Henry Fernandezs Plan to Improve Housing Code Enforcement In the City of New Haven

The Problem: Recent disturbing news reports have brought the issues of housing code enforcement back into the public eye. Most New Haven landlords work hard to maintain their properties in a safe and healthy condition, ensuring that their tenants are able to live in quality housing. Unfortunately, there are still landlords in New Haven who believe it is acceptable to make money off providing low quality and even dangerous housing to their tenants, while becoming rich off the backs of poor people. An essential role of New Haven City government is to aggressively enforce the housing code to protect tenants in these problem properties and to ensure that neighbors are not forced to live next to dangerous, unattractive, crime ridden buildings. It is also important that New Haven continue to remove lead from homes currently occupied by children and from homes which may be occupied by children in the future. Lead remains prevalent in
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homes built before 1950, which includes a significant portion of New Haven housing stock. Lead negatively impacts almost all bodily functions and is particularly detrimental to the development of the nervous system and brain for children. Background: While directing the Livable City Initiative and then overseeing LCI as Economic Development Administrator, Henry Fernandez developed significant improvements in the Citys enforcement of the housing code. These included computerizing housing code enforcement, training housing code inspectors, and dramatically increasing the total number of properties inspected every year. Principles: New Haven residents deserve quality housing that respects their human dignity, provides decent shelter, and ensures that they are safe from crime. Quality housing protects individuals, families and neighborhoods. A slumlord on a block destroys property values, encourages crime, and reduces public health. The City of New Haven has a fundamental responsibility to maintain quality housing, including enforcement of its housing code, responsiveness to complaints from residents and protecting renters. No contracts will be given to and no bids will be accepted from real estate owners and/or managers who have significant outstanding housing code violations or a track record of operating as slumlords.

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 The City needs to ensure that potential tenants are aware of properties that have been cited for lead paint violations but have not yet been remediated. The City will aggressively enforce housing code laws in all instances but particularly in those instances where taxpayer dollars, including Section 8 project based funds, are paying the rent. None of these principles will be ignored in any way for any reason and certainly not for political considerations, who someone may know, or who they may be related to. Strategies: All housing code violations will be available for review online at the Citys website and easily searchable so that potential renters know whether a property owner is high quality or has a history of being a slumlord. This will also allow neighbors to track whether the City is effectively and timely enforcing against problem properties and problem landlords. Transparency and accountability are important tools to remedying housing code violations. The City will create a new designation of Problem Landlord which will be assigned to residential property owners who repeatedly maintain properties in such a fashion as to raise serious life safety or health issues for tenants or who maintain properties in such a fashion as to invite crime. The City will make a list of Problem Landlords available to the public and will require that their buildings be inspected at a minimum of every year
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instead of every three years until such time as the properties are maintained appropriately. The City will work with the State of Connecticut States Attorney to prosecute slumlords and particularly repeat offenders who collect rents while abusing tenants and neighbors. The City Health Department will make available online a list of all properties that have outstanding citations for lead so that they are not rented to families with children until they have been fully remediated. The City of New Haven will work aggressively with the Housing Authority and the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (which choose whether to provide Section 8 and other subsidies to property owners) to restrict serial serious housing code violators from getting public subsidies. This is not unlike the work of the police chief to hold the State Liquor Authority accountable for licensing bars which are repeated sources of crime. The City of New Haven will require that the Housing Authority report quarterly to the Mayor and Board of Aldermen on efforts to maintain its own properties, including the number of outstanding work orders for repairs, the time for completion of work orders, and a complete description of outstanding issues that need to be fixed. As the largest provider of housing to low income people in New Haven, the Housing Authority needs to be closely monitored to ensure that its properties are safe, clean, free of criminal activity and do not have any life safety issues like
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mold, lack of heat during the winter or lack of air conditioning in senior properties during the summer. The City will require that all bidders on city development projects obtain from the Citys head of housing code enforcement a statement that there are no significant outstanding housing code violations at properties owned in whole or in part (whether directly or through an interest in an LLC) by the bidder, nor does the bidder have a history of being a slumlord. This is similar to the Citys requirement that bidders be up to date on all taxes. The City will work with an advisory board of quality landlords and property owners to ensure that all policies are fair and workable while maintaining the fundamental principles established here.

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