Megalandlords Land In Housing Court

The men in charge of two of the city’s largest low-income real estate empires landed in criminal housing court —as part of a city effort to prosecute landlords who take too long to fix up their properties.

Those two men are Shmuel Aizenberg and Menachem Gurevitch. Aizenberg is the head of Ocean Management. Gurevitch is the head of Mandy Management. The two groups control thousands of low-income apartments around town and tens of millions of dollars worth of properties.

On Tuesday morning in the third-floor housing court at 121 Elm St., the two local megalandlords took their turns before state Superior Court Judge John Cirello to face charges related to alleged violations of the city’s housing code. They were two of a half-dozen local property owners hauled before the court Tuesday for the first set of criminal housing cases to take place in person since the start of the pandemic.

Cirello agreed to continue both Aizenberg’s and Gurevitch’s cases to a future court date after Senior Assistant State’s Attorney Donna Parker explained that she had spoken with their respective attorneys and that the state had conveyed an ​“offer” to each defendant.

“We felt we need a continuance,” Parker said during Tuesday’s brief public hearing regarding Aizenberg’s three criminal housing court cases. There are ​“a few more issues that need to be brought into compliance.” She offered a similar statement to the court during Gurevitch’s brief time before the judge’s bench.

Cirello continued Aizenberg’s three cases until Oct. 12. The judge continued Gurevitch’s three cases until Nov. 9. The multiple violations cited in the cases range from rotted floorboards and a leaking roof to broken electrical outlets, junked cars, rotted eaves and missing gutters.

In the meantime, the legal action appeared to lead to clean-ups at Ocean properties this week.

Landlord: Mail Mix-Ups

Aizenberg’s and Gurevitch’s companies are two of the largest players in New Haven’s housing market, particularly in low-income areas far from the city center.

They run locally based property management outfits that partner with private equity firms, commercial lenders, and out-of-town investors to bring millions of dollars every year into buying up rental properties in and around New Haven.

Those investor-property manager partnerships then take the form of various limited liability companies (LLCs), which in turn legally own different groups of rental properties. In most cases, Aizenberg or Gurevitch is the principal or co-principal in charge of their companies’ respective affiliated LLCs.

A representative from Ocean Management told the Independent that the various housing code violations that resulted in Aizenberg’s criminal prosecution went unaddressed for as long as they did because the city’s anti-blight and housing code enforcement agency, the Livable City Initiative, sent the violation notices and orders to Ocean’s old address at 50 Fitch St, and the office manager had not received them.

“Shmuel attended court and has immediately assigned a team to resolve all open issues immediately,” that Ocean representative said. ​“Ocean Management is making sure that the address is corrected.”

LCI provided the Independent with reports that included scans of certified mail receipts for the Ocean Management order violation letters in question, though those receipts are not signed by any particular recipient.

A representative from Mandy Management did not respond to multiple requests for comment by the publication time of this article about the criminal housing court charges brought against Gurevitch.

According to the state’s criminal court database, neither Aizenberg nor Gurevitch has entered pleas in any of their criminal housing court cases.

The Charges

Sitting in housing court on Tuesday, a casual observer would have had no idea who these men were, why they were in court, or what their cases were about.

There was no substantive discussion during the one-minute-long public hearings as to why two of the most important men in New Haven real estate had been criminally charged and compelled to lawyer up and come to court.

A subsequent review of the one-page summons and complaint forms in each criminal case that are publicly accessible via the housing court clerk’s office offered little further insight.

The public documents stated that the state’s attorney’s office has charged Aizenberg and Gurevitch each with three municipal ordinance violations under state statute 7 – 148(c)(10). That’s a generic section of state law that empowers municipalities to enforce regulations by issuing warnings, citations, and penalties of up to $250 per violation.

Those public court records did offer one clue as to what was going on with these charges: Street addresses tied to the alleged housing code violations.

Aizenberg’s were for a first-floor apartment at 55 Carmel St. and for a three-family house at 76 Thompson St. Gurevitch’s were for a 12-unit apartment building at 29 Dickerman St. and for a three-family house at 359 Sherman Ave., as well as for an East Haven property at 142 Bradford Ave.

After Tuesday’s court hearings, a representative from the state’s attorney’s office said that these criminal housing court charges originated with housing code violations found by LCI.

LCI Director: ​“Last Tool”

In response to a request by the Independent, Acting LCI Executive Director Arlevia Samuel provided the address-specific reports her department has on file for the properties involved in these court cases.

She also explained how and why LCI-detected housing code violations can escalate to the point of criminal prosecution.

Here’s how the process works, she said:

LCI gets a complaint about a potential housing code violation — a persistently leaky ceiling, for example, or a rotting front porch, or trash strewn around a property — and then sends an inspector out to take a look.

If that inspector finds that there is indeed a housing code violation imperiling the health and safety of the property’s occupants, then the city agency sends a certified letter and order laying out the various violations and providing a timeline by which they have to be addressed. LCI calls the landlord only when a housing code violation is so urgent that it needs to be addressed in 24 to 48 hours.

The city then schedules a reinspection.

If the property is still not in compliance by that follow-up date, LCI can apply to the state housing court judge for an arrest warrant. If the judge signs off on the request, the case is handed over to the state’s attorney’s office to prosecute.

Samuel said that LCI applies for roughly two such criminal housing code violation warrants every month.

One week before the scheduled court date, she said, LCI conducts another inspection of the property.

“Any non-compliance can escalate to a warrant,” Samuel said. ​“I do believe it is an effective manner of getting the resistant landlords to comply.”

Samuel was asked if LCI is using housing code arrest warrant applications to keep the pressure on the largest property manager-landlords in town such as Ocean and Mandy. She said that this tool is focused on one goal and one goal only: Getting properties cleaned up and safe. LCI is not targeting any specific property owner, she said. Indeed, in housing court on Tuesday, Aizenberg and Gurevitch were two of roughly eight local landlords on the criminal housing court docket.

“The addresses are what matter to us,” Samuel said. “[Applying for a warrant] is the last measure to get them to comply. We want them to comply. This is the last tool.”

Trash, Rodents, Broken Windows, Leaky Ceiling …

What were the property-specific alleged violations that landed these two megalandlords in criminal housing court?

According to LCI’s reports, an inspector visited 55 Carmel St. on July 14, 2020. That property is owned by Sahn Del LLC, a holding company controlled by Ocean Management’s Shmuel Aizenberg.

On July 21 of that year, then-LCI Deputy Rafael Ramos sent two separate letters and orders: one to Aizenberg, one to the property’s first-floor tenant. Both letters described the same set of violations.

The letter ordered the tenant to clean cat hair and other debris from the building’s hallways, stairs, and within the apartment.

It also ordered the landlord to remove trash from the yard; replace missing eaves, cornices, gutters and/or down spouts; repair damaged siding; repair loose parts of the porch; provide adequate lighting for the exterior stairs; replace missing glass in the door; repair chipping and flaking paint; replace a missing or broken rail; remove and replace rotted floorboards; and remove unsafe vehicles from the property.

“Failure to comply with this Order represents a violation of the City of New Haven’s Housing Code and may subject you to criminal prosecution by the State’s Attorney’s Office,” the order letter reads. ​“Violators may also be subject to $100.00 penalty per day of violation per paragraph 102 of the New Haven Housing Code Ordinance.”

LCI’s files show that city housing code inspectors reinspected the Carmel Street property on Aug. 25, 2020, and on March 15, 2021.

A set of LCI records for 76 Thompson St., meanwhile, shows that LCI inspected that property on April 23 of this year.

An April 29 letter sent to Aizenberg — whose company Ocean 100 Delaware LLC owns that Newhallville rental property — orders the landlord to register the property with the city’s residential rental licensing program; remove accumulated trash from the yard; and remove unsafe vehicles stored on the property.

The file shows that a city housing code inspector reinspected the Thompson Street property on July 1. ​“Please apply for warrant,” that reinspection document reads. ​“All items fail.”

As for the Mandy Management properties and cases, LCI sent an order letter to Gurevitch on June 1 of this year based on a May 25 inspection that found a host of code violations at 359 Sherman Ave., which is owned by his company SFR 2 DE LLC.

That letter orders Gurevitch to remove all trash and debris from the property; remove piles of tree limbs; keep the property free of animal feces; replace rotted eaves and/or cornices; repair or replace dilapidated fences; remove accumulations of debris from the porch; replace broken window glass on the second floor front porch; remove graffiti from the wall; repair garage to prevent wildlife from burrowing in; repair holes in basement hatchway; replace rotted/defective/missing gutters and/or down spouts; and provide two openable windows in the basement.

The 29 Dickerman St. file includes a letter sent to Gurevitch on March 15 about a Jan. 12 inspection that found a host of violations at the Dickerman Street property, which is owned by Gurevitch’s Klee II LLC.

The LCI letter ordered the landlord to: replace uneven and broken kitchen floor and subfloor; make the kitchen door weather tight; exterminate a rodent infestation throughout the property; properly repair a bulging kitchen ceiling; repair a hole in a bedroom ceiling caused by peeling paint from moisture coming in from the roof; repair or replace insecure and inoperative electrical outlets in one of the bedrooms and living rooms; and repair a leaking roof throughout the property.

The PDF scan of that violation abatement order includes the word ​“Done” handwritten alongside a few of the violations, and checkmarks on top of most of where ​“Not Done” is written.

Click here, here, here and here to read those LCI inspection and order documents.

LCI: Ocean Now In Compliance; Mandy Not Yet

After Tuesday’s court appearances by Aizenberg and Gurevitch, the Independent asked LCI’s acting director about what the latest inspections of these four residential properties found.

Are they still not in compliance with the city’s housing code orders that date back months or — for 55 Carmel St. — over a year?

Samuel said that Aizenberg’s properties at 55 Carmel St. and 76 Thompson St. are in fact now in compliance with the city housing code. At long last, the arrest warrant applications and subsequent prosecution by the state’s attorney’s office appear to have worked.

“Our [most recent] reinspections both determined [55 Carmel and 76 Thompson] to be cleared,” she said on Wednesday.

What about the housing code violations at the two Mandy-owned properties at 359 Sherman Ave. and 29 Dickerman St. that have led to Gurevitch’s prosecution?

“Neither are in compliance to date,” Samuel said on Thursday.

Asked why all of these LCI violation orders and inspection records are not publicly available on the city land records database for all to easily see, Samuel said she is not sure why they have not been filed on that public-facing database. Perhaps because the associated court cases have to play out first?

She said that this is exactly the type of information that should and will be made available on the City Squared public-facing property database when that online records system is next updated.

Ocean Tenant: Some Fixes Done; Bathroom Still A Mess

While 55 Carmel St. may legally be in compliance with LCI’s housing code violation order, a recent interview with one of the property’s first-floor tenants revealed that — at least from his perspective — there’s still more fixing up that needs to be done.

That Carmel Street tenant said his name is Rafael Ramos. (He’s no relation to the former LCI deputy director, he said. He said he met the former LCI deputy during an earlier inspection of the Carmel Street property, and was as surprised as the then-city housing code enforcement leader to find out that they shared the same name.)

Sitting on his front porch alongside his two pet cats Oliver and Nina, the tenant said that his landlord, a subsidiary of Ocean Management, has fixed up the porch and has torn down a dilapidated garage that previously stood in the property’s backyard. But there’s still more work to do, in his opinion.

“To tell you the truth, we’ve had a bathroom issue since we moved here,” he said.

He showed the Independent his apartment’s bathroom, which had cracked tiles coated in what looked like mold, and patches of dampness on the ceiling. The whole apartment was heavy with a strong, sharp, acrid smell. ​“There are leaks in the basement,” he said. ​“Leaks in the house. A hump in the ceiling.” He insisted that the property is safe to live in, but ​“the infrastructure is totally messed up.”

Ramos said he and his wife first moved into the Dixwell rental property in 2014. Natives of Brooklyn, N.Y., they were staying in a homeless shelter in the Bronx at the time, when they found out that Ramos’s social security disability application had been approved.

With their new stream of fixed monthly income, he said, he and his wife started looking for a place they could afford, outside of the sky-high rents in their rapidly gentrifying home city.

They wound up settling on New Haven. Ramos said he and his wife pay $1,025 per month for their two-bedroom, ground-floor apartment.

“It’s something we can afford.” He predicted that New Haven will see many more tenants like himself and his wife in the years to come. As New York City’s rents only get higher and more people are priced out, he said, they’ll be looking for new places nearby to resettle. New Haven, he said, is one such place.