As the skeletal remains of 50 abandoned felines were removed from a foreclosed-upon Quinnipiac Avenue house Thursday, City Hall’s Andy Rizzo vowed that his anti-blight agency will take lessons from the episode as it confronts a new wave of abandoned homes.
Rizzo (pictured), director of New Haven’s Liveable City Initiative (LCI), spoke at a press conference one day after neighbors alerted TV stations to an overpowering stench that led to the mound of cat remains in a basement apartment of the boarded-up house at 467 Quinnipiac Ave. The bank that foreclosed upon the house earlier this year sent a cleaning crew to remove the remains Thursday, Rizzo said.
LCI had received repeated calls and emails from neighbors about the stink coming from the house, beginning last fall.
Rizzo was asked at the press conference: Did LCI drop the ball?
“We’re going to learn a little from this,” Rizzo said, “so in the future it won’t get to this point. As we get more foreclosures in the city, we have to deal with the issues that arise from vacant houses.” Foreclosures went up 80 percent in New Haven this past year. The number is projected to continue to rise this coming year, with an array of attendant blight problems.
What might Rizzo’s office do differently in the future in cases like 467 Quinnipiac?
“Maybe make sure there is a little more follow-up on my part,” he said. LCI gets 50 to 60 complaints a week about neighborhood problems, he said. His neighborhood workers and inspectors respond to them. “Maybe I need to follow up more,” too, he said.
Rizzo said he was familiar with the email complaints neighbors had sent LCI.
The complaints included reports of trash left on the property. LCI sent the building’s owner three separate orders demanding removal of trash.
On one visit LCI found a squatter living in an upper-floor apartment and subsequently made sure the premises were sealed, Rizzo said. “The apartment was full of human feces.”
The cat remains discovered Wednesday were in a basement apartment. Rizzo said his staffers had knocked on that door during a Jan. 6 inspection. But the apartment was sealed, and they didn’t have permission to enter.
He said Thursday that he doesn’t know who kept the 50 cats there and abandoned them, or how long they’d been there.
Neither did Stephani Johnson, the police department’s animal control officer (pictured). She hadn’t been in the basement apartment as of Thursday’s press conference. She did see the photos of what had been found there. She said the photos were gruesome.
Johnson said she had visited the property earlier this year on a report of a stench emanating from cats. She found six cats living with the squatter on the upper floor.
With foreclosures on the rise, the animal shelter is receiving a call per day on average from someone needing to leave a pet behind, Johnson said. In some cases the caller has to leave a home because of a foreclosure.
This isn’t the first cat-overrun hovel Johnson has encountered. In the summer of 2007, for instance, she was called to a Girard Avenue home where 94 cats were living. She had them removed.
“Some people have mental health issues. They have hoarding issues,” she said.
Maria Negron (pictured), who lives across the street from the house, said she hadn’t been aware of the cat horror lurking within. But she had worried about the abandoned and unkempt house.
“I’ve been afraid. I was always thinking a fire would light up or something,” she said. “I feel relieved because they found something that is being taken care of.”