‘How long do we have to live like this?’
Roaches, broken windows, no power. A Hartford family found little help.
After nearly a year in her roach-infested apartment, Shamiesha Inabinett is convinced the insects are watching her cook, waiting for their chance to jump into a hot pan. They crawl on her empty shelves, in the broken oven, under the refrigerator looking for the food she keeps sealed in big, plastic bins. When she found dead roaches in a jar of garlic powder, 36-year-old Inabinett kept it as proof for the city inspectors.
Inabinett filed her first complaint with the city — about missing window screens — on a balmy Friday in July. But it would take 6 ½ weeks for the city to inspect the North End apartment where Inabinett lives with a pregnant sister and four young children. The city found numerous violations during that first inspection.
Five months later, most of the problems continued. No fines were ever issued to the landlord.
“Wecall the health inspector people; they call (the landlord); he does the bare minimum to get by, to get them off his back and the next week it’s the same thing all over again,” said Inabinett, who cares for her 19-month-old son and her sister Shakiesha’s four children, ages 1, 2, 3 and 14. Shakiesha Inabinett, 33, has been working full time at a warehouse and a Taco Bell to
pay the bills. She’s due to give birth in April.
“How long do we have to live like this?” Shamiesha Inabinett asked last month.
In February, following continued complaints from the Inabinetts and an inquiry from The Hartford Courant, the city again inspected the property and gave the landlord until March 10 to resolve the problems or face fines. Are-inspection Friday confirmed that many repairs have been completed, though some violations still exist.
The city said it would pursue fines at a hearing in April if the owner does not follow through and complete the repairs and pest control.
Elda Sinani, Hartford’s director of licensing and inspections, acknowledged it has taken too long to close the case and ascribed some of the delays to poor record keeping and reliance on virtual inspections during the coronavirus pandemic.
“We’re working hard to implement changes and improvements to our housing code and the inspection process,” her supervisor, interim Development Services Director I. Charles Mathews, said. “... While we have tried to address the issues in this case, our goal is to address every single case fully and in a timely manner, and we’ll continue to make improvements until we do that.”
Plodding bureaucracy
On Sept. 10 — the inspection that took place after the initial complaint — a city inspector visited the multifamily home at 158-160 Martin Street and documented far more problems than the ripped and missing window screens reported six weeks earlier.
There was an infestation, the report notes, and code violations with the building’s stoop, front porch and foundation, and the thirdfloor unit’s front door and windows. The city threatened to fine the landlord if they didn’t correct the problems within 30 days.
But there’s no record of the inspector coming back to check. Another visit was scheduled for October, but the city cannot say whether it took place.
An inspector did come out on Dec. 6 and recorded another batch of violations, primarily water damage and electrical issues, according to city records. The inspector also stated that a separate assessment should be made of the tenants’ living conditions, but it’s unclear why that inspector did not do it. There’s no indication that any housing code inspector followed up.
The city’s only other documentation related to that first complaint was added to the file after The Hartford Courant requested the records in February. The inspector’s note, dated the night before the city provided the records, reads: “Owner made several attempts to address complaint.
“According to the owner, tenant is impeding the process to address issue.”
The property owner’s father and agent, Sylbert Andrade, admitted some things were broken before the family moved in, like the bedroom door that’s cracked nearly in half, the missing window screens and an exposed bathroom filter. But he denied knowing about most of the other problems, from the broken oven and exposed baseboard heaters to the stench of urine in a back stairwell, a city inspector noted in the course of an inspection.
Andrade says his tenants just don’t want to pay rent.
“Before they moved in, it was the most beautiful unit you’d ever seen,” Andrade said.
Shamiesha Inabinett admits she hasn’t paid rent — but says it’s because the landlord refused to address problems and she needed a way to get his attention. While the sisters can afford their $950 per month rent at 160 Martin Street, they stopped paying that in July, hoping to pressure the landlord to make repairs.
The city concedes its records of addressing the issues on Martin Street were lacking.
“Overall, we should have had a more detailed record of our interactions with the owner and tenant,” Sinani said. “Part of that may be attributable to how we need to operate now — more remotely than we would like — but even then, there should be more documentation.”
But Sinani says in general, Hartford has significantly stepped up enforcement of housing code violations.
While the city hasn’t issued fines with any regularity in the past, it has issued $40,400 in fines for housing code violations and conducted more than 1,500 virtual and in-person inspections since last July, says Mathews, the interim director, who’s been nominated to the permanent position.
Feeling trapped
Inabinett’s experience is all too common. With housing assistance and city staff stretched thin by the coronavirus pandemic, and the region’s affordable housing market tighter than ever, many families are struggling to escape neglected apartments, says Erin Kemple, executive director of the Connecticut Fair Housing Center.
With restrictions on multifamily housing common in many communities across the state, most affordable rentals are concentrated in the poorest city neighborhoods, perpetuating racial segregation and overwhelming city departments that are tasked with protecting resident’s health and welfare at home.
“Once an inspection is done, there is very little follow through and some of that is because there’s too much going on,” Kemple said. “And the landlord knows that. They may not have the money or have the incentive to keep the place up to code because nobody’s going to call them on it.”
Tenants often tell staff at the nonprofit housing center that they’ve given up reporting bad conditions to their cities because their complaints don’t lead to change, Kemple says. Her organization helps protect low-income renters and homeowners against housing discrimination, eviction and foreclosure, though Kemple says there are far more people in need than they can take on.
The lack of decent, affordable housing in the Hartford area came into clear focus several years ago when the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development took the extraordinary step of closing down three major public housing projects in the city’s impoverished North End, where nearly all residents are Black, Hispanic or Latino.
Shuttering those subsidized apartment complexes took about 300 affordable units off the market. While some of those properties have since been fixed up and granted new federal subsidies, others sit vacant as the pandemic and a growing eviction crisis drive up competition for rentals.
People who find themselves in unsafe and unhealthy housing can report problems to the city and file complaints against their landlords, but by and large they must do this without help. In the Hartford region, there are no resources dedicated to helping tenants rectify the poor living conditions that are so common in the inner city.
The Fair Housing Center has been getting more calls in recent years about bad conditions, and just prior to the pandemic, staff were talking about the need to address those issues, especially in communities of color where mold and other issues are contributing to high rates of asthma among children.
“We still want to get back to that but we are unsure when we’ll be able to do that,” Kemple said. “Capacity is a huge issue. There’s no other way around it.”
What little attention was being paid to poor rental conditions prior to the pandemic has been diverted by the most dire housing issues: eviction and homelessness.
“We would want to be working on fixing things like cockroaches and mice in peoples’ apartments — I hear about that all the time, too,” says Constanza Segovia, a member of Mutual Aid Hartford, a grassroots group that formed in response to COVID-19. Segovia’s husband is Hartford City Councilman Josh Michtom. “The eviction crisis is so much more pressing that it just feels like we should focus on that, but it’s tough to talk about even because you don’t want to be making these kind of decisions.”
Housing advocates recognize there’s a need for more tools to deal with poor conditions.
One bill being considered this legislative session would give all tenants access to an attorney in eviction and other housing-related cases, fund tenant organizing and establish affirmative litigation to enforce tenant rights. The law also guarantees counsel for tenants who take their landlords to court over failure to correct unsafe conditions.
Power’s out, again
At 160 Martin Street, Inabinett’s teenage niece has taken to shaking out her backpack and clothes every day, fearing an insect will crawl out when she’s at school.
Her son, Shamaree has learned to stamp his feet to scare away the roaches. He feels safest sleeping in his play pen, which is harder for the bugs to scale. But potty training has been difficult for him and his young cousins, especially Shakiesha Inabinett’s 3-year-old girl who’s scared to walk to the bathroom at night.
“She’ll scream and cry because there’s a whole bunch of roaches and she don’t know which way to run,” Shamiesha Inabinett said in early February. “That’s not normal. It’s not OK.”
In the last few months, the family has been staying with other relatives for a few days or weeks at a time. They split up between the homes of different aunts and grandmothers because nobody has very muchroom to spare. A few times, the family left to wait out the electricity and heat outages that periodically affect half the building. It happened in October and again on Jan. 28, Feb. 8 and at the end of the housing inspection on Feb. 17.
Acity inspector had spent about two hours in the unit, documenting violations, sending the property manager to a corner store for batteries and watching them installed in the smoke detectors. She listened to the landlord defend his property and himself and to Inabinett curse him.
Finally, as the inspector went to leave, the lights and electric fireplace stove in the living room went dark.
Shaking her head, she followed Inabinett back into her kitchen to call for a check of the electrical system.
“Oh, come on,” the inspector said. “We’re plugging in smoke detectors and now you don’t have any lights on half the building?”
The Inabinetts want to put Martin Street behind them. They’ve been searching for a new home, though many landlords are requiring high credit scores and larger security deposits to protect themselves against tenants who can’t or won’t pay rent. Shamiesha Inabinett says she’s more discerning, too, as she continues the search — after a year of disappointments, she’s only looking outside of Hartford.
But for now, they remain at 160 Martin Street, the living room still filled with toys and the walls decorated with stick-on decals.
“I’m gonna try until God takes the breathe out of my body to make sure my son and my nieces and nephews have what they’re supposed to have in the proper manner,” Shamiesha Inabinett says.
And after nearly a year, things are moving. The city has stayed in touch with her, sending a supervisor back out to the property March 2.
The landlord has installed a working oven. More work began after that, including a pest treatment and replaced doors, window screens, rotten plyboards and kitchen tiles, according to the city.
“A closed mouth don’t get fed,” she said. “That’s something I’ve learned.”