Deborah Stanley glared at the landlord who owns the house across from her own. “Say a group of us — I’m just saying! — a group just came over and moved into your area … and we stopped cutting the grass and we let the porch go, and we had the kids running around, running through your yard?”
“I would also be upset,” Mendy Edelkopf acknowledged. “I agree with you. I’m here because I want to give you guys my number. If there’s any issues, I’ll come and meet you guys personally.”
Their conversation didn’t stop there.
And if Erik Johnson has his way, it will keep going, with not just Mandy Edelkopf, but with other landlords whose rental properties sit side by side with well-kept homes owned by Newhallville families struggling to keep their neighborhood clean and safe.
The conversation took place Tuesday afternoon at the police substation on Winchester Avenue. (Click on the video for highlights.) Johnson, who heads city government’s neighborhood anti-blight agency, the Liveable City Initiative (LCI), convened it.
Edwards, Johnson, and Edelkopf.
The conversation was one part of a broader effort to turn Newhallville around. The neighbors do a lot of it on their own: They tend gardens at their homes and in communal spaces. They keep up their properties and spend time on their front porches watching the street. They hold community clean-ups and cook-outs. (The latest clean-up took place Wednesday.) They work with community-based cops to cut crime. They work with not-for-profit builders to renew sturdy, stately old homes (while seeing speculators and their co-conspirators destroy other homes and sometimes go to jail for mortgage fraud).
Neighbors want their efforts matched by outside landlords. They want the landlords to screen their tenants better, get rid of problem tenants, and improve broken-down, trash-strewn properties.
Johnson invited Edelkopf to Tuesday’s conversation. Edelkopf runs Mandy Management, one of the rental real-estate empires in New Haven’s poor and working-class neighborhoods. Mandy manages an estimated 1,300 rental units for faceless, hard-track-down investment partnerships formed by his boss, Menachem Gurevitch. Johnson’s LCI staff regularly fields complaints from people about conditions at Mandy-managed properties.
Johnson also invited Alfreda Edwards and Delphine Clyburn to the conversation. Edwards and Clyburn own homes in Newhallville and represent the neighborhood on the Board of Aldermen. They often forward complaints — about Mandy, about other landlords — to LCI.
Homeowner Deborah Stanley (at left in photo) was invited, too. Like Edwards, Stanley lives on Sheffield Avenue — where, Edelkopf told her, “I own almost half the block.” Sheffield is lined with grand century-old homes tended with loving care by homeowners. And rental properties where trash piles up, porches sag, and, in the case of the house across from Stanley, police found a dead body wrapped in a carpet.
That happened before Mandy took over the property (on behalf of a limited-liability corporation called “Netz-TE LLC”) from a different landlord. No dead bodies have turned up since. Sitting on her front porch with her grandchildren, Stanley has still observed much to complain about.
“Go up there! That building is horrible!” Stanley told Edelkopf. “I’m telling you!” Until recently bags of trash overflowed on the property. She watches a slanted second-floor porch, worrying it will collapse. Tenants create havoc.
She and Edwards proceeded to argue with Edelkopf about whether a recently returned tenant had tried to burn the house down (the account they heard) or whether he merely went to the hospital for a psychotic episode (Edelkopf’s version).
“We know how hard it is sometimes to get good clean tenants,” Edwards remarked. “But you need to do a little bit more in background checks.”
Elkin responded that Mandy always does background checks. Sometimes a tenant who has a clean record changes his or her ways after moving in, he said. He spoke of how renters don’t take care of properties as well as homeowners do. That’s why, he insisted, he wants to cooperate with the neighbors — to protect his investment by being a good neighbor.
He was pressed on how many tenants receive government assistance to rent with him; he didn’t have exact figures on him. They discussed one program under which a problem tenant rented; Edelkopf said it took him three years to evict her. Several times he spoke of how legal aid suits tied him up for months or years in trying to remove problem tenants.
Edwards: “How many Caucasians you got living in that building?”
Edelkopf: “Caucasians?”
Edwards: “White folks living in that building?”
Edelopf: “White folks? I have no idea! You think I know it by heart? I don’t care about the colors! I don’t take a tenant if he’s color this or color this. I take a tenant if the background is clean. If they have a good job. …”
Edwards and Stanley said they want to see more Caucasians as renters. They said they’d like Edelkopf to rent to Yalies. Edelkopf expressed disbelief that Yalies would move into the neighborhood; Edwards and Stanley responded that some already have.
Edelkopf emphasized that he lives “five minutes away,” not out of town. (“I don’t live in New York! I live in New Haven!”) He said he personally visits his buildings often. He said he gives out his cell phone number so he can respond quickly to problems.
Stanley asked him where he lives. Answer: The Beaver Hills neighborhood. That’s when she asked him how he’d like to live with what she and her neighbors live with.
The meeting ended with Edelkopf giving out his cell number; Johnson and the neighbors said they want him not only to respond to complaints, but to prevent the problems in the first place. And Johnson spoke of bringing other major landlords — such as the elusive Michael Steinbach and Janet Dawson of Diamond Properties (and before that, the notorious Apple Management) — in for similar conversations.
Then the group traveled a block uphill to the Mandy house (pictured) across from Stanley’s on Sheffield Avenue.
Some of the old problems — mounds of trash in back, a broken pipe leaking water from the ground in front — were not in evidence. A broken window was, along with the sagging upstairs porch. The grass there and at other nearby Mandy Management properties had been cut.
Before Edelkopf left, he bumped into Ted Farrow, an LCI housing inspector. Farrow told him he’d received a complaint about a broken fence at a Mandy property on Butler Street. Edelkopf promised to get right on it.
(Correction: Edelkopf’s name has been corrected from an earlier version of this story and in earlier stories about him on the site; it’s still wrong in the video.)
Previous stories about Newhallville’s turnaround efforts:
• Newhallville Bounces Back; House Will Get Built
• Levin To Newhallville: “We’ll Be Back”
• Cops Make Arrest In 83-Year-Old Prof’s Mugging
• “Let There Be Light” (Emitting Diodes)!
• “Serenity” Takes Root On Shepard Street
• Bird Garden Fights Blight
• Yale Flees Newhallville After Prof’s Mugging