An elevator in a Cromwell condominium building hasn’t been working for months. It’s making life difficult for some elderly and disabled residents.
“It’s hard, it’s been, I would say, a rough summer keeping her inside the house,” said Yanet De los Santos.
She hasn’t been able to get her mom outside much since June when their apartment building’s elevator broke.
The mother and daughter rent together on the third floor.
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“She has like really late-stage Alzheimer’s already,” said De los Santos.
And it’s not just impacting them, but other neighbors living in the Cromwell Gardens condo complex, too.
“My wife is handicapped, she’s in a wheelchair,” said Jim Krostoski. “She really hasn’t left the building in say four months.”
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Krostoski’s son has had to start ‘working from home’ in the home he’s owned in this building for six years all to avoid scaling three flights of steps twice a day, every day. He has cerebral palsy.
“I’ve been trying. I’ve called even the fire marshal, according to them, they’re still under the law,” said Krostoski.
De los Santos has been trying too, “What am I supposed to do? And we’ve been watching the news all the time, and I know about you guys.”
Fed up she initially reached out to Telemundo Nueva Inglaterra Responde reporter Betsy Badell, who teamed up with NBC CT Responds to investigate this complaint.
While our teams like to work together to help resolve problems in both English and Spanish, this story is a lesson for all of us.
The Town of Cromwell tells us it can’t take action because the complex was built before building codes existed for elevators. The elevator was built in 1973.
The state’s Bureau of Elevators says this isn’t in its purview either.
So we kept reaching out to other experts throughout the state.
Housing advocates we spoke to say an issue like this falls under the Fair Housing Act.
This means residents should have the right to request other accommodations, like moving to a unit on the first floor, but this isn’t easy since this is a condo complex with multiple owners and condos already rented out.
“And I’m like OK maybe a week or maybe one day it’s down, whatever, we can live with it, but since June,” said De los Santos frustrated.
The building’s property manager says a new motor was installed this summer, but the decades-old elevator couldn’t keep up, so it has to be completely modernized.
This fix falls to the stakeholders: the owners of the condos.
Cromwell Gardens Condominium Association has selected a new company and agreed to pay the $40,000 improvement, according to the property manager.
On Oct. 12, the manager told NBC CT Responds he believed would be up and running in four weeks time.
We’ve reached out to him twice since then, but haven’t heard back.
To De los Santos’ dismay, it’s still not up and running and she’s running out of patience.
She’s filed complaints with the state and is contemplating moving, a tough task as she takes care of her mother.
“What if something happens? What if I need to take her out [of the building], like, quickly?,” she said.
At last update, De los Santos says she received a text from her landlord that the manager says elevator repairs will be complete by the end of the week of Dec. 3. NBC CT Responds will be keeping an eye on it.
