Ceiling Fixed After Rent Goes Into Escrow

Hawa Edison will resume paying rent to her landlord for the first time in eight months — the first time in years since the ceiling of her kids’ bedroom has been intact and free of mold.

After filing a lawsuit against Ocean Management last November, Edison has paid her monthly rent of $995 per month to housing court, rather than to her landlord, in an escrow arrangement from November to April.

In early May, housing court judge John Cirello ruled that Edison was entitled to the six months’ worth of her paid rent back in the form of a $5,970 check. Edison received court permission to withhold rent for the months of May and June as her apartment continued to violate the housing code.

This past Thursday, Edison (who asked not to be photographed) and her lawyers — New Haven Legal Assistance Association attorneys Sinclair Williams and Amy Eppler-Epstein — reached an agreement with Ocean to resume paying rent in July, now that Ocean addressed the problems in her apartment.

Edison lives with her four kids, who range in age from toddlers to tweens, in a two-bedroom apartment at 167 Scranton St. in West River. The apartment is on the top floor of a three-family home with off-white siding. Edison uses the living room as a third bedroom for herself, while her kids share the two official bedrooms.

When Edison moved into the apartment in July 2015, the apartment was ​“wonderful” and ​“clean,” she recalled. At the time, she still lived with her kids’ father. The house’s only fault was an infestation of mice, who would scurry across kitchen counters as she washed dishes, and over her feet as she brushed her teeth, she said. Her kids would scream at the sight of a mouse.

Over time, Edison said, she learned that when something broke in her apartment — her sink, for instance, or her toilet — an Ocean representative would promise to send someone to the house, but no one would come, or someone would arrive to inspect the house but not make repairs. 

“We got kids,” Edison said. ​“We cannot wait for stuff to be fixed.” She said she sometimes used her own money to pay for repairs.

One morning in 2016, Edison went to the kids’ bedroom to get them ready for school and saw that water had dripped down from the ceiling. The family placed a bucket beneath the leak and reported the issue to Ocean that afternoon. 

Soon ​“everything started dropping from the roof onto the floor,” Edison recalled. The bedroom ceiling bulged and flaked. The ceiling above back staircase caved, rotted, and peeled.

“They said, ​‘We’ll send somebody,’ ” Edison said. One person arrived to examine the ceiling, but Edison said that no one came back to make repairs. (The lawyer representing Ocean and the company’s owner, Shmuel Aizenberg, did not respond to multiple attempts to reach out for comment by the time of this article’s publication.)

The family kept the bucket out, waiting. ​“We keep doing it, keep doing it, keep doing it, keep doing it, until it was 2019.”

By then, mold had flourished along the stairwell walls and in the damp ceiling debris. Mushrooms were growing in the crack beneath the bedroom door. 

Edison was pregnant with her fourth child and had a 12-year-old, 4‑year-old, and toddler. Her three kids had developed coughs, including her oldest son, who had asthma and found it hard to breathe. They noticed a bad smell emanating from their clothes, so Edison resorted to storing the kids’ belongings in her already-crowded living room-turned-bedroom. 

“I was very stressed out,” Edison said. ​“I was pregnant, in a mold house with mushrooms.”

During one medical appointment, a doctor asked Edison about circumstances that might be causing the kids’ breathing challenges, and Edison explained that the roof above their bedroom had begun to crumble. The doctor connected Edison with a social worker, who linked her to the city’s anti-blight Livable City Initiative (LCI), which put her in touch with New Haven Legal Assistance Association.

When Covid-19 arrived in New Haven, Edison lost her job at Apple Rehab in West Haven, she said. She asked Ocean for rent relief, but the landlord refused, she said. ​“We pay rent, and then have to fix our own problems — it didn’t make no sense at all,” Edison said. 

LCI inspected Edison’s house in early October 2021, and found that in addition to the roof and rodent issues, the house had a defective door, a staircase on the verge of collapse, missing smoke and carbon monoxide detectors, and a broken gutter system. The agency gave Ocean one day to fix many of the issues, and 21 days to fix the roof, staircase, and door.

On Nov. 9, when the ceiling remained in shambles, the mold left untreated, the door broken, the mice free to roam, Edison and her lawyers filed a lawsuit against Ocean for not complying with housing code.

She began paying rent to the court.

“The court process was very good,” Edison said, praising her lawyers.

Over the course of months, Ocean gradually fixed her apartment. Her kids are able to breathe more easily in their home. Edison said she’s still nervous that despite the traps, mice will return to her apartment. 

“The court was very concerned about the conditions there,” Judge John Cirello said in housing court this past week.

An Ocean legal representative suggested that mice may have continued to infest the apartment due to crumbs of food left out. Cirello turned to Edison. ​“It’s really important that there’s no food lying out,” he said. (Edison later insisted that she keeps her apartment clean.)

On Thursday, Cirello approved an agreement between both parties to resolve the case and resume rent payments beginning in July.

Edison is on a month-to-month lease with Ocean. She said she plans to search for another apartment with a different landlord.

“It should not take forever [for a landlord] to come,” Edison maintained. ​“They should come and fix it right away. It is not fair for us to go through this stuff with little kids… We got a right to live in a house where we can be happy.”

Williams said that other tenants who are struggling to work out repairs with their landlords should call LCI, and then reach out to legal aid. 

“Our advice is that every tenant in New Haven should learn from Ms. Edison’s case and recognize that although tenants cannot and should not ever withhold rent, every tenant should demand that their landlord take care of their apartment and follow the steps (here) if needed to pay rent to court and win their rent money back,” Williams wrote in an email.

Edison also shared advice for tenants in similar situations: ​“If you see your landlord is not doing his best in the house, reach out for help and they will help you… They got help.”