Affordable housing, low wage jobs and foreign workers, taken from the CT DOR Report --
The statewide affordability issue has been very much felt in New London County, where the price of a home is unreachable for the more than 80 percent of casino employees who earn less than the required $79,900 a year needed to qualify for a mortgage to purchase a home at the 2007 median sales price of $255,500.314 The only groups of casino employees who meet or exceed the threshold are senior management and directors.
The affordability problem has hampered the ability of casinos to fill positions. They sometimes recruit workers from overseas – students from Eastern Europe in the summer and from South America in the winter who often rent rooms in homes near the casinos.315
The lack of affordable housing has created, in large part, a substandard housing problem in southeastern Connecticut. Area housing officials such as Vernon Vessey of Montville acknowledge they have been waging an unsuccessful battle to curb illegal conversions of single-family homes into rooming houses.328
Sharing of beds in shifts known as ―hotbedding‖ is a common practice among casino workers who earn low wages.329 One shift of workers returns to a home, only to be replaced by another. The term ―hotbedding‖ denotes that the bed, occupied on a constant basis, is always warm. Building inspectors say the illegal conversions first started after 9/11 when, according to the Asian American Federation of New York, nearly a quarter of Chinatown‘s 246 garment factories closed, putting nearly 8,000 Chinese Americans out of work. Many of them obtained jobs at the two Connecticut casinos, both of which were expanding. Some continue to commute back and forth from New York, but many others stay three-to-five nights a week in the region, renting out rooms. According to Foxwoods‘ Human Resources Department, more than 600 workers list a city in New York State as their residence; about two-thirds of them live in either Brooklyn or Manhattan.
The first brush with illegal conversions was in November 2001 when firefighters, responding to a small house fire, discovered 20 beds in a single-family house in Norwich. Makeshift screens separated mattresses lying on bare wood floors.330 State building codes require a means of egress that ―provides a continuous, unobstructed and undiminished path of exit travel from any occupied point in a building or structure‖ to allow for an emergency escape and rescue. Windows are supposed to be in each bedroom. Inspectors routinely discover code violations in homes illegally converted into boarding facilities. Vessey, the Montville housing official, relies mostly on complaints to investigate code violations. The complaints have lessened as more and more of a neighborhood becomes saturated with illegal conversions, according to Vessey. But on December 9, 2008, Vessey received a complaint from a longtime Uncasville resident, Vincent Radzwilowicz, who suspected that no permits were taken out for renovation work on a nearby single-family home. He was right. Vessey and the town‘s zoning officer inspected the home. Nothing could have prepared them for what they saw. Workers were converting a detached two-car garage into living units. They were building two floors. Each floor had two bedrooms and a kitchen. Workers installed electrical outlets without permits; none of the bedrooms had required smoke detectors and the ceiling heights were less than those required by state law.
Any doubts as to whether this home on Ridge Road was a rooming house were dashed by a sign attached to wall that read: ―Tenants do not touch the thermostat.‖331 Vessey then went from the garage to the house itself. He found six more bedrooms, all with locks on the doors, indicating that the bedrooms were being rent out as rooms to boarders. Another three or four bedrooms were in the basement. Like the rooms in the garage, none had smoke or carbon-monoxide detectors or proper emergency exits.
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Public officials such as Vessey fear that it is just a matter of time before a loss of life occurs. ―Here is a 1,800-square-foot home with as many as 10 bedrooms, and another two that were on the way,‖ he noted. ―If a fire broke out, it would be difficult for people to get out alive.‖ Radzwilowicz, a 45-year resident of Uncasville, said his neighborhood has undergone a significant change. ―You see people going in and out of homes all day and night. It is just not right. People are being warehoused.‖ Two days after the inspection, the landlord was ordered by Vessey to develop ―a plan of compliance to abate‖ the violations.
A day earlier, Norwich housing officials inspected a single-family home on West Thames Street after a health inspector relayed his concerns to city officials as he reviewed an application for a new septic system, which is affected by the number of bedrooms. The inspector noticed that the landlord carved up the house to add a number of bedrooms.332
Building officials found six bedrooms on the first floor and an attempt to add another two in the basement. Dining and living rooms were divided into several small bedrooms. All of the renovation work, including electrical, was done without permits. A heating technician told city housing officials that with the new rooms constructed, he believed there would not be enough airflow in the basement to allow the furnace to function properly. Carbon monoxide could build up. Inspectors report that the tenants were all casino workers.333 Inspectors found another illegal conversion at home near the one they had just cited. The same landlord owned this home as well.
As the inspectors left, the owner of the dwelling complained that she wasn‘t the only landlord operating rooming houses. She noted that the neighborhood is full of them.334 Landlords in Montville and Norwich, cited by housing officials in the two cases we reported, restored their properties to single-family homes, taking down walls and removing beds, according to building officials in both communities. But the issue, public officials acknowledge, is how long will it be before the homeowners illegally convert the homes again?
Holly Hill Drive in Montville is an area riddled with illegal conversions.335 Six years ago, a fire destroyed a home on the 100 block of the street. The owner had already installed several cubicles in the basement and was ripping up old carpeting when a torch ignited glue from the old carpeting. The one-story home was quickly enveloped in flames. Two occupants were slightly injured. Other cases include:
A home on Holly Hill Drive that was damaged by a stove fire. The fire marshal found four bedrooms and a bathroom that were built in a basement without permits.336
A three-bedroom home on Leffingwell Road in Montville that experienced a furnace backfire. Officials discovered four bedrooms in a basement without permits. A
Page 205
breezeway was converted to a sleeping room, and the living room was divided into two rooms for sleeping as well. Some of the sleeping rooms had three or more beds in them without any smoke detectors or rescue openings.337 Twenty tenants were in the house; most of them were casino workers. Only one spoke English. She explained that the tenants rented sleeping space from the owner, who lived out of state.338
A one-bedroom apartment in Norwich was discovered in June 2008 to have five students from the Ukraine living in it. It was condemned for electrical code violations. The students, casino workers, were brought here on visas. They were relocated at city expense into a new apartment.
One of the more bizarre cases of hotbedding occurred in late 2001, when a tenant complained to Montville Fire Marshal Ray Occhialini that he could not get enough bathroom time and, when he did, there was no running water. Occhialini found 15 people sleeping on towels sprawled across a hardwood floor. Through an interpreter, Occhialini discovered that the tenants worked at the casino, paid rent and sent back most of their wages to relatives living in New York City. Coincidentally, it turned out to be the same house that Vessey cited in December 2008. The owner was different; the problem the same.
The Norwich Department of Planning and Development has resorted to putting staff on overtime to investigate code violations. Building officials work roughly 60 hours a week. In FY 2006, the year the blight officer was hired, the number of code violations more than doubled to 1,170. Zoning complaints increased from 137 to 503 from 2002 to 2006.339 City officials attribute most of those increases to illegal rooming-house conversions.340 John Wong, president of New London County‘s Chinese American Cultural Association, said the unsafe housing problem is much worse than officials think. Wong believes that at least three-quarters of the homes in the Holly Hill Drive area in Montville are rooming houses. ―They have no idea how serious a problem this is,‖ Wong said. ―What we need to do is provide affordable housing for these casino workers.‖ There has also been some evidence of hotbedding and illegal conversions in New London. The Fire Marshal‘s office reported that a casino dealer illegally converted a number of apartment buildings into rooming houses. He then recruited casino workers as tenants. The city had to ask the state‘s Housing Prosecutor to file charges against the landlord.
Housing inspectors and fire marshals acknowledge that their record-keeping is not as meticulous as it should be. Inspectors say they do not inquire as to the employment status of the tenants. Often, they will simply demand that code violations be corrected. And if the landlord quickly does so, there sometimes is little, if any, description kept of the violations. For everyone they document, 10 go undocumented.341
Page 206
Norwich housing inspectors say they come across at least a half-dozen homes per month that have been improperly converted into illegal rooming houses. Montville inspectors put the figure there at least one a month. They often see tenants in casino uniforms.
Housing officials say landlords are getting smarter at beating the system. An increasing number disguise their renovations as storage rooms, music rooms or sewing rooms when, in fact, they are bedrooms. That way, they get around the requirement that smoke and carbon monoxide detectors be installed along with windows.342 Building official Vessey noted that the building code does not contain any regulations for determining the use of a room. He may have no choice but to approve plans for a Holly Hill home in which basement renovations call for four rooms and two bathrooms. ―I think it is a pretty solid bet that some of those rooms will become bedrooms, but that is not what the plans say right now,‖ Vessey said.
Under current law, building officials such as Vessey must receive a complaint or have first-hand knowledge of a violation before inspecting a single-family home.343 Judith Decine, the state‘s housing prosecutor, said she looks forward to the day when the state‘s Housing Code is amended to allow housing inspectors to investigate suspicions of overcrowding without a formal complaint. A housing task force recently completed a study that recommends the change when an absentee landlord owns the home. ―This is something that is really needed to address the problem of overcrowding in these homes,‖ Decine said. ―Now there is lack of authority that prevents an official from trying to avert a tragedy.‖
With so many people living in single-family dwellings, local officials fear a significant census undercount, which will affect the receipt of federal and state aid.344
Norwich officials pointed out, ―Many of the new residents have limited English language proficiency and engage in living practices that violate local zoning ordinances, making it likely that households would underreport the number of residents.‖345 The Census Bureau‘s American Community survey, released on December 9, 2008, reflects a near tripling of the number of Asians living in Norwich, but the estimate of 2,038 is still very low, according to city officials.
Pages 200-207
The statewide affordability issue has been very much felt in New London County, where the price of a home is unreachable for the more than 80 percent of casino employees who earn less than the required $79,900 a year needed to qualify for a mortgage to purchase a home at the 2007 median sales price of $255,500.314 The only groups of casino employees who meet or exceed the threshold are senior management and directors.
The affordability problem has hampered the ability of casinos to fill positions. They sometimes recruit workers from overseas – students from Eastern Europe in the summer and from South America in the winter who often rent rooms in homes near the casinos.315
The lack of affordable housing has created, in large part, a substandard housing problem in southeastern Connecticut. Area housing officials such as Vernon Vessey of Montville acknowledge they have been waging an unsuccessful battle to curb illegal conversions of single-family homes into rooming houses.328
Sharing of beds in shifts known as ―hotbedding‖ is a common practice among casino workers who earn low wages.329 One shift of workers returns to a home, only to be replaced by another. The term ―hotbedding‖ denotes that the bed, occupied on a constant basis, is always warm. Building inspectors say the illegal conversions first started after 9/11 when, according to the Asian American Federation of New York, nearly a quarter of Chinatown‘s 246 garment factories closed, putting nearly 8,000 Chinese Americans out of work. Many of them obtained jobs at the two Connecticut casinos, both of which were expanding. Some continue to commute back and forth from New York, but many others stay three-to-five nights a week in the region, renting out rooms. According to Foxwoods‘ Human Resources Department, more than 600 workers list a city in New York State as their residence; about two-thirds of them live in either Brooklyn or Manhattan.
The first brush with illegal conversions was in November 2001 when firefighters, responding to a small house fire, discovered 20 beds in a single-family house in Norwich. Makeshift screens separated mattresses lying on bare wood floors.330 State building codes require a means of egress that ―provides a continuous, unobstructed and undiminished path of exit travel from any occupied point in a building or structure‖ to allow for an emergency escape and rescue. Windows are supposed to be in each bedroom. Inspectors routinely discover code violations in homes illegally converted into boarding facilities. Vessey, the Montville housing official, relies mostly on complaints to investigate code violations. The complaints have lessened as more and more of a neighborhood becomes saturated with illegal conversions, according to Vessey. But on December 9, 2008, Vessey received a complaint from a longtime Uncasville resident, Vincent Radzwilowicz, who suspected that no permits were taken out for renovation work on a nearby single-family home. He was right. Vessey and the town‘s zoning officer inspected the home. Nothing could have prepared them for what they saw. Workers were converting a detached two-car garage into living units. They were building two floors. Each floor had two bedrooms and a kitchen. Workers installed electrical outlets without permits; none of the bedrooms had required smoke detectors and the ceiling heights were less than those required by state law.
Any doubts as to whether this home on Ridge Road was a rooming house were dashed by a sign attached to wall that read: ―Tenants do not touch the thermostat.‖331 Vessey then went from the garage to the house itself. He found six more bedrooms, all with locks on the doors, indicating that the bedrooms were being rent out as rooms to boarders. Another three or four bedrooms were in the basement. Like the rooms in the garage, none had smoke or carbon-monoxide detectors or proper emergency exits.
Page 204
Public officials such as Vessey fear that it is just a matter of time before a loss of life occurs. ―Here is a 1,800-square-foot home with as many as 10 bedrooms, and another two that were on the way,‖ he noted. ―If a fire broke out, it would be difficult for people to get out alive.‖ Radzwilowicz, a 45-year resident of Uncasville, said his neighborhood has undergone a significant change. ―You see people going in and out of homes all day and night. It is just not right. People are being warehoused.‖ Two days after the inspection, the landlord was ordered by Vessey to develop ―a plan of compliance to abate‖ the violations.
A day earlier, Norwich housing officials inspected a single-family home on West Thames Street after a health inspector relayed his concerns to city officials as he reviewed an application for a new septic system, which is affected by the number of bedrooms. The inspector noticed that the landlord carved up the house to add a number of bedrooms.332
Building officials found six bedrooms on the first floor and an attempt to add another two in the basement. Dining and living rooms were divided into several small bedrooms. All of the renovation work, including electrical, was done without permits. A heating technician told city housing officials that with the new rooms constructed, he believed there would not be enough airflow in the basement to allow the furnace to function properly. Carbon monoxide could build up. Inspectors report that the tenants were all casino workers.333 Inspectors found another illegal conversion at home near the one they had just cited. The same landlord owned this home as well.
As the inspectors left, the owner of the dwelling complained that she wasn‘t the only landlord operating rooming houses. She noted that the neighborhood is full of them.334 Landlords in Montville and Norwich, cited by housing officials in the two cases we reported, restored their properties to single-family homes, taking down walls and removing beds, according to building officials in both communities. But the issue, public officials acknowledge, is how long will it be before the homeowners illegally convert the homes again?
Holly Hill Drive in Montville is an area riddled with illegal conversions.335 Six years ago, a fire destroyed a home on the 100 block of the street. The owner had already installed several cubicles in the basement and was ripping up old carpeting when a torch ignited glue from the old carpeting. The one-story home was quickly enveloped in flames. Two occupants were slightly injured. Other cases include:
A home on Holly Hill Drive that was damaged by a stove fire. The fire marshal found four bedrooms and a bathroom that were built in a basement without permits.336
A three-bedroom home on Leffingwell Road in Montville that experienced a furnace backfire. Officials discovered four bedrooms in a basement without permits. A
Page 205
breezeway was converted to a sleeping room, and the living room was divided into two rooms for sleeping as well. Some of the sleeping rooms had three or more beds in them without any smoke detectors or rescue openings.337 Twenty tenants were in the house; most of them were casino workers. Only one spoke English. She explained that the tenants rented sleeping space from the owner, who lived out of state.338
A one-bedroom apartment in Norwich was discovered in June 2008 to have five students from the Ukraine living in it. It was condemned for electrical code violations. The students, casino workers, were brought here on visas. They were relocated at city expense into a new apartment.
One of the more bizarre cases of hotbedding occurred in late 2001, when a tenant complained to Montville Fire Marshal Ray Occhialini that he could not get enough bathroom time and, when he did, there was no running water. Occhialini found 15 people sleeping on towels sprawled across a hardwood floor. Through an interpreter, Occhialini discovered that the tenants worked at the casino, paid rent and sent back most of their wages to relatives living in New York City. Coincidentally, it turned out to be the same house that Vessey cited in December 2008. The owner was different; the problem the same.
The Norwich Department of Planning and Development has resorted to putting staff on overtime to investigate code violations. Building officials work roughly 60 hours a week. In FY 2006, the year the blight officer was hired, the number of code violations more than doubled to 1,170. Zoning complaints increased from 137 to 503 from 2002 to 2006.339 City officials attribute most of those increases to illegal rooming-house conversions.340 John Wong, president of New London County‘s Chinese American Cultural Association, said the unsafe housing problem is much worse than officials think. Wong believes that at least three-quarters of the homes in the Holly Hill Drive area in Montville are rooming houses. ―They have no idea how serious a problem this is,‖ Wong said. ―What we need to do is provide affordable housing for these casino workers.‖ There has also been some evidence of hotbedding and illegal conversions in New London. The Fire Marshal‘s office reported that a casino dealer illegally converted a number of apartment buildings into rooming houses. He then recruited casino workers as tenants. The city had to ask the state‘s Housing Prosecutor to file charges against the landlord.
Housing inspectors and fire marshals acknowledge that their record-keeping is not as meticulous as it should be. Inspectors say they do not inquire as to the employment status of the tenants. Often, they will simply demand that code violations be corrected. And if the landlord quickly does so, there sometimes is little, if any, description kept of the violations. For everyone they document, 10 go undocumented.341
Page 206
Norwich housing inspectors say they come across at least a half-dozen homes per month that have been improperly converted into illegal rooming houses. Montville inspectors put the figure there at least one a month. They often see tenants in casino uniforms.
Housing officials say landlords are getting smarter at beating the system. An increasing number disguise their renovations as storage rooms, music rooms or sewing rooms when, in fact, they are bedrooms. That way, they get around the requirement that smoke and carbon monoxide detectors be installed along with windows.342 Building official Vessey noted that the building code does not contain any regulations for determining the use of a room. He may have no choice but to approve plans for a Holly Hill home in which basement renovations call for four rooms and two bathrooms. ―I think it is a pretty solid bet that some of those rooms will become bedrooms, but that is not what the plans say right now,‖ Vessey said.
Under current law, building officials such as Vessey must receive a complaint or have first-hand knowledge of a violation before inspecting a single-family home.343 Judith Decine, the state‘s housing prosecutor, said she looks forward to the day when the state‘s Housing Code is amended to allow housing inspectors to investigate suspicions of overcrowding without a formal complaint. A housing task force recently completed a study that recommends the change when an absentee landlord owns the home. ―This is something that is really needed to address the problem of overcrowding in these homes,‖ Decine said. ―Now there is lack of authority that prevents an official from trying to avert a tragedy.‖
With so many people living in single-family dwellings, local officials fear a significant census undercount, which will affect the receipt of federal and state aid.344
Norwich officials pointed out, ―Many of the new residents have limited English language proficiency and engage in living practices that violate local zoning ordinances, making it likely that households would underreport the number of residents.‖345 The Census Bureau‘s American Community survey, released on December 9, 2008, reflects a near tripling of the number of Asians living in Norwich, but the estimate of 2,038 is still very low, according to city officials.
Pages 200-207
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2 comments:
if we all remember this kind of thing would never happen if the casinos, were built,look at the crime the 2 casinos have brought to connecticut, i havent seen so many screewed up people in my life,do you people that go to the casino look around and see what is really going on , or are you so bblind on sticking your mony in a machine that you have no clue whats going on , next time you go slow down and look around.e
you got the low wages right, we are going backwards every year , they can say what they want ,but the greed is greed and we all know it , only if people would sit and look what really goes on in a casino, , it might just blow your mind, as we all know people need to work , but i will guarentee when that man or women has the chance to leave they wont look back,
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