Expired Licenses: LCI’s Afterthought Leaves Tenants’ Homes At Risk

The two-minute video begins with a shot of a home about to crumble.

“Look at my bathroom ceiling,” intones a pained voice. ​”It’s almost going to cave down!” The narrator, a 56-year-old resident of Fair Haven named Darlet Gordon, points the camera toward the yellow-brown surface of her ceiling, folding and peeling like a day-old sunburn, as it steadily drips water down at her. All the while, she repeats to herself ​“Oh my god, look at it.”

Then, minutes later, boom. It came crashing down on top of her.

For two months, Gordon had been calling, texting and sending videos like this to her landlord, Ocean Management, to come and fix the water-damaged roof over her head before it collapsed this July. No response. A Jamaican immigrant and home health aide, Gordon had moved into the three-unit building at 333 Blatchley Ave. over six years ago with her then-teenage daughter. When asked if she had tried to call the Livable City Initiative (LCI) – the city’s housing code enforcement agency – to try and get the ceiling fixed, she said she had never heard of it. The last time a housing code complaint was recorded at the building was in 2012. 

On paper, it’s exactly the kind of situation the city’s Residential Rental Licensing Program was built to address. 

“With a lot of these properties, we noticed that we weren’t able to get into them,” LCI’s Deputy Director Mark Stroud, who oversees the licensing program, told the Independent in a recent interview. ​“People were not filing complaints for whatever reason, maybe because they were scared of retaliation [from their landlord]. So the mission was and is still for the [licensing] program to check inside of those buildings for life safety and quality issues.”

LCI mandates that all landlords seeking to do business in New Haven obtain a unique rental license for each property they hope to rent, and promises to inspect all of the city’s rental units at least once every three years. The program, one that has few parallels in the state, once survived a lawsuit levied against the city by the Greater New Haven Property Owners Association attempting to strike down the requirement. In theory, regular licensing inspections should prevent a faulty water system from escalating to the point of a unit collapsing onto the tenant living there. 

But according to publicly available licensing records, Ocean Management’s rental license for Gordon’s building has been expired since January 2021. Next door, the three-unit 335 Blatchley Ave. house is, according to the same records database, similarly unlicensed. So is 365. And 373. And 421. And 423. With each expired license comes a new story of dismal, dangerous living conditions at these now-unlicensed properties. Tracey, who lives with her boyfriend and one-year-old son at yet another unlicensed property on Blatchley Ave. took her son to the doctor in January and found he had elevated lead levels.

“I brought it to [Ocean’s] attention,” Tracey, who requested only her last name be used, told the Independent. ​“I told them ​‘I have a baby. You need to come fix this ASAP and I don’t want to hear anything else.’” Her building was due for a licensing inspection in early 2021, but no records exist indicating such an inspection took place.

Expired rental licenses aren’t the only thing these properties have in common. They are also owned by companies controlled by the same man, Shmuel Aizenberg of Ocean Management. A review conducted by the Independent found that only 21 of the 324 New Haven properties controlled by the megalandlord – just 6.5 percent – have up-to-date licenses. (Affiliates of Aizenberg’s local megalandlord-property management-real estate investment outfit have been steadily selling off New Haven rental properties all year.)

Their 303 unlicensed properties include nearly 900 units yet represent only a fraction of New Haven’s thousands of unlicensed properties. Each of these buildings currently has no guarantee of a housing inspection unless the tenants within them initiate one themselves. In the midst of a burgeoning housing crisis, such broad abandonment of the licensing mission Stroud spoke about at Ocean’s properties raises crucial questions about LCI’s ability and willingness to enforce local housing law when Ocean decides to break it. 

When reached by phone, Aizenberg told the Independent he did not have a comment on any of the matters discussed in this story.

Over the last two months, I’ve interviewed 28 tenants living at 16 of these unlicensed Ocean buildings. The city is failing to provide these tenants – and likely thousands of others throughout the Elm City – with the extra layer of environmental and financial protection the licensing program was designed to create. 

The cost grows daily. 

“I do whatever I can, and there is no answer,” Gordon said. ​“I just can’t get no one. Nobody is picking up. No one.”

A Fatal Fire & Promised Reforms

In the spring of 2019, a building on West Street owned by a Bronx-based landlord went up in flames, killing two people. That building was unlicensed too. 

The fire, and the subsequent public outcry over LCI’s failure to license the building, sparked sweeping reforms – ranging from a new tiered inspection system to respond more quickly to the worst conditions to requiring that a landlord’s licensing noncompliance at a property be documented on the property title – within the program that fall. The licensing program had been a tool at the city’s disposal since its creation in 2005, but by the time the West Street building caught fire, only a fourth of the city’s rental housing actually had licenses, according to LCI data from that year. 

“This has all been very hard for us,” then-LCI Executive Director Serena Neal-Sanjurjo told the Independent at the time. ​“If we don’t get a complaint, we don’t know if there are issues.”

That was over five years ago. Last month, the Independent sat down with Stroud to discuss the current state of the program, armed with these new reforms. If you’re a new landlord, Stroud explained, the licensing office now mandates that when you acquire a property, you first apply for a rental license, which landlords can complete online or at LCI’s office in City Hall. 

Once LCI processes the application, they schedule a licensing inspection at the property by physical mail to determine if the property is sufficiently up to code. After that inspection, conducted by one of LCI’s 12 housing inspectors, the department produces a report letting a landlord know which ​“tier” of license they have been approved for – the worse the conditions, the higher the tier, and the sooner the next licensing inspection will be. 

For existing licenses, Stroud said the department uses an internal tracking system called Municity to upload licensing inspection results and license expiration dates. Every three months, Municity provides the program with a list of properties whose licenses have expired since the last update. Upon receiving the list, Stroud said his staff then notifies the landlords in question – again by physical mail – and repeats the inspection process in order to renew the licenses.

“Our project manager is actively and aggressively, almost always, sending out letters to people that are non-compliant,” Stroud said. ​“He’s actively sending them out at least every three months.”

LCI Project Manager Darrell Ford and Program Manager Marta Arroyo-Quirama are the program’s only full-time staffers. When reached for comment, both declined to speak and instead referred the Independent to Stroud. The program is also budgeted for an administrative assistant but the role is currently vacant. And though Stroud, who worked as a housing inspector himself for 16 years before becoming deputy director in 2022, said that while the program could always use more hands, he’s proud of the role LCI serves for New Haven residents.

Fires at unlicensed buildings should be a thing of the past.

“The work that this department does for the community and the residents of this state is what keeps me here at this department,” Stroud said. 

“These Living Conditions Are Not Right”

A week before the Independent’s interview with Stroud, Robert Dillon, the top building official from the city’s Office of Building Inspection and Enforcement, stared open-mouthed at two black wires protruding into the decaying basement at 1476 Chapel St. ​“Hey, are these hot? Where do these wires go?” he asked as he began to poke at them with a flashlight. Javier Ortiz, the city’s head housing code inspector, stood next to him alongside a representative from Ocean Management, which at the time owned the 18-unit building. As Dillon looked on in disbelief, Ortiz turned to the Ocean representative, eyebrow raised. ​“You know the reason why this is bad?” he asked.

“Fire?” the representative asked in return. ​“Yes, fire.” Ortiz replied. 

The crowd that had gathered in the building that Thursday morning, made up of LCI officials, building code officials, a fire marshal, the landlord, the tenants, and Stroud himself, had been prompted by the unionization of the building’s tenants two days prior. 

The union, led by music neuroscience researcher Amanda Watts, made headlines by calling out widespread fire hazards and unlivable conditions throughout the building. Sure enough, the horde of city officials found that these fire hazards, like the one in the basement, were everywhere. 

In addition to the basement’s exposed wiring, the building’s fire escape doesn’t reach the ground, requiring tenants to make a 10-foot jump to descend it. Windows in many of the units, including 39-year-old Shaquita Alston’s, don’t open. Smoke detectors needed to be replaced and many of the wooden doors weren’t suitable to stop a fire from spreading. 

According to Watts, a disaster isn’t a matter of if, but when.

“On the very first day I moved in, I invited the gas folks out to turn on my gas,” Watts, sporting pink sweatpants and gold glasses, said. ​“We were down in the basement, and when he noticed the faulty electrical wiring, he said if there was one spark the building could be engulfed in flames.”

Watts moved in 16 months ago, and Ocean had done nothing about the wiring by the time Dillon spotted it this June. To make matters worse, the building’s license has been expired since 2018 and some of the units haven’t been inspected since 2016. The building has never had an up-to-date license while under Ocean’s ownership, which began in 2019.

Before the inspectors arrived, Watts led me around the property, presenting the conditions in a quiet voice that rang with conviction. The story that unfolded during this tour was of a building that had been forgotten by everyone except the people trying to make a home out of it. In one of the property’s vacant units, the ceiling has collapsed just like Gordon’s. The radiators are so old that they’ve started spewing scalding hot water into tenants’ homes at random. Residents, including a girl in kindergarten, frequently wake up with mice in their beds and bite marks covering their bodies. In the middle of the inspection, a mouse even ran into the stairwell.

Alston, a single mom whose oven was broken for all of 2020 and 2021 and who has gone to the hospital for asthma flare-ups exacerbated by her mold-ridden apartment, said she had never heard of residential licensing or a licensing inspection and believes the building has only deteriorated over the 13 years she’s lived inside it.

She, along with Watts, said the city’s inaction is putting them in harm’s way. 

“The city shares a whole lot of the blame,” Alston said. ​“These living conditions are not right. So I don’t get it, like what are you doing? It’s not fair.”

Stroud confirmed that the records reviewed by the Independent of Ocean Management’s lack of rental licenses were up-to-date and accurate. But LCI data also revealed the problem extends far beyond Ocean Management. 

In a statement to the Independent, Stroud reported that as of July 21, 6,086 (63 percent) of the 9,600 properties eligible for rental licenses in the city currently have expired licenses. Of the expired licenses, Stroud claimed 1,887 expired in the last two months, which LCI anticipates will soon be renewed. Another 1,011 of them were previously owner-occupied buildings, which are exempt from rental licensing. He did not specify how long those licenses have been expired.

That leaves a whopping 3,188 properties with expired licenses that, according to LCI, are owned by ​“non-compliant property owners… who have a history of non-responsiveness.” This means that thousands of New Haven residents are left with no guarantee of safe living conditions, and no recourse against negligent landlords. On top of this, the city’s many single-family rentals are not included in the licensing program, even though these rentals make up about 5.5 percent of Ocean Management’s portfolio, for example. 

“​Eligible landlords are expected to comply with the Residential Rental Business License requirements,” Stroud wrote in the statement. 

Stroud also brought up that the department was heavily stymied by the Covid-19 pandemic, at the height of which, he said, LCI was not allowed to do any non-emergency inspections, and therefore could not conduct any licensing inspections. A majority (64 percent) of Ocean’s expired licenses expired in 2021, though some expired as long ago as 2013.

“We were working on an emergency basis only for the protection of our employees as well as the residents of this city,” Stroud said. 

But licensing inspections have been reinstated for nearly two years now. In that time, even one of the most visible buildings in the city has remained unlicensed. 

The day after the union at 1476 Chapel St. went public, Ocean Management sold the building to Danbury resident Neal Patel. Nonetheless, two weeks after the inspection found imminent deadly fire hazards, the fire escape still didn’t reach the ground and wires in the basement remained exposed. According to Watts, there was no communication from LCI in the weeks that followed the inspection, despite officials as high-ranking as Stroud being present to observe the danger and LCI inspection reports showing that conditions in four of the units were so severe that the reports mandate they be addressed in just seven hours. 

And as any progress at the building has stalled, the properties with less media attention continue to fall apart well outside the public eye. 

Gordon, the Blatchley Avenue tenant whose ceiling fell down on her after weakening for months, also had the heat go out in her buildings this past winter; she and her daughter subsequently developed bad colds. Her neighbor, who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation, said that animal feces continue to build up from rodents that have clawed their way into the walls, while mold continues to creep around the air vents. Down the road at Tracey’s place, where new mouse holes are appearing in the basement and the siding is falling off the walls, she also watches mold slowly but surely growing up the side of her neighbor’s building. All of these worsening conditions occurred since licensing inspections have resumed, and they occurred in the unlicensed properties of just one landlord on just one street. 

So while these properties, and the hopes of the tenants within, continue to deteriorate without regulation, it seems it’s only a matter of time before there’s another spark that lights a catastrophe for the city once again. 

“We’ve been here for eight years,” Gordon’s neighbor said, reflecting on the hand New Haven has chosen to deal her. ​“We don’t deserve to be living in terrible conditions and craziness. But at this point, we’ve just got to make the best of it, because we’re used to it. 

Ocean: “The Company Needs To Be Profitable”

About 20 minutes into the inspection at 1476 Chapel St., the representative from Ocean Management, Yochai, addressed Watts directly for the first time. 

“I want to take the opportunity to say we’re doing an honest job here,” Yochai said, voice increasing in both pitch and volume as he spoke (The Independent was unable to confirm his last name). ​“Does it look like we’re trying to hide anything or play some game? Seriously, don’t worry!” 

He stood over a foot taller than Watts and wore an unremarkable array of blue in the form of jeans and a striped button-down. Whenever one of the government officials at the inspection addressed him directly to ask if he had followed this or that part of the housing code, or to request that he fix an obvious violation of it in the near future, he always responded in the affirmative. ​“Yes,” he would say as he began to write on a paper-stuffed clipboard. ​“Yes, of course.”

Part of what the government requires Yochai and Ocean to do is pay a series of fees in the course of licensing a building. These include everything from initial application fees to fines for not showing up to an inspection, and paying them off is a crucial step in allowing the licensing process to continue. 

But according to public records, Ocean has not paid these bills at 116 different properties (36 percent of their portfolio) which has left a combined unpaid balance of over $33,000 owed to the city. When reached by phone, Ocean Management’s Office Manager Danielle Trivers, whose name appears on many of the licensing records, said ​“I really don’t have a comment on any of that.”

“LCI has notified Ocean Management on the outstanding payments that are owed related to their properties and the need to come into compliance in paying their Residential Rental Business License Fees and other fees that are owed to the City of New Haven,” Stroud wrote to the Independent. ​“Disappointingly, Ocean Management has been non-responsive to date.”

While Ocean waits to pay these bills, the hazards continue to grow at the Ocean-owned buildings that have escaped LCI supervision. In addition to the horrors at Gordon and her neighbors’ building on Blatchley Avenue, at Arely Natal’s building on Orchard Street – where Ocean owes $500 – she doesn’t have regular heat and has to pump water out of the basement when it rains. At Damar Williams’ building on Carmel Street – where Ocean owes another $375 – the floor has started separating from the wall, leaving room for termites to rush in. At Tiona Dalton’s building on Judith Terrace – where Ocean owes another $500 – she had to figure out how to shield her 8‑year-old son from persistent mold for months when a pipe burst. Ocean’s widespread stalling of payments has in effect removed what would have been a crucial check on each of these conditions. 

“It’s crazy that my kid can be subjected to that type of stuff,” Dalton said. ​“Nobody should be living in those type of conditions. But Ocean Management didn’t care about that. They don’t care about you, your health, or your family.”

In October 2021, Aizenberg did a full interview with the Independent raising various complaints about LCI’s practices, lamenting communication breakdowns between the city agency and his company, and touting investments his company has made in fixing up New Haven rentals. But refusing to pay licensing fees is far from the only tool his company employs to outsmart Stroud’s licensing office. There’s also the Tenant Consent/Waiver form. 

As Stroud explained to the Independent, whenever LCI wants to schedule a licensing inspection in a unit, the form provides tenants the option to cancel the inspection if they don’t want it or deem it necessary. In most cases, LCI does not give this form to tenants directly. Instead, the landlord typically works as the middleman, providing the form first to the tenants, then to LCI. 

“You know, the tenant does have the right to privacy,” Stroud said. ​“So the waiver is essentially a way to say they don’t want the inspection at this time. But it doesn’t waive any rights they have to give us a call to come and do a housing inspection.”

Of course, given the root of the form is a tenant’s right to privacy, Stroud said there is no limit on how many times a tenant can waive a licensing inspection. So if the tenants in each unit of a building waive the licensing inspection over and over again, there is no way for the building to be licensed, as there can be no licensing inspection. 

Stroud, however, disagreed with this framing, as he said even if tenants repeatedly submit a waiver, LCI will still visit the common areas of a property to check for code violations in those shared spaces. But based on the massive number of currently unlicensed buildings, it’s clear LCI is not visiting every property, or even most properties, with any regularity. 

So how often are tenants waiving licensing inspections? Stroud revealed that 50 percent of the time they reach out to schedule licensing inspections with tenants at a building, they get a signed waiver in response. This figure would suggest that at least half of all tenants don’t need or want their building to be licensed. But of the 28 tenants I spoke with for this story, the vast majority had never even heard of a licensing inspection, much less a licensing inspection waiver. 

Back at the Chapel Street inspection, lead LCI inspector Ortiz briefly spoke with Luke Melonakos-Harrison, Vice President of the Connecticut Tenants Union, who was there to observe the inspection with Watts. As they spoke, Ortiz offered another theory that could potentially explain the rate of inspection waivers being so high. 

“You know, things can be forged,” Ortiz said.

“For the license?” Melonakos-Harrison asked in surprise.

“Yeah, for the license, because they’re given the option to waive the inspection or give consent,” Ortiz said. ​“Whether it happens or not, I mean who knows, but it’s not like we have a videotape that they actually put pen to paper.”

Ultimately, what Ocean Management’s actions have made clear is that they will continue to avoid rental licenses as long as mechanisms exist to circumvent LCI without consequence. After all, they have the incentive to do so. Their operation exists to pursue a single goal – a goal that Ocean articulated themselves at the site of the most comprehensive inspection of their properties to date. 

“You may not always like our answers, but the company needs to be profitable,” Yochai told Watts as he prepared to leave. The pair were standing in the hallway of one of the second-floor units that has been dealing with a mice infestation.

“I don’t care about that, but thanks,” Watts retorted. Behind him, the broken fire escape was visible, clear as day, and the familiar beep of a smoke detector rang out from the floors below. 

Hearing Officer Newly Appointed; Enforcement Tool Left Unused For Years

If you drive drunk, your driver’s license will be taken away.

With hundreds of illegally unlicensed properties and tens of thousands in unpaid city licensing bills, it would not be surprising to learn that a landlord like Ocean Management has crossed the same licensing threshold as a drunk driver. But that’s not how it works.

“A [rental] license can’t be revoked, from my understanding,” Stroud said. 

Part of the difficulty, according to Stroud, is that LCI ​“doesn’t have a program” that can easily show a list of properties owned by ​“Ocean Management.” Aizenberg, Ocean’s owner, divides his portfolio across a wide range of limited liability companies, or LLCs. 

But in 2022, New Haven passed an amendment requiring all LLCs registered in New Haven to list the address and name of a ​“natural person,” making it possible to connect LLCs that share an owner. As a result, the Independent was able to create its list of Ocean properties using public records involving 62 Ocean-owned LLCs over the span of just a week. LCI can do the same. 

In February, I reported in the Yale Daily News Magazine that LCI Director Arlevia Samuel said her department is ​“unbiased… everyone is treated the exact same way,” even if the landlord is a repeat code violation offender like Ocean. Now, though, they are beginning to change their tune. 

“While the vast majority of landlords provide appropriate housing for their tenants, there are some who consistently and repeatedly violate the law and create unsafe and unsanitary living conditions for residents, and we are committed to holding those landlords accountable through the Residential Rental Business License program and other measures,” Lenny Speiller, Mayor Justin Elicker’s Director of Communications, wrote to the Independent in a statement. 

So there’s no mechanism to revoke Ocean’s license to own rental properties in the city and the percentage of unlicensed city buildings seems to have shrunk only nominally over the last half-decade. One might imagine the onus for the needed change to make Speiller’s words a reality lies in reforms to city and state law that might allow for more strict penalties when Ocean manages to avoid the licensing office. (Mayor Elicker’s office is in the process of amending city law to increase housing court fines from $250 to $2,000 per violation, for example). 

But such a measure already exists, spelled out plain as day in city law.

“Any residential rental property owner,” reads Section 17 – 84c of the New Haven Code of Ordinances, ​“who violates the above regulations with respect to the inspection requirements… may be penalized in accordance with applicable penalty provisions of the City’s Anti-Blight and Property Maintenance Ordinance, which shall include… the assessment of a fine in the amount of one hundred dollars ($100.00) per day for each day that the violation of the inspection requirements continues.” In other words, if a landlord fails two licensing inspections, they can get charged $100 every day until they prove that all the issues resulting in a failed inspection have been fixed.

According to Sinclair Williams, a housing lawyer at New Haven Legal Assistance Association who has been researching the licensing office, the city has a history of implementing the $100/day fine for issues of blight focused on the exterior of buildings, and when the fine is applied, many cases rise to charges between $10,000 and $20,000. If the fine had been applied during the two months Darlet Gordon’s ceiling leaked before it collapsed, for example, the fine would have reached $6,000, and if it had been applied during the 16 months of exposed wiring at Watts’ property on Chapel Street, Ocean would have been charged $48,500 (which is more than an LCI inspector’s salary). Of course, the point of such a fine is to give landlords a financial incentive to fix housing issues before the fine reaches sums that high, making it a crucial tool in the effort to hold landlords accountable as Speiller promised. 

At least, it would if the city was actually using it. 

“Right now, we are not actively using that under residential licensing,” Stroud said in an interview in early July. ​“The language is not clear. It’s a gray area. We’re talking with corporation counsel to get more clarification.”

However, LCI actively advertises this fine as a viable penalty in multiple places as of July. It appears listed as a consequence in the ​“Residential Licensing Overview” found on the office’s website, and it also appears, in bold, on code compliance letters that LCI sends out to landlords before they appear in housing court. Stroud signs these documents himself. 

In addition, Williams strongly disagreed with Stroud’s claim that the language is not clear.

“The plain language of the city ordinance section 17 – 84 says that landlords who fail licensing inspections can be penalized in the exact same way that homeowners are penalized for blight violations,” he said.

When asked in a follow-up interview about this discrepancy, Stroud declined to answer in the moment and said LCI would follow up. A week later, Speiller provided the Independent with a response via email. 

“To the best of our knowledge, it has been many years since citations and fines have been issued for [licensing] non-compliance, predating the current administration,” Speiller wrote to the Independent. ​“However, both Mayor Elicker and LCI Director Samuel are committed to reinstituting its use and believe it’s an important and necessary measure to help ensure that tenants have safe, high-quality housing and compliance with the city’s housing code. To this end, LCI has been actively working with the Office of Corporation Counsel on reestablishing the appropriate internal processes and updating the public hearing procedures that are required to appropriately administer and manage these citations, fines and appeals. This is expected to be completed by the end of this year.”

Later, on Aug. 10, Speiller wrote to the Independent to amend his statement to announce that, earlier this week, Mayor Elicker appointed a hearing officer who Speiller said will begin reviewing licensing non-compliance cases ​“later this month.”

Even though LCI knows the extent of unlicensed buildings in the city they’re charged to protect, and even though they’ve known about a powerful enforcement tool in their arsenal for years, tenants will still be left waiting to notice any change in LCI’s handling of the licensing office until those reviews begin. In 2021, the city had to settle a lawsuit levied against the Health Department for similarly neglecting to inspect and monitor properties for lead, creating an environment in which hundreds of children were poisoned. (In an email to the Independent after publication of this piece, Speiller wrote that ​“this sentence neglects any mention of the aggressive policies and systems that are in place by the City of New Haven to support lead-safe homes and to address elevated blood level cases, including a public website and dashboard that tracks every case). As the waiting period goes on – two years since the Health Department lead settlement – Ocean will remain without incentive to change the only behavior that all 28 of their tenants in unlicensed buildings mentioned experiencing at least once: when they ask for help, Ocean doesn’t answer.

Because the city has failed to give them a reason to, Ocean Management does not respond when the ceiling in Gordon’s home leaked water for months before finally collapsing. ​“There is no answer from Ocean Management,” she said. ​“No answer ever.”

Because the city has failed to give them a reason to, Ocean Management does not respond when the wall in Dalton’s home burst from water damage, leaving a hole that grew over time. ​“I called them,” she said. ​“They never came.”

Because the city has failed to give them a reason to, Ocean Management does not respond when Alston’s home needed repairs after years of damage from rodent infestation. ​“When you call for repairs, they say somebody is going to come out,” she said. ​“Then nobody comes out.”

And until the city’s enforcement – and the philosophy of those in charge of that enforcement – changes, tenants all over New Haven will be left to leave more texts and voicemails pleading for aid in vain. In the meantime, the safe and comfortable housing they pay Ocean for will continue to be anything but.

“They really just think that they can just do whatever they want with us because of our tax bracket and our income,” Watts said. ​“They just think they can do whatever while knowing that we deserve better. So I’m just trying to keep that anger and agitation alive in my community, because right now what we share is the willingness to say that something needs to change. So let’s do it.”

In an email to the Independent after the publication of this piece, Speiller wrote that ​“LCI has not ​“abandoned” its licensing mission. And ​“the philosophy of those in charge of that enforcement” is very much dedicated to ensuring tenants have affordable, safe and high-quality housing.”

This article has been updated since its original publication to include further comments from the city’s spokesperson about LCI’s residential licensing program, and to include a note that the mayor has newly appointed a hearing officer charged with reviewing non-compliance cases starting later this month.