Laura Glesby photo
The Mandy-owned nine-unit house on Sherman Avenue.
After half a decade of roaming between abusive homes and strangers’ couches, Asia Harris moved into her first-ever apartment and purchased a dresser from Goodwill for $20. “Nobody bought it for me,” she said. “I bought it my own self.”
Three years and one eviction notice later, Harris threw out the dresser. It was too heavy to sell for rent money and it no longer felt like her own.
As with many tenants who live paycheck to paycheck, two consecutive personal catastrophes were enough to send Harris a handful of months behind on rent. (The exact amount is disputed, but she and her landlord agree that she owes under $3,000.)
Her landlord, an affiliate of the megalandlord Mandy Management, filed suit on Oct. 6 to kick her out for nonpayment of rent.
Now, Harris’ hard-won housing security is in jeopardy. She could lose the first home she’s ever had to herself.
See below for a full response from Mandy’s Yudi Gurevitch about this eviction case. Gurevitch told the Independent that his company files evictions as a “a last resort,” that Mandy reached out to Harris multiple times but never heard back about her partial payment of rent, and that his company has no records of Harris explaining to them her situation and recent hardships.
Prior to moving into the walk-up Sherman Avenue apartment, Harris told the Independent in a recent interview, “I was homeless for a while.” She stayed not in shelters but in apartments belonging to people she didn’t know or couldn’t trust, including an abusive boyfriend.
One day, when she was about 23 years old, she stood outside the Price Rite where she worked, unsure of where she would sleep that night. A familiar customer — an “older guy” — approached her and offered to put her up with his cousin.
The cousin “let me sleep in her bed with her. I cried myself to sleep,” Harris recalled. Her money and belongings ended up stolen. “I felt so violated,” Harris said. “That was the worst night of my life.”
Eventually, through a “rapid re-housing program” administered by the youth homelessness organization Youth Continuum, Harris was able to find an apartment at around the age of 24: the Mandy-owned Sherman Avenue unit nestled within a nine-apartment house.
At that time, she was making $100 a week working part time at Price Rite. Youth Continuum helped Harris pay a year’s worth of rent, but Harris knew that she would soon be fully responsible for her bills. She decided to leave her Price Rite gig for a temporary position at Yale, which eventually became permanent. She works 26 hours per week in the university dining halls. Harris found another job at Blue State Coffee, she said, which she kept until pandemic-induced layoffs. She has also been working to earn her college degree in communications from Gateway Community College.
For half a year, Harris’ apartment was hardly distinguishable from its former vacant state. The only furniture inside was a mattress and box frame provided to Harris by Youth Continuum.
Gradually, though, Harris began to fill her apartment with furniture she selected herself. In the spring of 2021, she bought a gray bedroom furniture set with a “buy now, pay later” agreement. She found matching gray curtains, a kitchen bar set, a white dresser.
She salvaged the $20 dresser from Goodwill. It was originally brown. She decided to coat it in a “nude” color: “I painted it myself.”
She felt powerful taking a paintbrush to the piece of furniture in a space leased just to her. “You feel like you could do whatever you want,” she said.
Unlike housing programs that ask clients to live in emergency shelters while preparing for the eventual costs of a rental apartment, rapid re-housing programs — like the one that helped Harris find her apartment — help clients move into an apartment as soon as possible, funding part of the rent when clients are unable to pay.
Rapid re-housing operates on the “housing first” philosophy, which maintains that having a dependable living situation is a necessary precursor to thriving in other ways. The idea is that the stress and hazards of not having a reliable place to live often preclude the time and energy needed to find and maintain a stable job. Most of these programs, including Youth Continuum’s, offer casework services and other support to rapid re-housing clients.
In a 2013 study, the Connecticut Coalition to End Homelessness found that 82 percent of single adults in the state who received rapid re-housing services have retained their housing.
Still, many recently homeless tenants remain on the brink of housing insecurity.
Harris’ new Sherman Avenue apartment wasn’t perfect. At one point, her bathroom ceiling collapsed. “I shut my door just in case a squirrel came in,” she said. (No rodent came into her apartment — “Thank God!” she said.)
Harris said that Mandy initially covered the hole in the roof with a trash bag, and then waited eight months to repair it. Mandy’s Yudi Gurevitch denied this claim, writing in a statement that “all maintenance and repairs to Ms. Harris’s apartment were made in a timely manner including her door and bathroom ceiling.”
Meanwhile, some of Harris’ neighbors in the tightly-packed building made her uneasy. She recalls one neighbor, an older man, knocking on her door to give her an unsolicited bag of razors. That same man would park in front of her window, prompting her to put up the curtains, she said.
She suspects that another former neighbor was responsible for an event that left her rattled: a break-in at her apartment.
Harris had arrived home one day last February. She was so tired that it took her a few minutes to notice the state of her apartment: it had been “ransacked,” and her window hung “wide open.”
“They took $400 — my savings. That was me starting to get my savings together,” Harris said. “They took all my Christmas presents. They took pads. They took my blow dryer. My combs. My brushes. My movies. Any new pair of socks. Any new pajamas.”
Any sense of safety Harris had associated with her apartment evaporated. This wasn’t the first theft she’d experienced, but it was the first to occur in a space she thought she could depend on. “That destroyed me,” she said. Her chronic anxiety — a condition that both housing insecure people and domestic violence survivors disproportionately experience — grew severe.
Two days after the break-in occurred, she had a miscarriage that landed her in the hospital for over a week, she said. She used up her sick days and took extra time off of work to grieve and recuperate.
Facing new financial strains, Harris said she sold every non-essential item in her home, including a majority of her clothing and shoes. “Anything I thought that was valuable that could help me with my rent, I sold,” she said.
Summer came. When she couldn’t make rent, Harris said she explained the circumstances of her break-in and miscarriage to Mandy. “Three weeks later, they sent me an eviction notice,” she said.
Mandy: Eviction "Always A Last Resort"
Yudi Gurevitch, a representative of Mandy, disputed that Harris had informed the company about her circumstances. He wrote in a statement to the Independent: “Filing an eviction notice is always a last resort and something that we don’t take lightly. Before starting the process, we make every effort to reach out to our tenants and find out what is going on.”
“We are especially mindful of tenants who may be facing hardship for reasons out of their control, such as loss of employment or the current struggles associated with high food costs, fuel and so on.” Gurevitch continued. “In this case, we made several attempts to contact Ms. Harris, all without success… We do not have any record of her contacting us to discuss her situation nor, did she inform us as to why only partial rent was paid.”
At the age of 28, Harris is no longer eligible for the teen and young adult services through Youth Continuum, and she said she doesn’t qualify for other rental assistance programs she’s found. Court records show that she is being represented in her ongoing eviction case by a New Haven legal aid attorney.
Mandy Management claims that Harris owes July, August, and September rent. Harris argues that she’s already paid off her July debt, and that she’ll be able to catch up on the rest of the rent soon, given a recent salary raise.
She also told the Independent she doesn’t want to stay in the apartment, anyway. She still feels unsafe there. “I’m gonna pay every dime that I owe to them and I’m moving out,” she said.
When she moves, she won’t have much to carry.
In addition to the items she sold, Harris threw away most of her other belongings: books, DVDs, some leftover furniture. Everything reminded her that someone had broken into her home, ransacked her drawers, stolen her possessions, she said. None of it felt like hers anymore.
Harris decided that the hand-painted, “nude”-colored dresser was too heavy to sell for rent. So she lugged it down the stairs and left it by the dumpster.
Other recent stories about New Haven eviction cases working their way through housing court so far in 2022.
• Investor Skips Hello, Starts Evictions
• Eviction Deal Drops $1 Ruling Appeal
• Judge’s $1 Award Tests Eviction Rule
• Court Case Q: Which“Nuisances” Merit Eviction?
• “Or” Evictions OK’d
• Fair Rent: Dog’ll Cost You $150
• Rent Trumps Repairs In Elliot Street Eviction
• Though Sympathetic, Judge Blocks Eviction
• Family Feuds Fill Eviction Court
• Rent Help Winds Down. What’s Next?
• Eviction Withdrawn After Rent Catch-up
• Hill Landlord Prevails In“Lapse” Eviction
• Landlord Thwarted 2nd Time On Eviction
• Church Evicting Parishioner
• Hard-Luck Tenant Hustles To Stay Put
• Eviction Of Hospitalized Tenant, 74, Upheld
• Judge Pauses Eviction Amid Rent-Relief Qs
• Amid Rise In“Lapse-of-Time” Evictions, Tenant Wins 3‑Month Stay
• Leaky Ceiling, Rent Dispute Spark Eviction Case