Victor Avila still remembers the morning in late October he got woken up by his neighbors’ screams and his dogs’ barking to see gray smoke coming out of his heater.
Seconds later, Avila had grabbed his two dogs, car keys, put on his boots and run downstairs, not knowing he was set to lose the place he had called home for more than 25 years.
The basement fire at 271 Wethersfield Ave. forced the evacuation of 17 adults and seven children, according to the American Red Cross. It was the third fire in October that left unhoused tenants and units affected across Hartford.
“We have been fighting for three years for them to take responsibility for fixing all the problems and to pay more attention to these apartments, this is just not fair,” said Avila, who works installing flooring.
He had come back from a night shift like the majority of the tenants that work long shifts or hold more than one job in the Barry Square building.
The fire was not an isolated case in Hartford, where 83 house fires have happened between January and October this year, according to Mario Oquendo Jr., district chief of the Hartford Fire Department.
Just next to the Wethersfield Avenue building there is a blighted building from a January fire, and around the corner, a burned house from a summer fire, where four people died.
In the days following the October fire, the 271 Wethersfield Ave. tenants were not able to return right away and claim the family belongings they had to leave behind when they escaped.
Avila hoped his video cassettes and photos, some of which he brought with him from Aguascalientes, Mexico, when he came to the U.S., were still there and would not be stolen if someone broke into the locked up burnt building.
Service requests
Tenants from 271 and 267 Wethersfield Ave., along with housing equity organizer from the organization Make the Road, Teresa Quintana, said they have organized to fight for better housing conditions for the last three years.
“Every Tuesday we would go into one of those garages in the back and they would start the meeting and talking and saying ‘this is happening’ and ‘we want this to change’,” Quintana recalls. “Then they would send letters to the landlord, and they would complain as a group to the city again, and again.”
Quintana said when she initially organized tenants to send complaints to the city about cockroaches, rats and roof leaks, the forms were in English, and most of the tenants spoke Spanish only.
“There weren’t any complaints before because the form wasn’t even in Spanish. If there is no language accessibility, obviously people might have started to complain more,” Quintana said.
The tenants rallied several times — in December 2023, January 2024 and February 2025 — calling out the mayor to hold the landlord accountable for hazardous living conditions and not having their basic services met like garbage disposal, heat and hot water. The last rally was on Nov. 3 demanding justice about the fire.
Avila, who is one of the tenants who has lived there the longest, says the living conditions worsened after the longtime landlord sold it to Alpha Capital Funds and then All is Good LLC. The property management company was Arlington Group LLC, and now is Mint Management Group LLC.
In total, the properties at 267 and 271 Wethersfield Ave. have 31 service requests for urgent and non-urgent maintenance issues. From heater and boiler failures, to roof leaks that freeze the stairs during the winter to door and window repairs.
Mint Management Group LLC said they responded to the maintenance requests.
“We had service issues and we addressed them, we sent our workers,” a representative of the company responded. “We feel so sorry for what happened, we feel bad for our tenants.”
Hartford’s public records show the management company, Mint Management Group LLC, has an incomplete rental license application. The direct legal landlord is Israel Wiznitzer, who also has an incomplete rental license application in Hartford.
Wiznitzer could not be reached for comment.
Cristian Corza-Godinez, spokesman for the City of Hartford, said an application is considered “complete” only upon the submittal of the application form with payment of the required fee for the license. If the fee is not paid, the application is considered “incomplete,” which means it’s not filed. Rental license applications are tracked through the city’s online software system. The owner is notified that the fee must be paid, as was done in the case of the owner of 267 Wethersfield Ave. on three occasions. A notice of violation for failure to apply for a rental license is the next step.
Sarah White, attorney for Connecticut Fair Housing Center, said the fines are placed on the building as a lien and can be prioritized over mortgages. The city could try to foreclose on the liens.
“The City of Hartford will continue to use every tool at our disposal to hold problematic landlords accountable for their actions, or lack thereof,” Corza-Godinez said in a statement. “Senior city officials have had ongoing conversations with the property owners of the affected building, and the City of Hartford’s Tenant Liaison has been on the ground having direct conversations with tenants to provide needed support. In a city where so many families rent their homes, Mayor Arulampalam and his administration will continue to push every landlord to meet their obligations to provide adequate housing for our residents.”
Owners who have not attempted to file an application have been issued notices of violation for any buildings with 10 or more units. Owners who applied incompletely will be receiving a notice of violation by Nov. 30, the city spokesman said.
“‘Are they waiting for our building to burn down?’ tenants told us last year, because for years we’ve been complaining about the way they’re maintaining this building, and it happened, it burned,” Quintana said.
The fallout
After the fire, the building was secured and labeled as unsafe. Tenants were told to not enter or it would be considered trespassing. But break-ins happened that weekend, according to neighbor Tangela Perry, who called the police.
Tenants were allowed to retrieve their belongings on Nov. 5, six days after the fire. A contractor, who declined to give his name, got hired by the management company to open up the building, which had wooden boards sealing off the entrances.
As tenants began to enter their apartments, they realized a lot of their family’s valuable belongings were gone.
“All that, gone, that’s not replaceable,” said tenant Ronald Bozeman, referring to his parents’ jewelry.
When police arrived, the tenants reported their lost and stolen property.
“I used to be homeless. I used to couch surf. I worked so hard to get here. And nobody cares,” tenant Ryan Pirre said.
Those with no children expressed their emotions out loud more, compared to the those with children, who swallowed up their tears and just kept packing as the neighbors watched out for their sons and daughters playing in front of the apartment building.
Avila was silent, as his daughter helped him pack his clothes. His video cassettes were still in a drawer, and a yellow envelope of his family photos laid on top of his bed.
“I wanted to cry, I felt that pain inside me, I wanted to cry, but nothing came out,” Avila said.
The tenants were told to retrieve their belongings from Wednesday, Nov. 5 until Friday, Nov 7. On Friday, Avila said he saw contractors demolishing parts of the building, while tenants were still moving out their belongings.
Mint Management LLC did not answer when asked for comment.
Displaced
Pirre lived at 271 Wethersfield Ave. for less than six months, and has had sleepless nights after the fire while staying in a motel with his girlfriend and three cats.
Through the Relocation Assistance Act, Pirre, like the rest of the unhoused tenants, have the right to relocation benefits from the city. They get emergency housing — like the motel Pirre was staying in for up to two weeks — temporary housing, storage, payment of moving expenses and up to $4,000 towards a new apartment.
The city’s resources might alleviate tenants’ immediate shelter concerns, but the trauma lingers.
“I woke up from a nightmare that the motel that I was in was burning and that I had to gather my cats again, that I had to get my girlfriend out of there,” Pirre said.
Days after the fire, Pirre was having a walk around Broad Street during his lunch break when he had a flashback of the fire in the middle of the day.
“There was another fire response happening at that exact moment, I just immediately had a super intense flashback of that moment of smelling wood burning and choking on the air and my eyes burning and thinking that I was going to die. I had to close my eyes, I had to just focus on my breathing,” Pirre recalls.
Avila says on the night of the fire he could not sleep due to chest pain and he thinks it’s because he inhaled smoke. He did not consider going to the hospital to get checked since he had asked for time off from his job, unpaid. All he could think about was his housing situation.
“I was still overwhelmed in my head thinking ‘well, I’ve lost my home and my memories,’ so I thought this chest pain would go away, and so far it has, thank God,” he said.
Quintana and Make the Road, along with the Connecticut Fair Housing Center, are meeting with the tenants regularly, to closely follow up their recovery efforts and ensure that their rights are respected.
Avila received the city’s notice that he can stay in a hotel for now and got the $4,000 of aid to get a new apartment, but says it’s not enough accountability.
“Whatever they can give us it’s useless if tomorrow there’s a fire in another building and a loss of life,” he said.