Landlord Fined $18K For Missed Inspections

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.

That was the outcome of a hearing held in a second-floor meeting room at City Hall.

The hearing was presided over Friday by volunteer municipal hearing officer James Cormie, one of seven such non-city-employees whom LCI recruited this past summer in order to satisfy the local and state legal requirement that landlords have an opportunity to appeal LCI-issued fines around residential rental licensing program violations before monetary penalties take effect.

The hearing officer process is a necessary intermediate step between when LCI sends out order letters and civil citations to landlords in regards to such violations, and when the agency can actually start trying to collect those funds — through a direct payment by the landlord, or through a civil judgment in state court.

“It creates a stronger enforcement mechanism” to hold landlords accountable, LCI Executive Director Liam Brennan said after Friday’s hearing. It allows the agency to follow through on the promise of fines detailed in order letters and civil citations related to the residential rental licensing program.

He said that LCI is hustling to catch up on a backlog of more than 500 licensing program proposed fines that have to come before hearing officers before they can take effect. A similar hearing officer process already exists for LCI-issued anti-blight fines. Thanks to a Monday vote by the Board of Alders, there will also now be a hearing officer appeal process for LCI-issued fines around housing code violations.

All of these citations proposed fines lead to hearings like Friday’s taking place sometimes as frequently as once a week. 

On Friday, Brennan and LCI attorney Jonathan Bedosky made their case to Cormie for why the landlord Jianchao Xu should be fined for various violations of the city’s residential rental business licensing program.

In particular, they argued that Xu should have to pay a total of $18,200 — or $100 per day for every day that had elapsed since LCI first sent him a civil citation in mid-April for failing to show up to multiple scheduled LCI inspections for his rental property at 516 Elm St. 

Months after those missed inspections, that three-family house — and potential rooming house — became the site of a fatal fire, the fourth fire in less than two years at a Xu-owned property.

Xu was not present in person at Friday afternoon’s hearing. He sent his company’s lead property manager, David Kone, to explain why he had missed those residential rental licensing inspection dates, and to argue for a lesser fine. 

Friday’s hearing took place several days after Brennan and a team of housing code and fire safety inspectors confronted Xu at a potential rooming house he owns on Avon Street amid a fatal-fire-inspired sweep of inspections of all 22 of Xu’s New Haven properties. According to the city land records database, on Oct. 18, the city’s Building Department sent Xu a letter noting that he had installed furnaces at 56 – 58 Avon without the required city permits and approvals. That letter orders the landlord to obtain all required permits within a week of the letter.

Missed Inspections. Fatal Fire. Full Fine

On Friday afternoon, Bedosky, Brennan, and LCI Rental Licensing Program Manager Marta Arroyo explained to Cormie that, earlier this year, Xu had applied for a residential rental license for 516 Elm, but failed to show up to two in-person inspection appointments, and failed to respond to two mailed scheduling letters sent to his Bethany address (after initially being sent to the incorrect business address of 516 Elm).

“We respectfully request you impose a fine” worth the full $18,200, or $100 per day since the civil citation was sent out, Bedosky said to Cormie, or an amount the hearing officer sees fit.

Wearing a dark gray blazer and a paisley-patterned tie, David Kone began his rebuttal by stating that he had only found out about the hearing the night before, and hadn’t had time to gather any evidence or prepare a defense in advance.

He admitted that he had missed one residential rental licensing inspection for 516 Elm, but said he was unaware of any rescheduled appointments. ​“I don’t know why I don’t have notice of as many of these” alleged inspection misses as LCI does, he said.

He also noted that he is not the only one to miss a scheduled LCI inspection. Earlier on Friday afternoon, Kone said, he waited for more than half an hour at a Xu-owned property on Shelter Street in Fair Haven for an LCI inspector who never showed up. Only after reaching out to City Hall did he find out that the inspector had called out sick for the day, and no one from LCI had let Kone know. 

“We’ve had both experiences,” Kone said about the landlord representatives and LCI inspectors not showing up for scheduled inspections. ​“Obviously, there’s been some miscommunication.”

“I do want to get all of our residential licensing in order,” he continued. He told Brennan that he knows Xu’s company has residential licenses for some properties, but not for others. He’d like to get all of them legally and properly licensed.

516 Elm isn’t available for a residential licensing inspection, however, because of the significant damage it sustained during an Oct. 6 fire.

“What was the cause of the fire?” Cormie asked.

That’s still undetermined, Kone said. He said it started in the second floor, and that first-floor tenants told him there was no fire in their part of the building when they evacuated.

“The whole licensing [program], this was set up to prevent fires,” Cormie said. He added later on, ​“The inspection could have prevented this.”

Kone pushed back, noting that an initial investigation by the state police and fire department has determined that there were smoke alarms in the area of the second floor near where 32-year-old New Havener Kenneth Mims died during the blaze. (Brennan later pointed out that, during an August 2023 inspection, LCI found that there were missing smoke alarms, among other code violations; an LCI inspector then observed Xu’s property manager installing smoke alarms soon after that August 2023 order was sent out.)

Kone also noted that the person who lived in the second-floor apartment where Mims died was Mims’s mother. She had lived there for 15 years, and received a Section 8 federal housing subsidy, which requires a separate annual LCI inspection. Kone said that her apartment passed each one of those annual Section 8 inspections — which, Brennan and Bedovsky pointed out, are separate from the city’s residential rental licensing program inspections, which are also administered by LCI.

“It’s a tragic loss,” Kone said about Mims’s death. He said that he and Xu had known ​“Kenny” for 15 years, ever since he was a teenager. But, he pressed, ​“I’ve seen nothing to indicate that it’s a failure on our part” that the fire took place.

The same goes for other recent fires that have taken place at Xu’s New Haven properties (at least four since January 2023). He said one of those fires appeared to be caused by a cigarette; one by cooking error; and two were ​“deliberately set.”

That’s when Cormie dialed up Xu himself — and put the landlord on speakerphone so he could participate in Friday’s hearing.

Xu told Cormie that he did not know Friday’s LCI hearing was taking place until he read about it in a New Haven Independent article. He said he also received an email from Brennan about Friday afternoon’s hearing — on Friday morning.

Like Kone, he acknowledged that he had missed one scheduled LCI residential rental licensing inspection for 516 Elm. He said 516 Elm was part of a batch of ten New Haven rental properties he had applied for residential licenses for. ​“I do not know what happened. It got lost,” he said about the scheduled — and missed — reinspections. ​“We did not receive any letter [for the] civil citation,” which was sent out in April, he added. 

Xu also described the Oct. 6 fatal fire as a ​“tragedy,” and said he’s still waiting for authorities to determine the cause of the fire.

“Personally, I am very upset about what happened, because I’ve known Kenny since he was a teenager. He was so close to us,” Xu said. He said he gave Mims a free place to stay for several months during the pandemic when Mims otherwise had nowhere else to go.

He concluded by saying that upwards of 60 of his New Haven tenants have Section 8 vouchers — and therefore their apartments require annual LCI inspections, independent of the residential licensing program. He said that his apartments pass those inspections each year. 

With that, Cormie thanked Xu for calling in — and then handed down the maximum fine of $18,200 for the missed residential rental licensing program inspections at 516 Elm.

On Henry, "Professional Squatters" Temporarily Took Over

516 Elm wasn’t the only one of Xu’s properties to be heard by Cormie on Friday for potential fines. It was the only one that ended with a definitive penalty, however.

Cormie wound up continuing two other cases involving various code violations found by LCI during residential licensing program inspections at Xu-owned properties at 84 Henry St. and 113 Ivy St. Instead, Kone and Arroyo scheduled reinspections of those properties for the near future, so that LCI could check and see if, as Kone said, the problems identified by LCI months ago had been addressed.

Cormie said that, when he hears these two cases again during a November hearing, he almost certainly will approve some kind of fine. The only questions is: How much? That amount will be determined by what LCI finds on its subsequent reinspections.

Cormie did not conclude LCI’s hearing for 84 Henry St. on Friday. But Kone, while reviewing an order letter with Brennan, revealed some of the problems that he had experienced while trying to make city-ordered repairs to that property earlier this year.

“People took over the apartment and started renting spaces out for crack,” Kone said about the first floor of the Henry Street building. ​“We had quite a problem getting them out.” 

He said that the legal tenants were relegated to sleeping on the kitchen floor while ​“professional squatters” took over part of that property. He referenced an eviction case that named nearly a dozen John and Jane Does as evidence of his company’s attempt to kick out those squatters.

Kone said that he had the hardest time getting any agency, including the police department, to get these ​“professional squatters” out of 84 Henry. Ultimately, he said, the Connecticut Mental Health Center (CMHC) came through and helped. 

“Once we got those people out, we fixed everything,” he said. ​“We have three good families there now.” 

Apparently, he added, ​“we didn’t follow through with you guys” at LCI to let them know that everything had been repaired.

After Cormie handed down the $18,200 fine for 516 Elm St. and continued Xu’s cases for 84 Henry and 113 Ivy, Kone walked to the other side of the meeting room to stand beside Arroyo and make sure he had all of the right dates down for follow-up inspections. He told the group that he had recently bought a new phone because his last one was out of memory; this new phone, he promised, would be used to document all the smoke alarms and carbon monoxide detectors in all of Xu’s local buildings, and would allow him to stay more on top of inspection and reinspection appointments.

“We love our smoke and CO detectors,” Kone said. He said he’s ​“always battling with people who want to smoke inside, or who get upset because they cook badly” and set off beeping smoke alarms. He said he faces the ​“constant problem” of tenants taking apart smoke detectors. But, he recognized, ​“I have to step up my own self-inspections” of Xu’s properties.

He concluded by looking directly at Brennan, and saying he looks forward to working closely with him now that Brennan is the head of LCI. Kone and Xu want to get these properties licensed, Kone pledged, and he would work with LCI to do everything he can to get their licensing in order.

Brennan: "We'll Be Moving Faster In The Future"

In a follow-up interview on Friday, Brennan confirmed that the city has recruited seven hearing officers for the residential rental licensing program appeals process. The city already has two hearing officers for the anti-blight fine process. He plans to propose that existing hearing officers be able to hear housing code violation cases, too, so that LCI can start issuing citations on that front and pursuing financial penalties.

Asked about the six-month delay between when Xu was issued a civil citation in April for 516 Elm St. and when a hearing officer actually heard the case in mid-October, Brennan pointed to the city’s stepped-up recruitment of hearing officers this summer, and to a backlog of 500-plus cases — and that’s just for residential rental licensing program violations. 

“I don’t like delays, and I don’t want delays,” he said. ​“We’ll be moving faster in the future.”

That said, ​“there are safeguards here for landlords.” A landlord can request an appeal. Even if they don’t, the hearing officer — an independent party who does not work for the city — still has to uphold LCI’s proposed fines before they take effect. That hearing officer can also change the final fine to whatever they deem appropriate after hearing LCI’s and the landlord’s arguments.

Brennan described the LCI hearing officer process as required by city statute, and as offering ​“an independent check, someone not employed by the city who ensures we meet our statutory requirements.”