Paul Bass photo
Reinvention team: LCI's Rosario, Brennan and Williams at WNHH FM.
Rosaly Rosario discovered that a rundown vacant house on Sylvan Avenue wasn’t so vacant after all.
The New York-based owner had let it deteriorate and boarded it up. Two homeless people needed a place to sleep, so they ended up there instead. For a while.
It wasn’t a safe situation. So Rosario, a Hill native who now serves the neighborhood as a Livable City Initiative (LCI) specialist, went to talk to the people. She explained the situation, offered to link them to help and a place to stay.
The couple left for elsewhere. The house was still a problem for the neighborhood. The problem landlord didn’t respond to efforts to make contact. Rosario had notices issued to him about code violations. Still no response.
Rosario brought the information, including photographs, to Sinclair Williams, a former legal aid lawyer who went from holding government accountable to trying to make it work from the inside as an LCI-assigned city staff attorney. Now Williams is preparing the paperwork to bring the absentee owner before a city hearing. The owner will either need to make repairs quickly to make the property safe. Or he’ll face fines that can run as high as $2,000 a day.
Based on recent experience in New Haven, those fines could mount quickly. And the owner will either make the repairs. Or look for a buyer who might do better by the Hill.
That recent experience has occurred at LCI, the newly retooled city government anti-blight and housing-code-enforcement agency.
Eight months ago, Mayor Justin Elicker tapped a new leader for the agency. The administration gave it a newly refined mission: double down on inspecting code violations, fining and hauling slumlords before volunteer hearing officers, chase after those responsible for illegal dumping. (Meanwhile a different part of government would take over affordable-housing construction projects LCI used to run.)
Elicker chose one of his most prominent critics to assume the job: Liam Brennan, a former federal prosecutor and legal aid lawyer who ran for mayor against Elicker partly on a fix-LCI platform.
Brennan accepted the challenge to put his critiques and suggestions in place. He hired new staffers like Williams, offered support (including a newly digital record-keeping and communication system) to existing workers like Rosario to tackle the task of monitoring 9,400 multifamily properties, many of them controlled by irresponsible, absentee owners.
Call it LCI 3.0: The third iteration of an ambitious city agency that began in the mid-1990s as a community policing-inspired “let’s get small” effort to turn abandoned homes and lots to abutting property owners or into community gardens; to a post-scandal retooling into a home-building and accountable inspection team; to the current 40-person team laser focused on inspections and tracking down elusive scofflaws.
Click here, here, here, here, and here to read about examples of progress that has already occurred — as well as obstacles remaining to be overcome.
And click on the video below to watch three key members of the team — Brennan, Williams, and Rosario — discuss their work Thursday on an edition of WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” program.
Click here to subscribe or here to listen to other episodes of “Dateline New Haven.”