cent Eviction
• Landlord Prevails After Eviction-Paper Delivery Debate
• Sunset Ridge Becomes Eviction Central
• Eviction OK’d After Restaurant Shutters
• Eviction OK’d After​“Lapse,” Rent Debate
• Mandy Leads Pack In Eviction Filings
• Eviction​“Answers” Reveal Renters’ Struggles
• Eviction Suit Caps Tenant’s Tough Run
• Investor Skips Hello, Starts Evictions
• Eviction Deal Drops $1 Ruling Appeal
• Judge’s $1 Award Tests Eviction Rule
• Court Case Q: Which​“Nuisances” Merit Eviction?
• ​“Or” Evictions OK’d
• Fair Rent: Dog’ll Cost You $150
• Rent Trumps Repairs In Elliot Street Eviction
• Though Sympathetic, Judge Blocks Eviction
• Family Feuds Fill Eviction Court
• Rent Help Winds Down. What’s Next?
• Eviction Withdrawn After Rent Catch-up
• Hill Landlord Prevails In​“Lapse” Eviction
• Landlord Thwarted 2nd Time On Eviction
• Church Evicting Parishioner
• Hard-Luck Tenant Hustles To Stay Put
• Eviction Of Hospitalized Tenant, 74, Upheld
•Judge Pauses Eviction Amid Rent-Relief Qs
• Amid Rise In​“Lapse-of-Time” Evictions, Tenant Wins 3‑Month Stay
• Leaky Ceiling, Rent Dispute Spark Eviction Case