100+ Tenants Caught In Lead Limbo

Syreeta Nicholson’s second-youngest son Marque already had an elevated blood lead level two years ago when his family first moved into the single-family home at 489 Sherman Pkwy.

Marque’s blood lead level quintupled after just five months of living at the property.

It turns out at least 100 renters like Nicholson have moved into federally subsidized apartments without promised lead paint inspections.

Earlier this week, Nicholson learned from her lawyer, New Haven Legal Assistance Association (NHLAA) Attorney Amy Marx, that all those low-income tenants who live or have recently lived at properties approved by New Haven’s housing authority for a federal Section 8 rent subsidy have not had their units inspected by the city’s Health Department for lead paint hazards.

Late last year, Nicholson was able to move her family and her federally-subsidized Section 8 housing voucher to a new apartment. Marque, now 3 years old, has seen his blood lead level drop back to the same slightly elevated position it was at before his family’s move to Sherman Parkway.

But Nicholson and her eight children aren’t out of the woods yet. This month, they’re planning to move yet again, for the third time in as many years, thanks to another Section 8‑sanctioned property with dangerous living conditions.

“I’m always moving,” Nicholson, 38, said from the living room of her soon-to-be-former apartment at 153 Fitch St. Wearing maroon certified nursing assistant (CNA) scrubs, she had just gotten home from work, and was on her way to Beecher School to pick up three of her kids’ report cards.

“It’s tiring,” she said, ​“and it’s aggravating, because you think you’re gonna call this your home and then, bomb, something happens. I just been through so much with these apartments.

“My kids want a home,” she continued, ​“and it’s so sad that you can’t find one here.”

As the city finally closes the books on one months-long child lead poisoning and continually botched lead abatement ordeal at a home in West River (more on that further down in this article), Nicholson represents one of potentially over 100 low-income tenants trapped in an unwitting purgatory in Section 8‑qualified properties that have not been inspected by the city’s Health Department and that may present lead hazards to children under 6 years old.

At Least 117 Lead Inspections Behind

According to information provided by the Housing Authority of New Haven (HANH) / Elm City Communities, the city’s anti-blight Livable City Initiative (LCI), and the mayor’s office, the Health Department has yet to inspect well over 100 Section 8‑subsidized housing units that the city’s Housing Authority has requested lead paint inspections for over the past four years.

That’s according to two tracking documents used by two different city departments to stay up to speed on which Section 8 federally-subsidized apartments are lead-safe for children under 6 years old to live in.

“We are working with the health department to develop a plan for how they will inspect the units that haven’t yet been inspected and to improve their communication and tracking,” said Housing Authority Executive Director Karen DuBois-Walton.

“The info received is so shocking that I don’t know what to do other than forward to you two,” Legal Aid Attorney Marx told the Independent and the New Haven Register via email earlier this week. ​“There may be ground for litigation but sharing with you as a matter of public concern.”

City spokesperson Laurence Grotheer attributed the Health Department’s Section 8‑related back log to limited personnel and even more limited funding.

“The challenge is meeting the HANH demand while also working to keep current with the health department’s hundreds of other required inspections,” he told the Independent by email, ​“with a reduced roster of inspectors due to the loss of grant funding to underwrite the salaries of those inspectors.”

After Fiscal Year 2017, he said, the state Department of Public Health terminated an annual grant that subsidized the city’s lead inspection program. ​“So this is now the second year without that funding,” he said. He did not share the name of the grant or how much money it provided to the city each year.

Since 2014, the Housing Authority has required that all Section 8 units home to children under 6 years old pass a Health Department-conducted lead paint inspection in order for the landlord to continue receiving low-income tenant rent subsidies.

This locally-required, lead-specific inspection is independent of the federally-mandated Health Quality Standards (HQS) inspection, which in New Haven is conducted by LCI prior to each Section 8 unit’s lease up.

DuBois-Walton explained that LCI inspectors are trained to identify visible lead hazards like flaking paint and dust during the HQS inspections. The more intensive lead-specific Health Department inspections, she said, are reserved for Section 8 units where a child 6 years old or younger will live or is currently living.

“When the health department inspects” for lead, DuBois-Walton told the Independent by email, ​“if the unit is identified as having a lead hazard, the health department must notify us and the landlord so that the landlord can abate. Failure to do so means that the unit will fail HQS inspection and the family will use their voucher to move to a new unit.”

In October, the housing authority paved the way for an Orchard Street tenant and her lead-burdened child to do that very thing by stripping the landlord of her Section 8 subsidy because of unabated lead paint hazards at the property.

DuBois-Walton provided a tracking spreadsheet which is maintained by the city’s Health Department and which the Housing Authority receives a copy of every few months. That document, which can be downloaded here, contains detailed notes on each of the 462 Section 8 lead inspection requests that the Housing Authority put in with the Health Department between Oct. 2014 and Sep. 2018.

By Grotheer’s reading of the data, 160 of those units have been inspected, cleared, and/or are otherwise verified to be lead-safe.

“The occupants of 122 units were unresponsive to health department overtures,” he wrote. ​“And 64 units were no longer part of the Section 8 program.”

That leaves 117 occupied Section 8 apartments for which the Housing Authority has requested a lead inspection, but for which the Health Department has not yet conducted one.

Two LCI tracking spreadsheets obtained by Marx through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request at the end of October indicates that the list of Section 8 properties uninspected for lead despite Housing Authority requests could be even greater than the numbers provided by Grotheer and DuBois-Walton.

Those LCI spreadsheets show 381 Housing Authority lead inspection requests between 2016 and 2018.

Only 30 of those requests have a ​“Date Results Received” indication in the spreadsheet’s final column. Marx said that, based on her conversation with LCI, the ​“Date Results Received” column of that spreadsheet corresponds to the Section 8 apartments for which LCI has received completed lead inspection reports from the city’s Health Department.

Click here and here to download the LCI spreadsheets.

“We Didn’t Ask For This”

One of the uninspected but Section 8‑occupied apartments listed on both the Health Department and the LCI spreadsheets is 489 Sherman Pkwy., a single-family home just across the street from Hillhouse High School.

Nicholson and her then seven children had moved into the property, owned by Mushka Levitin’s holding company Bracha LLC, in Oct. 2016.

At that time, Nicholson’s young son Marque already had an elevated blood lead level of 6 micrograms per deciliter (mg/dL), presumably acquired at Nicholson’s previous Section 8 apartment at 338 Grand Ave.

By Apr. 2017, a follow up doctor’s appointment revealed that Marque’s blood lead level had shot up to 26 mg/dL: 21 points above what local and federal law describe as the threshold for concern about the future development of long-term cognitive and behavioral impairments, and 6 points above the state threshold for childhood lead poisoning.

Nicholson said the Sherman Parkway property had chipped and flaking paint in the upstairs bedrooms, window frames, around the bedroom closets and groundfloor fireplace, and on the front porch.

According to Marx and the Health Department and LCI spreadsheets, the Sherman Parkway house was not inspected by the city for lead hazards prior to Nicholson’s move in.

According to city land records, city lead inspector Andrew Carnvela inspected the property on May 5 and found a wealth of lead paint hazards. The city’s Health Department issued to Levitin a lead paint abatement order on May 8, 2017 and a lead soil abatement order ten days later, on May 18.

The city released Levitin from the two lead abatement orders on June 26, 2017, indicating that the lead abatement work was complete.

Nicholson said that a specialist from the Yale Child Study Center visited her apartment during that time to show her how to do a wet wipe of window sills and floors to quickly clean up lead dust hazards. She also said that the landlord completed the abatement work while she and her family were still living in the property.

By November 2017, Marque’s blood lead levels had dropped to 10 mg/dL. And by June 2018, seven months after Nicholson and her family moved to 153 Fitch St. because of a host of other problems at the Sherman Parkway house, including a sewage leak in the basement and a carbon monoxide leak from the basement furnace on Christmas Day 2017, Marque’s blood lead levels had dropped back to a 6.

“We didn’t ask for this,” Nicholson said about her son’s lead poisoning. ​“What’s inside him affected his brain, his development. Can’t nobody put up with that. And it’s all because of these houses.”

She’s now at 153 Fitch St., a 6‑bedroom apartment owned by Eyal Preis through the holding company 102 CH Fitch LLC.

But she won’t be there for much longer.

Nicholson and her family are now preparing to move from the Fitch Street six-bedroom after the Housing Authority revoked Preis’s Section 8 reimbursements for the property because of recently tended to maintenance problems, such as a sustained kitchen ceiling leak that damaged the ceiling and left a hole in the kitchen floor, as well as other problems with the apartments’ upstairs toilets and kitchen faucet.

On Nov. 15, Nicholson received an eviction notice from the landlord because of alleged nonpayment of rent. Even though Nicholson has never paid out of her own pocket for that property, where the rent had been entirely covered by Section 8 up until the Housing Authority’s discontinuation of its subsidy for the property last month.

“This is totally inappropriate behavior,” Marx said about Preis’s attempted eviction of Nicholson’s family on the basis that he is no longer receiving Section 8 reimbursements.

Reflecting on the child lead poisoning challenges that Nicholson faced at 489 Sherman Pkwy. because of the lack of a lead inspection from the city’s Health Department, Marx said, ​“Your child was wronged by the city.

“The ball got dropped big time by this team,” she said, referring to the Housing Authority, LCI, and the Health Department.

“I want more for my kids,” Nicholson said. ​“I don’t want to be stuck like this. I don’t want to keep moving. That’s tiring. Packing up, moving every year, every six months. That takes a toll on you. I’m surprised my kids ain’t even been like, I’m getting away from my mother. They stick it out with me. We make it happen. We try to turn a raggedy house into a home. We try our hardest to do that.”

Lead Releases At 75 Sherman Ave.

One mile south of Nicholson’s former home at 489 Sherman Pkwy, the city’s Health Department has signed off on a West River home as lead safe nearly seven months after it first found toxic lead hazards at the property.

The lead abatement releases end half a year of legal wrangling between the city, the landlord, and two separate families of tenants, both of whom spent months living out of a Long Wharf hotel as they waited for their apartments to pass inspection.

On Nov. 1, Byron Kennedy, the director of the city’s health department, signed releases for lead paint and lead soil abatement orders for the first and second-floor units at 75 Sherman Ave, according to city land records.

Both releases discharge Abdullah Soliman, the New York-based landlord of the two-family home, from the multiple lead abatement orders that the city sent him in April and May for the two separate units.

“It’s been such a long process,” said Maajid Muhammad, the former tenant of the three-bedroom, first-floor unit, who now lives with his pregnant wife and four children in a new three-bedroom home in Westville.

He said that, despite the city’s sign off, he still doesn’t feel comfortable moving back into the now-cleared property, and is still waiting to return to his former apartment to pick up some of his belongings, even one month after moving into his new house..

“What would have made it better is if everybody did what they were supposed to do when it was supposed to be done,” said Jennifer Williams, who in early October moved back into the cleared second-floor unit with her 2‑year-old son, Elijah Hall.

Both Muhammad’s and Williams’s families lived out of hotel rooms at the New Haven Village Suites on Long Wharf as they waited for their apartments to be abated.

Muhammad and his family first moved into the Long Wharf hotel at the end of April, when former Superior Court Judge Anthony Avallone ordered Soliman to relocate the ground-floor tenants and abate the lead hazards at the West River property.

Soliman had initially tried to evict Muhammad for non-payment of rent, but Muhammad and, subsequently, Legal aid attorney Marx successfully argued that he had stopped paying rent because the conditions at the apartment had given his 1‑year-old child Malik an elevated blood lead level of 11 mg/dL.

Jennifer Williams and her son Elijah moved into the Long Wharf hotel at the end of July, after Marx filed a lawsuit against the city on her and her son’s behalf. In that suit, Marx argued that the city’s Health Department had failed its obligations to inspect and enforce lead abatement deadlines at the West River property, leading to the second-floor child tenant’s elevated blood lead level of 7.

Both Muhammad’s and Williams’s lawsuits wound their way through state housing court for months, with multiple judges forcefully rebuking the city’s Health Department for not following its own regulations around lead inspections and abatement enforcement.

Avallone went so far as to order the city to pay for an independent inspection agency to oversee the abatement of the property because of his lack of confidence in the city Health Department’s work.

According to city land records, the city’s Health Department granted the landlord Soliman a $19,500 loan to help cover the costs of abating 75 Sherman Ave. That loan came out of a $2.48 million grant that the city received from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Lead Based Paint Hazard Reduction Grant Program.

After leaving the Long Wharf hotel and moving into a Westville three-bedroom house in October, Muhammad said he doesn’t plan to move back into the 75 Sherman Ave. ground-floor unit, even though the city has officially deemed it lead safe.

“Brings up bad memories,” he said. ​“Broken promises and everything.”

“In a perfect world, I would have loved to live there on Sherman,” he continued. But he and his wife can’t stomach moving back into a place that gave their family so many problems.

Williams, who moved back into the West River house’s second-floor unit in early October, said she plans to stay for the foreseeable future. And, after the months-long sojourn in the hotel and the subsequent return to the abated 75 Sherman Ave., Williams said she already notices a difference in her 2‑year-old son Elijah’s behavior.

“Elijah is doing really well,” she said. ​“His language skills are a lot better than prior” to the abatement. She hopes that her son’s cognitive and behavioral development will only improve now that he is no longer living in a house with lead hazards.

Previous coverage:

• 2 Agencies, 2 Tacks On Lead Paint
• Chapel Apartments Get 3rd Lead Order
• Lead Sends Family Packing
• Health Officials Grilled On Lead Plans
• Judge Threatens To Find City In Contempt
• Same Mandy House Cited Twice For Lead Paint
• Lead $ Search Advances
• 3 Landlords Hit With New Lead Orders
• Another Judge Rips City On Lead
• Judge To City: Get Moving On Lead
• Health Department Seeks Another $4.1M For Lead Abatement
• City-OK’d Lead Fixes Fail Independent Inspection
• Judge: City Dragged Feet On Lead
• 2nd Kid Poisoned After City Ordered Repairs
• Judge: City Must Pay
• City Sued Over Handling Of Lead Poisonings
• City’s Lead Inspection Goes On Trial
• Eviction Withdrawn On Technicality
• 2nd Child Poisoned; Where’s The City?
• Carpenter With Poisoned Kid Tries A Fix
• High Lead Levels Stall Eviction
• 460 Kids Poisoned By Lead In 2 Years
• Bid-Rigging Claimed In Lead Cleanup
• Judge Orders Total Lead Paint Clean-Up
• Legal Aid Takes City To Task On Lead