Several new laws in New Haven will make it easier for renters to advocate for themselves, and harder for landlords to get away with providing housing that has unsafe living conditions.
New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker announced Wednesday a slew of new ordinances, some already approved by the city’s Board of Alders, some awaiting approval, that will strengthen protections for tenants and punishments for absent landlords.
The purpose of the new laws is to ensure New Haven has safe, affordable housing and a way to create change if it isn’t, Elicker said.
"We want people to be good landlords, and when you're not, we're going to hold you accountable,” Elicker said.
Among the expanded protections are laws increasing landlord penalties for safety violations from a daily fine of $250 to up to $2,000. Formerly, the process to enforce the $250 penalties was labor intensive and often resulted in a slap on the wrist for the landlord, Elicker said.
“When tenants complain and the city comes in, and there’s an identified housing code violation one of the challenges we’ve had is that landlords don’t quickly act to correct those housing code violations,” Elicker said.
The city’s Alders already approved an ordinance that would change the housing code enforcement, allowing New Haven officials to appoint independent hearing officers that run two inspections on a property found to have a code violation and can provide a heftier fine.
The new ordinances will also enable about 2,500 more residents to form tenants unions.
Previously, only tenants of apartment buildings with ten or more units could establish tenants unions. Now, residents of buildings with five or more apartments can form unions.
The ordinances may take several months to go through the legal process and for housing inspection officers to be hired, Elicker said.
Hope Vaughn, vice president of the Quinnipiac Avenue tenants union, said she’s excited for more residents to be able to unionize.
“With what we did here it proves that there’s a need for a tenants union and we can get results with unifying,” Vaughn said.
In the last five years, about 2,000 new housing units were created in New Haven, and an additional 3,500 are in the works. Of those apartments, about 40% are affordable.
New Haven is home to about 45,000 rentals, and about 70% of residents are renters.
The increase in fines will combat what is known as “landlord math,” according to Connecticut Tenants Union President Hannah Srajer.
“In the rental market right now that is increasingly corporatized, more and more actors are raising rents and not putting any of the money that they're extracting from our members who are working two to three jobs to pay that rent,” Srajer said. “They're not putting any of those dollars back into the property, and they're doing that even if it's breaking the law, because they can get away with it.”
