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Middletown's North End Copes With Neglected Buildings by Livia Gershon |
Ferry Street, on the North End of Middletown, disgusts Starla Bolduc for many reasons. Drug dealers knock at her first-floor apartment door at two in the morning offering her drugs. Her baby son is staying with her mother in Maine, and she's afraid to bring him home because of the sporadic violence in the area. And, according to many local residents, city services from police to sanitation serve the area less thoroughly than they do most other parts of the city. More than anything else, though, Bolduc is upset about the state of the apartment building where she lives, 40 Ferry Street.
During the week before Christmas, there was a fire on the third floor of Bolduc's building. The Fire Department put it out, but the water damage reached down to her apartment. The carpets were soaked, the kitchen floor was covered by two inches of water, and no one knew how much electrical damage the water might have caused. She and her boyfriend, as well as the two families above them, had to leave the building. The Red Cross helped the displaced tenants get rooms in the Middletown Motor Inn, where Bolduc and her boyfriend stayed for two days. Then they moved in with a friend who lives across the hall from their apartment. They spent Christmas there.
Bolduc spent the next two weeks trying to reach her landlord, Andrew Vallas, in Meriden. He never returned her calls, and when she spoke to his brother, he told her that Andrew was out of town and hung up. This was no surprise to Bolduc-she hadn't seen or heard from Vallas, or anyone who worked for him, since October. Finally, she convinced the brother to pay for an electrician to check her unit's wiring. She moved back into her home in mid-January only to discover that the apartment now had no hot water. Sick of trying to get results from Vallas, she called a plumber herself and paid the 50 dollars for him to get the water working properly again.
eanwhile, on December 23, Nancy Brault, a Middletown Health Department officer, came to check on the building and discovered that the cold water-but not the hot-was turned off throughout the building. "We're talking about Christmas vacation, kids, Christmas trees," she remembers, "and here are families with no cold water." Eventually Brault convinced the city to get the cold water turned back on, even though, she says, "there were people here who felt that it wasn't our responsibility" to hire a plumber.
In fact, legally, Vallas was responsible for both getting the plumbing fixed and securing the fire- and water-damaged apartments. Before performing these services, the Fire and Health Departments had both tried to reach him, but, like Bolduc, they never succeeded.
Long before Vallas disappeared, there were serious problems at 40 Ferry. Divia and Zaida Arteiz, school-age sisters whose family moved in last winter, say that Vallas wouldn't fix anything in their apartment or even pay for materials so that the family could do the jobs themselves. According to Zaida, "The bathroom was all messed up and we fixed some of it, painted it ourselves. We had no alarm when we came here and the inspectors had to put one on." Divia adds that they also had broken windows, roaches, and major leaks. Other tenants reported similar problems, as well as faulty electrical sockets, large water stains, holes in their ceilings, a non-functional laundry room, and broken toilets.
he Health Department became aware of these housing code violations through one of their periodic surveys of the area. At that point, housing code officers could have begun legal proceedings to make Vallas fix the problems, but they didn't. The legal procedure requires the Department to send out a thirty-day notice detailing the problems and asking for a schedule of repairs. After that, if the owner does not correct the problems, the Department must get a court order issued. If the problems are still not solved in thirty more days, the city attorney writes to the owner, leaving another block of time before the city can begin assessing fines for the violations. In general, Brault says, the Department tries to get the violations fixed through informal methods. "If you just send the owner written notice it takes so long that the people who live there are suffering. So most of what we do here is negotiation." "Ninety to 99 percent of the cases," she says, "never have to go to court."
As it turned out, Vallas was part of the one to ten percent of landlords who aren't so compliant. On November 3, after city officials had spent months trying to get 40 Ferry Street's problems solved, Judge Beverly Hodgson issued a court injunction requiring Vallas to make the repairs. On November 22, with the problems still unsolved, and with Vallas failing to appear in court, Hodgson ruled that the city could begin assessing Vallas 99 dollars per day until the repairs were made.
Tim Lynch, the Deputy City Attorney, points out that, theoretically, the Health Department could file criminal charges against Vallas. However, because Middletown doesn't have its own prosecutor for housing code cases, the Department rarely exercises this option, which means that usually the worst thing that can happen to a landlord is to have the property taken away. Lynch points out that in some cases this may not be sufficient motivation for a building owner to improve his or her conduct. "If you're so far in the hole that you can't get your mortgage paid, and you get a letter from me telling you you have to pay a fine, you might just shrug that off." If an landlord is threatened with jail time, he adds, he or she is more likely to pay attention. "Middletown really needs a full-time housing code prosecutor."
Most tenants of 40 Ferry stopped paying rent in October, when it became apparent that Vallas was not going to send anyone to collect it. Even before that, many of them were questioning whether they had any responsibility to pay. As Zaida Arteiz says, "He wasn't a landlord, exactly, he just came to collect. One time I had to tell him off. I told him, 'you cannot just be coming and collecting. You have to fix the place.' My mom said 'We have a lot of problems in this place-you need to come and fix our stuff.' But he never did."
At least one tenant, however, did keep paying. Starla Bolduc receives a Federal Disability check, which goes directly to her payee. The payee then sends in her rent money. After Vallas disappeared, Bolduc wanted to stop paying her rent, but the payee continued to send it in. Now it has begun allowing her to save her money, starting with the January payment. She hopes she will have enough to move to a new building soon.
As of the end of January, Vallas has failed to pay any of his fines or to make contact with the city or his tenants. The next step for the city is for the City Attorney's Office to foreclose on the building. If it does so, the city will then either sell the property with the tenants in it, close it up-evicting all the tenants-and then sell it, or close and demolish it. Many of the tenants express doubts that the city will find any buyers for the property. Sophia Weaver, who has been living on the second floor for two years, notes that Vallas had been trying to sell the building himself and had no luck. Like most of the tenants, she expects that the city will close the building up and hopes that it will offer them some help in relocating. "We think it's only right that they should place us," she says.
For now, the Health Department is taking care of residents' most urgent needs, but the building's stairs and hallways are covered with garbage and smell of urine, and most apartments have leaks, malfunctioning electrical systems, broken windows, and other problems. The tenants have received no formal notification of what is likely to happen to their building, but most are looking for new places to live.
Residents of 40 Ferry are not alone in their situation. According to Tim Lynch, there are currently ten Middletown buildings going through court processes, many of them in the North End. In addition, in the past few years the city has taken possession of several buildings which it has closed up and been unable to sell. For example, 44-46 Ferry, a building right next door to 40 Ferry, was taken after the owner failed to provide heat and hot water, as well as basic repairs, for three months, and then failed to pay either the fines or the taxes on the property. The building-which the city considers "blighted" because its dilapidated condition would put inhabitants in danger-is now entirely boarded up. The Common Council has approved a proposal to demolish it. However, the city has provided no funds for the demolition.
Many former residents of 44-46 Ferry are glad the city closed the building down and even happier that the Department of Welfare helped them find new housing across the street at 51-53 Ferry. Yet some people with an interest in the North End, including Carole Ketelsen, who owns two buildings on nearby Dekovan Drive, now argue that 51-53 should be torn down as well. Ketelsen says that one of the main problems with 44-46 was that the landlord didn't screen his tenants well enough. Now that many of these tenants have moved to the bank-owned building across the street, she says, "the mess has followed them." She calls 51-53 an eyesore and suggests that it, and similar buildings, should be torn down to make room for better residential buildings and for parking for Main Street businesses, which she thinks would make the area more attractive for shoppers and merchants.
Fifty-one-Fifty-Three Ferry resident Viola Porath argues that the building is "a hundred and fifty percent better" than 44-46. She is glad that she has been able to stay together with friends who had been her neighbors in the old building for several years. T.J. Taylor, another transplant from across the street, agrees that 44-46, as well as 40 Ferry and a few other buildings, should be destroyed. But he worries that the city wants to tear down even the good buildings on Ferry Street, possibly to put in more parking space. "That's what Middletown is," he says, "parking lots and banks."
Whatever city officials would like to do about Ferry Street, for now it seems that they don't even have the money to do what all parties agree is the right first step. The city's apparent inability to either sell or tear down the obviously blighted buildings, which often become centers of drug dealing, is a major concern of the North End Action Team (NEAT). The community organization, which Ketleson and some other landlords, as well as tenants and tenant advocates, are members of, argues that improving the conditions of North End buildings is closely connected with solving the area's other economic and social problems. NEAT member Marie Stevens suggests that as long as economic opportunities for local residents remain as limited as they are now, drug-sales-related property damage and the inability of some tenants to pay their rent on time will create problems for both landlords and tenants. "On one hand," she says, "houses aren't to blame-a lot of landlords lost a lot because the apartments were destroyed, to be fair about it. And a lot of tenants lost out because they were still there, and they suffered." She advocates attempts to improve job opportunities, especially for the young. "The thing is, you don't want to move problems, you want to solve problems. When you're moving these kids around, there's still the same situation. No place to go-no place nice. Talk to the kids around here. They have no cars. They need job training, and when [reformers] say they want jobs for the community-how, if they don't have the training for it?"
More immediately, however, some NEAT members argue that the city should allocate more money to fix or demolish blighted buildings and that it should keep tenants of buildings like 40 Ferry better informed of the legal situation of their homes. NEAT members hope that in the future the process of relocating residents of buildings that the city plans to close can operate more smoothly. That would mean that tenants wouldn't need to be as anxious about their immediate future as Starla Bolduc and the other residents of 40 Ferry are now.