Hamden Looks To Tackle Tenants’ Rights

One month after Hamden’s first tenant union took shape, its members are pushing not just to keep their landlord accountable, but to ensure town-wide protection of tenants’ rights.

Representatives of the Seramonte Tenants’ Union, including local renters of the Seramonte Estates apartments which span Mix Avenue as well as organizers from the Central Connecticut chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, joined Councilperson Justin Farmer in championing a resolution focused on defending tenants from substandard and unfair housing conditions to Hamden’s Legislative Council.

That resolution, written and brought to the council by Farmer and Town Attorney Sue Gruen, includes four broad and non-binding ​“actions” that the town can take to improve tenants’ quality of living moving forward. The council’s Human Services Committee approved it unanimously this past Wednesday night; later this month, the full council is scheduled to to vote on its passage and determine exactly how to enact its terms.

The policy’s requests include:

• Working with the Hamden Fair Rent Commission to create pathways towards higher standards of living, including developing a landlord database, improving code enforcement mechanisms, and revising Hamden’s house code.

• Meeting with the Quinnipiac Valley Health District, the town’s official housing code enforcement agency, to expand its contract with the town concerning housing inspections and enforcement activities.

• Strengthening local controls over predatory parking practices (read more here about Seramonte tenants’ reportedly negative experiences with the private towing company contracted by their landlord.)

• Hold Hamden agencies and commissions accountable for using the full extent of their statutory and administrative powers to enforce existing housing regulations and consider collectively-filed complaints.

This resolution comes at a time when next-door New Haven, too, is looking to ramp up its Fair Rent Commission and support tenant unions. Click here and here to read about that.

Council member Farmer spoke briefly about his intent behind drafting the Hamden resolution, asserting that ​“housing should be a fundamental right.Farmer put emphasis on that latter point, noting that the town’s Fair Rent Commission has been relatively inactive for years and that the town’s public bodies could better advocate for and empower tenants.

“This is an opportunity for us to … say we wanna see better quality of life and make sure we’re keeping track of situations,” he said, urging the development of a landlord registry so the town could ​“see who are landlords are so we can better partner with them,” the institution of a revisionary process of the town’s housing codes, ​“the majority of which have been updated by 1967,” and a new town-wide focus on facilitating connections between complainants of the same housing circumstances.

Mayor Lauren Garrett told the Independent that all housing complaints made by local renters first go through a community development director, who has consistently been able to settle with tenants before their concerns escalate further. Thus there hasn’t been a need for the Fair Rent Commission to meet. But, she added, she believes the work of the commission could expand to further support tenants and that the town would revisit the commission’s responsibilities in future months.

“I think we can all recognize Hamden’s Fair Rent Commission is not currently operating at its full potential,” DSA organizer Adam Waters asserted, ​“a problem that’s not really about the motivations of its members so much as it is about a lack of institutional investment in strengthening the Fair Rent Commission.” 

Waters said that if the commission expressly reviewed collective complaints filed by tenants, renters would be able to file claims with less fear of retribution from their landlords, tenant unions would become legitimized and popularized, and the town could more easily identify systematic failings of local landlords and better hold them accountable.

As organizers spoke to their recent work interviewing Hamden renters about the regularity of ​“peeling paint, mold, doors off their hinges and broken smoke detectors,” to use Waters’ words, Paul Boudreau, the Seramonte resident who founded the tenants union pictured above offered a glimpse into his daily life at the apartments.

“You get up in the morning and your first step is to immediately look out in the parking lot and make sure your car is still there. Many times your car gets towed overnight while you’re sleeping for a variety of nonsense reasons. If your car is there, you’re pretty happy and you go to work,” he said.

“When you come back home, you back your car incredibly carefully into the parking space and you take pictures to ensure the pictures show the angle and the permit in your window… 

“Then you walk through your apartment building, usually through a door that’s broken.”

For years, he said, nothing was done about the conditions at Seramonte even though he and other renters continuously reached out to town departments for assistance.

“Now that we’re a union, we’ve seen some small results,” he said. ​“I think if we work together we can solve a lot of problems collectively.”

While the committee responded positively to the resolution and moved it forward to the full council, they acknowledged that it will take time to determine exactly how to accomplish the goals laid out in the policy.

“The power in this resolution,” Councilwoman Katie Kiely said, ​“is that it is one step in giving a voice to residents who rent — to giving them a place of advocacy with power behind it.”