Alders Approve $2,000 Fines For Landlords

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.

At a full board meeting in the Aldermanic Chamber of City Hall, alders unanimously passed an ordinance amendment to the city’s housing code.

The amendment allows the city to fine landlords for code violations up to the maximum amount allowed by the state. Effectively, according to LCI Director Liam Brennan, that increases potential housing code fines from a maximum of $250 per violation to up to $2,000 per violation per day that the issue goes unfixed.

The amendment also institutes a new mechanism for landlords to contest civil citations: empowering volunteer ​“hearing officers” appointed by the city to adjudicate all housing code appeals. This creates a system for enforcing housing code parallel to the way the city currently addresses blight violations and holds accountable landlords registered with the city’s licensing program.

Both changes are part of a broader effort to overhaul the Livable City Initiative (LCI), the city agency tasked with enforcing the housing and blight codes. As the city contends with relatively old architecture and a very low vacancy rate (meaning limited choices, higher rents, and less market power overall for tenants), many renters have found themselves living in substandard conditions.

LCI has faced criticism for insufficiently holding landlords accountable for those conditions. The stakes can be high: five months after the city reached a $14.5 million settlement for a deadly fire in an illegal rooming house fire that LCI failed to shut down, another man died in an Elm Street house that never received a mandatory reinspection from the agency. LCI recently created five new housing inspector positions to increase the department’s capacity. 

Meanwhile, as LCI’s recently-appointed director, Brennan has sought to speed up the department’s inspection and communication processes. He framed the hearing officer system created by Monday’s ordinance amendment as one step toward that goal.

Brennan has said that the department’s previous practice of working with the state’s attorney’s office to prosecute the most egregious code violations in criminal housing court entailed too much bureaucracy and built-in delays. 

“It impedes us from meeting the expectations of the public,” he said on Monday.

A civil citation hearing system — enabling the city to levy municipal fines, in with New Haven’s blight enforcement system — will ​“just make us so much more efficient and effective,” Brennan said. ​“It will really give us more teeth.”

Legislation Committee Chair and Wooster Square Alder Ellen Cupo advocated for the amendment during the alders’ meeting on Monday. ​“This amendment seeks to address the delays in the housing code violation process … without a court order,” she said.

It will ameliorate ​“unsafe and unsanitary conditions” that ​“LCI has not always been able to address,” said Health and Human Services Committee Chair and Downtown/East Rock Alder Eli Sabin.