by Laura Glesby
After a cold long weekend, the heat is back on inside Queen Lacks’ Dixwell Avenue apartment — with a promise from her landlord, Mandy Management, to install an automatic sensor to prevent future oil shortages.
Lacks had reported a heating outage to her alder, Troy Streater, on Friday. The basement furnace at 479 Dixwell Ave. had run out of oil, leaving tenants without heat during a snowstorm.
In the meantime, Mandy Management offered her and the other tenants of the eight-unit apartment building the option of relocating to a hotel room or using space heaters as a makeshift solution; Lacks, along with all her neighbors, elected to stay.
Livable City Initiative (LCI) housing code inspectors visited the Dixwell Avenue apartments on Saturday and confirmed that Mandy had offered the tenants a solution in compliance with the housing code. LCI Deputy Director Mark Stroud and inspector Roberto DeJesus returned Tuesday morning, prepared to require evacuation of the tenants into hotels if the heat remained non-functioning.
By the time Stroud and DeJesus arrived on Tuesday, accompanied by Streater, the furnace had hummed back to life in the basement. One tenant told the inspectors that the heat had resumed working in their apartment the day prior.
The pair used thermometer guns to measure the temperature of the walls in each room of Lacks’ apartment. They got readings between 71 and 73 degrees.
Lacks said that the two space heaters that Mandy provided over the weekend weren’t sufficient. Each of them had a missing wheel, and she propped them up atop a stack of paper. Lacks said that she slept overnight on the sofa because it was too cold to sleep in her bed.
Mandy’s maintenance department manager, who asked not to be named or photographed in this story, arrived on scene alongside a pair of maintenance workers Tuesday morning — not only to warm up the building, but to defrost any tensions with tenants.
He said that the building currently receives oil deliveries on a regular schedule – which, in the case of the past weekend, didn’t necessarily account for fluctuations in the weather that led to irregular heating usage.
(Update:) Mandy Management CEO Yudi Gurevitch wrote in a statement that the heat outage could be attributed to an “unexpected depletion of oil during an unusually severe winter.” He wrote, “These buildings are enrolled in an automated oil delivery program with our provider, Standard Oil, and this was the first time we have encountered such an issue.”
Gurevitch wrote that Mandy Management “promptly contacted Standard Oil to request an emergency delivery” upon learning of the outage. “However,” he wrote, “a breakdown in Standard Oil’s weekend response and delivery process delayed delivery until Monday morning when normal heating service was fully restored.”
“I want to emphasize that ensuring resident safety and uninterrupted essential services is a core priority in how we oversee our properties,” Gurevitch wrote. “We have a long-standing record of providing reliable heat across all of our properties, and this was an isolated incident.”
The furnace is back on at 479 Dixwell.
Going forward, the maintenance manager said, he is working on installing automatic oil sensors in furnaces across Mandy Management’s extensive properties in New Haven, which will alert Mandy Management when the furnace is low based on real-time data as opposed to preset schedules. He said that the 479 Dixwell Ave. can expect such a sensor to be installed within a week or two. (Click here to read a January 2025 article about winter heating problems at a different Mandy apartment building, on Dickerman Street.)
When asked about the space heaters missing a wheel, he replied, “that’s not OK.” He unscrewed a wheel from one of the heaters and added it to the other, leaving Lacks with one upright space heater “just in case.”
At Streater’s prompting, he agreed to cover any spike in Lacks’ electric bill during the time that she used the space heaters.
The manager also said that Mandy Management is in the process of shifting to a new centralized software system that will enable tenants to communicate more directly with Mandy Management staff — a system he expects to come online in April.
“This is gonna be a big change, and it’s going to be felt,” he said.
Lacks pressed the manager on why Mandy Management has increased her rent over the years without investing more in the property.
“I agree with you,” said the manager. He said that since he’s taken over the company’s maintenance department in June 2024, he has worked on improving the company’s track record of responding to building conditions. He said that leadership of the company has been on board. “There has been no resource that I asked for that got denied,” he said.
“I told them, we don’t sell cans of Coca Cola. We deal with people’s homes,” he said.
“I’ve been here 50 years,” Lacks told the manager — long before an LLC affiliate of Mandy purchased the building in 2019.
The manager put his hand to his heart. “Wow — my respect” he said. “That’s impressive.”
Lacks pointed out the shaky doorknobs throughout the units, which the manager added to his to-do list. She pointed up at the popcorn ceiling above the living room, one strip of which had been smoothed over. She asked if Mandy could finish the job, and the manager assented, though he noted that the furniture in the room would need to be temporarily relocated.
When Stroud pointed out a wrinkled carpet in the hallway outside Lacks’ home, the manager said he could replace it with new flooring.
“We’ve got some work to do. We’ve got a lot of homework,” he said.
“I look forward to me working with you, and you working with me,” said Lacks.
Inspector Roberto DeJesus and Alder Troy Streater enter the building.