Courtesy of Liam Brennan

In February 2023, an investigation by the News found that most complaints filed the previous year with New Haven’s housing code enforcement agency, the Livable City Initiative, had not been resolved.

The agency, LCI, is responsible for addressing blight to residential properties, enforcing the housing code and monitoring building licensing. However, a number of operational faults, such as delayed inspections, meant that some New Haven tenants faced broken smoke detectors, haphazard piles of screws, loose electrical wiring and other dangerous conditions in their homes with no redress from their landlords or the city.

After several years of mounting criticism from tenants and housing activists, the city responded last year with a makeover of LCI, including new leadership, expanded staff, boosted funding and higher fines on noncompliant landlords. The overhaul has become a point of pride for Mayor Justin Elicker’s administration, which has long faced pressure to strengthen its housing policy.

LCI has operated in New Haven since 1996. For most of its existence, the agency had dual responsibilities: housing enforcement — determining whether properties complied with code regulations, anti-blight standards and licensing requirements — and housing development, which entailed establishing affordable options and providing financial assistance to homebuyers and tenants.

In his proposal for the city’s 2024-25 fiscal year budget, Elicker took the first major step in transforming LCI when he shrunk its jurisdiction to housing enforcement alone. By the end of 2024, he formed a new department in the Economic Development Administration to take over the city’s housing development work.

“I think [it’s] very important for LCI to focus on the core mission, what it was originally created for, which is ensuring our existing housing stock is of high standards,” Elicker told the News in 2024.

A “record of neglect”

After housing code violations in three properties sent him to criminal housing court in October 2021, Shmuel Aizenberg, the head of local real estate company Ocean Management, blamed LCI’s outdated certified mail communications for his failure to resolve the violations, which included strewn trash, damaged siding and rotting floorboards.

Yet LCI staff explained that they often struggled to reach a human property owner when addressing tenant complaints about code violations. Instead, the names of corporations tended to be listed on residential license applications, which proved problematic in emergencies or time-sensitive situations.

In February 2022, under then-director Arlevia Samuel, LCI successfully pursued a city ordinance amendment that would require property owners to list a human being on their applications for residential licenses. LCI staff still communicated with property owners through mail in regular cases.cq

During Samuel’s tenure as director, from October 2020 to August 2023, she oversaw additions to LCI’s staff and over $800,000 in federal aid disbursed to renters during the pandemic. But community members continued to sound the alarm about their unresolved complaints.

In April 2023, a tenant filed against LCI in housing court after waiting nearly eight months for a reinspection of her Hill apartment. The hearing found that the apartment had failed three inspections — due to problems ranging from a rodent infestation to broken cabinets — but that LCI hadn’t returned. The court-ordered inspection that followed found that those problems persisted.

Later in April, activists from the Room For All Coalition, a local housing advocacy group, testified before the Board of Alders Finance Committee to demand that LCI expand its 12-person team of inspectors and create a digital system for tenants to track the progress of their complaints. In a New Haven Independent op-ed published the same week, activists called for increased funds for the agency and accused the city of tolerating slumlords.

“Unlike individuals in the criminal-legal system, landlords are treated the same whether it’s their first or 50th offense,” activists Amanda Watts, Jessica Stamp and Luke Melonakos-Harrison wrote in the op-ed. “Ocean Management has over 50 convictions in court for housing code violations. This record of neglect represents harm against the health and wellbeing of hundreds of New Haven renters, especially considering that many violations go unreported for fear of retaliation.”

The agency and mayor continued to respond with gradual action. For instance, Elicker advocated for a state bill that would increase fines for code violations to $2,000, increasing from a $250 cap.

In August 2023, an investigation in the New Haven Independent found that over 3,000 multifamily rental properties had expired licenses, which meant that landlords did not pass inspections certifying those properties to be safe. The article also noted that LCI wasn’t using fines to punish licensing noncompliance.

The path to reform

After years of unresolved cases and swelling criticism, LCI’s transformation began in earnest in spring of 2024. Besides focusing LCI on housing enforcement, Elicker’s budget proposal for the following fiscal year provided for eight new staff members, including five housing inspectors.

In April 2024, Elicker appointed Liam Brennan LAW ’07, a former mayoral candidate and active critic of LCI, to serve as a consultant for the agency. At the time, Brennan said he would focus on using legal devices to strengthen enforcement efforts. In August, Elicker appointed Brennan as the new executive director of LCI, with Samuel moving to the Economic Development Administration.

As Brennan took the reins, policy began to change rapidly. In September, the alders’ Legislation Committee advanced an ordinance amendment that would help the city hire hearing officers — local volunteers responsible for issuing citations and fines — rather than waiting for approval from the state Board of Appeals.

Brennan also updated the housing code to extend the $100-per-day fine from code violations to both blight and licensing cases, which he said has encouraged landlords to attend hearings or address complaints before their scheduled hearing.

In December, a hearing officer issued $130,000 in fines to Ocean Management for blight on six of their properties. Previously, Brennan told the News, LCI needed five reinspections and approval from the state Board of Appeals to enforce anti-blight cases.

“That is not a recipe for making government work,” Brennan said. “And I want to see government work.”

According to Brennan, a survey of 40 cases from his research as a consultant revealed that it took an average of 16 days to send a landlord a notice of violation following a failed inspection. Today, he said, that number is down to 3.3 days.

Still, Brennan said, there is room for the agency to grow. He told the News that large gaps can remain between when a landlord receives a notice of an anti-blight violation and when they receive a citation. LCI also has a queue of reinspections it has yet to complete.

One way to ensure accountability is a publicly available dashboard for tracking the status of inspections and complaints — an innovation Elicker promised when he appointed Brennan back in August.

According to Brennan, his team is working to add a search bar function that can aggregate data about a property’s code compliance, licensing and anti-blight records all at once. The current draft of the system presents these data separately. Brennan told the News that this new function is in beta testing, and will be ready for internal review by late May.

Elicker’s 2025-26 fiscal year budget includes a $1.3 million increase in funding for LCI.

“I think the LCI team has been feeling pretty proud of the progress that they’re making, chipping away at blight and housing code issues that the city’s struggled with for decades,” Elicker told the News. “There’s a lot of good work being done, and we’re better able to track that work now to ensure that we hold ourselves accountable, and also to share with the public our progress.”

The Livable City Initiative’s director serves a four-year term.