EAST HARTFORD — Town officials hope that updates to East Hartford's anti-blight initiatives will serve as a warning to landlords and homeowners to keep their properties up to code and a call to residents to report those who don't.
During a press conference Monday, Mayor Connor Martin spoke of several changes the town has made, including increasing property maintenance fines from $100 per day or incident up to as much as $1,000.
"We now have the ability to increase those fines up to $1,000, and that's important because when we're finding a local homeowner who hasn't cut their grass, they feel the weight of that. It means a lot," Martin said.
The push for more severe penalties for blight comes after residents of Chapman Arms Apartments, owned by Straus Equities, were forced to relocate last winter due to a lack of heat in the buildings.
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Martin said after that incident, the town needed "more teeth" in its blight enforcement effort.
"The increase brings the weight of responsibility down on that landlord so that they can remedy whatever repair they need to make and get those residents back to normal life," Martin said.
The town has strengthened its "disjointed" relocation assistance process, Martin said, so "everyone in East Hartford government knows exactly who has a role in assisting of relocation of a resident, who knows what they're supposed to be doing and how we can get a resident back into their unit as fast as possible so that we can get them back to normal life."
Laurence Burnsed, director of Health and Human Services, said caseworkers in the town's Youth and Social Services division need to be responsive to resident issues, which means being available and on-call even if a problem occurs after hours or on the weekend.
"We need to be sure that residents understand what their responsibilities, what their rights are, how we can help them out," he said. "We want to be sure that we're comprehensive in our response and that we actually are assisting our residents so it can be a little bit more comfortable and less challenging when unexpected circumstances happen to them, and they're displaced for a period of time."
In circumstances where residents need to look for other housing due to total property damage, Burnsed said the town needs to make sure they help residents locate suitable and comparable housing that is within the resident's financial means.
Hannah Srajer, president of the Connecticut Tenants Union, said when elected officials listen to the tenants about their experiences, they can integrate that feedback into the daily functioning of how city government works for its residents.
"Much of the Connecticut housing stock and a lot of the housing stock in East Hartford is controlled by corporate landlords who do not care about people who rent from them, and see them as profits, paychecks and not as people," she said. "We hope the updated fines incentivize landlords to do the right thing. Right now many corporate actors, many corporate landlords are breaking the law every single day just because they can, and this policy signifies that that is no longer possible."
Martin said he wanted to be clear East Hartford is not anti-landlord but is against absentee landlords, adding that some out-of-state landlords don't care about the residents that live in town.
"We will always be anti-landlord to those who do not prioritize the quality, the health and safety of their tenants in their building," Martin said. "We will always support economic development apartment building housing, but at the end of the day we want to make sure that you're providing a quality of life that residents are paying for, that residents deserve. We've got your back here in East Hartford, this tenant union has your back, the entire team behind me has your back."
March 5, 2025
Jamila Young
Reporter
Jamila Young is a reporter with the Journal Inquirer. She has been with Hearst Connecticut since June 2023. She is a 2014 Journalism graduate of SCSU. She has previously worked for The Bristol Observer and Step Saver newspapers. When not working, she enjoys going to concerts, comedy shows, watching TV, listening to music, and hanging out with friends.