Displaced Tenants Must Find New Homes

Elsa Bradley got to return ​“home” for a few minutes Monday, in the company of a firefighter — and left reunited with Emily, the beloved parakeet she left behind in a building feared ready to collapse.

Since Thursday, Bradley has been stuck in The New Haven Inn motel out on Whalley Avenue worried about the fate of the bird she had to leave behind when she learned that her 66 Norton St. apartment was no longer inhabitable.

She had to leave her Emily behind when she and her neighbors were forced to evacuate on 45 minutes notice after it was discovered that the more than 100-year-old 41-unit building that she’d lived in at 66 Norton St.— five years this coming December — was structurally unsound and in danger of collapse. (Read more about that here.)

On Monday, officials let Bradley and other 66 Norton tenants grab essentials from their apartments. Tenants had a short window of about four hours to retrieve documents, medicine, baby food, diapers, and clothes. But they had to leave behind furniture and other belongings until officials deem the building safe enough — not to return to live in but to enter to collect the rest of their stuff to move elsewhere.

“It’s been a lot of emotional stress,” Bradley said as she stood outside the building. ​“I took off work today.”

Some of that stress was relieved about 30 minutes later when Bradley’s son emerged from the building with Emily in her cage. Bradley said she was taking Emily back to the hotel with her. Her next order of business was to find out where both she and Emily could call home next.

The fate of tenants like Bradley became at least slightly clearer Monday. City Building Official Jim Turcio said that based on an engineer’s report, 66 Norton St. won’t be habitable for at least months, if not longer. It will need major structural repairs.

“We don’t see the building coming down for a while,” agreed Rafael Ramos, deputy director of the city’s anti-blight agency, the Livable City Initiative (LCI), one of a team of city officials working practically around the clock since last Thursday to help families and deal with the emergency at 66 Norton.

So the 80 mostly low-income people who have been living in some cases in rundown motel rooms all weekend will not return to 66 Norton. Instead, building manager, Mendy Katz, is finding many of the tenants apartments in other buildings he manages through the Ocean management empire. The building’s Brooklyn-based owner, Ernest Schemitsch, has agreed to cover the tenants’ down payment and first month’s rent, according to Ramos. Katz has also given the tenant households (depending on size) Visa debit cards with between $50 and $160 so that they can buy food to eat since they can’t store or cook food at their motels.

Ramos said that under the state’s Uniform Relocation Act, the tenants are entitled to up to $4,000 total for help with the costs of moving and eating when officials require them to leave their building. The city can place liens on the dangerous property if the owners don’t cover those costs, Ramos said. He and other officials said Katz has stepped up and taken responsibility for helping the tenants resettle.

“We are working with a handful of other landlords and agencies regarding rehousing,” Katz told the Independent Tuesday morning.”

“We are awaiting instructions from the city to be able to assist tenants to move their belongings from the building to the new homes they have found in the safest and organized fashion. Those new apartments will be inspected by LCI prior to move in.”

“Triage”

So in addition to other duties, officials were performing ​“triage” Monday on tenants’ temporary emergency living arrangements, Ramos said — for instance, moving one family with an asthmatic child from a musty room at the Three Judges Motor Inn to a cleaner room at the nearby New Haven Inn.

And helping, starting at 1 p.m., make forays into 66 Norton to retrieve belongings.

Vanessa Grassi was one of the first tenants to arrive back at 66 Norton before city LCI Housing Code Inspector Rick Mazzadra started taking names and pairing tenants with firefighters who escorted them to their apartments to make sure they would be safe in the building. Fire Batallion Chief Robert Ortiz said that there were four firefighters at the scene Monday to help tenants enter and exit the building safely. Some 13 families had stopped by in the first couple of hours to retrieve more of their belongings.

There is expected to be another opportunity for tenants to retrieve belongings if they missed the opportunity on Monday, given that some might have been at work when meetings were held at hotels earlier in the day. Tenants were not allowed to move bigger items like furniture but are expected to be told by Friday when they might be allowed to do that.

Grassi said she’d been living in her fifth-floor apartment with her son and daughter for about a year and a half.

She said Monday was a whirlwind for her because she doesn’t have transportation. Like Bradley, she is staying at the New Haven Inn. She was in the middle of trying to wash clothes for her family — there’s no laundry facility at the motel — while also trying to get to the apartment building to pick up more things for her and her children. When they left Thursday they left her son’s ADHD medications, her diabetes medication, and her sleep apnea machine. On Monday she was trying to quickly pick those things up in time to collect her laundry and meet her kids who were due back at the motel around 3:45 p.m.

“It’s been a crazy weekend,” she said good-naturedly. ​“I feel bad for another lady with a baby-baby. They finally got her a microwave but she was worried about the $400 worth of diabetes medicine that she lost because they didn’t get her a fridge in time.”

Unlike other tenants, Grassi had found her three-bedroom apartment at 66 Norton, which she rented for $900 a month, to be a bit of a godsend in a tight and expensive New Haven real estate market. Her rent included both heat and hot water.

“It was clean even if the apartment was a little crooked,” she said.

Grassi said she had no complaints aside from the ancient, often broken elevator. She also gave props to the management for being responsive to this crisis, including by providing them with the Visa cards. Tenants said that they had been told that the cards would be refilled every three days or so. And those funds go fast between food and transportation, Grassi said.

Some people also were able to get microwaves and refrigerators placed in their rooms. Transportation to school was arranged to make sure that the children of the complex could get to school though not all parents were privy to that information and kept their children home.

“It’s hard,” Grassi, who works full time at a Wendy’s in North Haven, said. ​“I had to take today off and a half a day on Friday. The motel is not the best looking but it’s better than the street.”

She already has her eye on a new apartment on Winthrop Avenue. But the logistics of getting it inspected by LCI while trying to get laundry done and getting to 66 Norton and then back to the motel before her children returned home were all a bit much for a woman with no transportation.

Owner Praised

Shelly Sutherland and her husband Dwain Perkins made their way over from their motel room at the New Haven Inn with their 1‑year-old daughter while their sons were at school. The family had been initially placed at Three Judges, which didn’t work for the family of five. (Read more about that here.)

Sutherland said the accommodations at the New Haven Inn worked a little better for the family. They have access to a microwave and a fridge. Now they’re on the hunt for an apartment with monthly rent similar to the $875 they paid at 66 Norton.

She said a tenant meeting was held at the motel Monday, and the family was told that it would be provided a security deposit and the first month’s rent at a new apartment. But they had to find it and quickly. How quickly, she said was unclear.

“They just say, ​‘As soon as possible,’” she said.

Sutherland and Perkins came by Monday to pick up more school uniforms and asthma medication for their 7‑year-old, who was slated for a trip to the doctor. He’d been to the intensive care unit three times in the last year because of his asthma; the doctor would determine if black mold at the now condemned building was the culprit.

Former live-in building superintendent Stephen Izzo has been a staunch critic of the owner and management of the building. But he said that when it comes to the relocation of the tenants — him and his wife and their son being among them — the owner and management did the right thing. His family has been staying at Three Judges. He came back Monday to get his tools, some blankets, and clothes.

“They’re not good landlords,” he said. ​“But now, they’re helping.” Like several people Monday, he praised the tireless efforts of Rafael Ramos who was meeting with tenants at the motels prior to the 66 Norton retrieval runs.

Katherine Peccerillo, an attorney with the New Haven Legal Assistance Association, was among those praising Ramos whom she said was delivering the ​“right message” to tenants so they knew that they had some help.

She said she does have some concern that tenants with disabilities might have a hard time navigating the process of finding a new home. And it will be a challenge for people who can’t afford to take off from work to look for a new place to live without risking their job. In fact, one man had been informed before the meeting that he had been terminated. Peccerillo also noted that while someone else is footing the costs for motel rooms, some money for food, and eventually first months and a security deposit for tenants, it’s likely that tenants are still being hit with unexpected out-of-pocket costs.

“They had just paid their rent and many have a full fridge of food,” she said. ​“There will be duplicate costs on these families that can’t afford duplication.”

Peccerillo also expressed concern that every tenant might not be getting needed information. She has a client who is caring for a three-month-old infant and missed the tenant meeting at her hotel because she was nursing her baby. She questioned why the Red Cross didn’t step in the same way it would if the inhabitants of 66 Norton had been displaced by fire instead of neglect.

“There were kids who went to school today in the same dirty clothes from last week because they didn’t know how long they would be gone and there is no laundry,” she said. ​“This is a basic hygiene issue. Why not mobilize a response in the same way you would if this had been a fire?”

Meanwhile, on the WNHH FM radio show ​“Mayor Monday,” Mayor Toni Harp praised the way different city departments — fire, building code, LCI, schools — worked together in the 66 Norton crisis. That made a big difference, she said.

She also said that the discovery of the structural problems by LCI’s Mazzadra demonstrated the importance of the city’s program of inspecting and licensing rental buildings. She said she had inquired how the four 66 Norton apartments rented under the federal Section 8 program had passed inspections. She learned that in fact, those units had been in good shape, she said.